Bard Edrington V - Two Days In Terlingua (2021)

Taking time out from The Hoth Brothers, Bard Edrington V recorded Two Days In Terlingua, his second solo album, live over the course of two days before lockdown at Santa Fe church in Terlingua, Texas, separated from the Mexican border by the Big Ben National Park protect wilderness. He is joined by Karina Wilson on vocals and violins, bassist Bill Palmer and his brother Jim Palmer on drums, Alex McMahon on pedal steel, banjo and guitar and Zoe Wilcox on backing vocals. Aside from a fuller band sound, it’s no great departure from the Hoth Brothers work with the songs drawn from the same Appalachia and Americana well.

Recorded with just three takes and no overdubs in the sequence they appear on disc, it opens with Ramblin’ Kind, a moodily fiddle-backed chugging strum sway-along tale of an ageing man on the run. He was the ramblin’ kind, with a heavy heart and a simple mind, he found love out on the run (“trouble’s never been that far, all the deals gone bad in the back of the bar”), working the lines and railways, drowning the nights in booze and always having to move on when things get rough, finding brief happiness in family but facing mortality as he sings “don’t worry about me what I once was, I will be, just bury me deep enough so I can dream”.

The pace slows but is still veined with an Appalachian folk-blues feel and scraping fiddle for Property Lines, which picks up the theme of hard times working the gold mines (“two dry acres with water rights, old worn out shovels and broken tail lights Stuck on the wrong side of water gone wild”) and memories of better days left behind (“on the banks of the Embudo the willows grow strong and the river she sings her cool mountain song”), but still with a bitter sting (“it all burnt down when they blew up her car, three souls lie and wait for love to defeat hate”).

Of a more country barroom ballad persuasion with its pedal steel, Shut The Screen Door initially paints a picture of a domestic bliss (“stand by my side tell me how you love me and how your forever mine”), but it’s clear this is under strain with the foreboding of things crashing down (“well I’m holding on to a dream that has passed a frightening resemblance of a love that won’t last”) and how “that day will remain forever on my mind when the woman I love sent cold chills down my spine”.

There’s a bluegrass fiddle swing tempo to A New Day On The Farm with its echoes of classic Jimmie Rodgers. A far more upbeat number about farm life (“it’s backbreaking work but son it’s better than dying”), it’s credited to both Bard and his Kentucky-born great grandmother, the late Mabel Edrington who wrote History of Mississippi County, Arkansas. The album also includes a Prine-like brushed snares and banjo slow hayride dance tune setting of another of her poems, Dog Tags 1942, about the time her son, Bard Edrington III, proudly came home with his dog tags for WWII and her fear of him going off to fight.

One of three pushing past five minutes, Bard And The Bears is a slow swaying number with a sparse repeated fiddle line that relaxes into an idyllic sketch of wilderness nature at its most benevolent (“The desert’s in bloom from the rain that’s been falling… Life thrives on the edge nature’s arms entwine like two old lovers dancing in time”) with memories of childhood splashing in the creek and two black bears playing among the trees. However, the ambience dramatically changes with the arrival of the ominous storm-gathering soundscape of the stripped back, haunted Strange Balloon, co-penned with son Bard Edrington VI, with its heavy, slow rhythm and desolate guitar notes that contemplates other life out there in the universe, turning thoughts back to the state of our own world in the lines “where they live in peace and they don’t fight, where pollution is a thing that they don’t know/With hearts like theirs they can let love grow”.

Quickly dispelling that mood, Ma Cherie arrives with a rattle of drums and a spritely zydeco-flavoured dancehall fiddle romp love song. Still, then, in an almost musically opposite manner, it’s back to a slow country-folk shuffle with Masterpiece Of St Mark’s Square. However, this too is of a positive persuasion, with the narrator singing of the woman he loves (“mosaics may shimmer in the morning light, but it’s you my darling such a beautiful sight”).

As the title suggests, the sparsely strummed Black Coal Lung is a more downbeat number sung in the voice of a miner facing death from the titular disease but not afraid of hell since he’s already lived through it.

Like Ma Cherie, Athena’s Gaze is co-written with Wilcox, a violin and her tribal rhythm guiding a musing on the wonders of Ancient Greece, “Homer’s Odyssey and the birth of democracy”, finally ending with the six and a half-minute No Reason, its world-weary tone belying a feeling of contentment (“Come sit beside me we’ve got nowhere else to go/Just pass the time and watch this boy grow/I fear the day when he walks out the door/Leaves me proud and crying always wanting more”) and at last being able to kick back and take life easy. A celebration of life in both its highs and lows, memories of things lost and thankfulness for what is still held, these Two Days in Terlingua will make your listening week.