Prine and company offer up the whole damn truth with a rare kind of purity

The Station Inn stage could have crumbled Tuesday night from the weight of history. Instead, it glowed with the warmth of family.

 

“I’m Little Johnny WholeDamn, and this is the Whole Damn Family,” said John Prine, gesturing to a crowded and grinning gathering of men who have helped shape Music City. The Grammy-winning Prine has done some shaping himself – he’s the first singer-songwriter to read and perform at the Library of Congress (at the request of Poet Laureate Ted Kooser) and over the past four decades he’s written one of American roots music’s most revered and envied batches of songs – and he’d shaped this night to be a joyful and rambunctious get-together that would happen to feature some of the greatest players alive.

 

The show was billed as “The Whole Damn Family,” with no personnel listed on the Station Inn’s calendar. But long before the 9 p.m. show time, someone at the Inn had written “Sold Out” on a paper plate and affixed the plate to the front door. Inside, folks jostled smilingly for views of the stage and spots in the beer line.

 

The Family differs in composition each year. Tuesday’s edition was led by Prine and featured Shawn Camp on fiddle and guitar, Jamie Hartford on electric guitar, Pat McLaughlin on mandolin, Jim Rooney on acoustic guitar, Richard Bailey on banjo, Mike Henderson on slide guitar, Dave Ferguson on upright bass and Larry Harteker on drums.

 

The patriarch of the family WholeDamn is Cowboy Jack Clement, the songwriter, producer, guitarist and armchair philosopher with whom all of those players have understudied, but the Cowboy wasn’t around on Tuesday night except in spirit. The assembled Whole Damn Family members are responsible for plenty in the way of Grammy awards, country hits and memorable records. Even a cursory summary here would prove both unduly lengthy and inherently inadequate. You’re reading this on a computer screen: Feel free to pause here, do some Googling and return at your leisure.

 

 

Prine led things off with two Merle Haggard songs, “The Running Kind” and “Ramblin’ Fever,” while an all-star crowd (country star Dierks Bentley, Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Duane Eddy and photographer-to-the-stars Jim McGuire were a few of the assembled) watched and listened. Ferguson and Rooney followed with two Billy Joe Shaver tunes, “Georgia On A Fast Train” and “Just Because You Asked Me To,” and then McLaughlin (who played mandolin all night in spite of his status as perhaps Nashville’s finest rhythm guitarist) offered up Roy Acuff’s “Wabash Cannonball.”

 

During the first set, everyone except Bailey and Harteker sang lead, and Henderson (whose “I Wouldn’t Lay My Guitar Down” was recently named a top 10 favorite blues guitar recording by ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons in Rolling Stone) offered some wondrous slide solos. 

 

The set ended with Rooney leading his compadres through “Sitting On Top Of The World,” but the anticipated 20-minute set break was cut short by some unexpected stage activity, and Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys soon appeared behind a microphone. The Keys’ El Camino is currently the No. 2 best-selling album in America, of any genre, but Auerbach made no attempt to capture that album’s bluesy bluster, instead offering a plaintive, acoustic version of “Goin’ Home,” from solo album Keep It Hid.

 

 Auerbach then brought out Bluegrass Hall of Famer Del McCoury, and with Ferguson and Grammy-winning fiddler Tim O’Brien they romped through Bill Monroe’s “Can’t You Hear Me Calling” with McCoury taking the high harmonies on the choruses. Here were two men, one a rocker and one who has devoted his life to bluegrass, one born in 1979 and one born in 1939, joined in harmony by a song that was initially released more than 60 years ago.

 

Auerbach exited, but McCoury led a bluegrass mini-set that featured more Monroe tunes along with Stanley Brothers’ favorite “Little Maggie.” After another break, Little Johnny WholeDamn walked back onstage, alone, and played his self-penned, semi-Christmas number “All The Best.” “I guess that love is like a Christmas card,” he sang, to a hushed crowd. “You decorate a tree, you throw it in the yard/ It decays and dies, and the snowmen melt/ I once knew love, I knew how love felt.”

 

Prine then delivered his “That’s The Way The World Goes ‘Round,” pausing mid-song to chuckle at the scratch in his throat: “Boy, I sound like I been eating razor blades.” Then he sang the second verse, about a man “Stuck in the ice, without my clothes/ Naked as the eyes of a clown.” “Christmas In Prison” was next (“The food was real good/ We had turkey and pistols, carved out of wood”), and Prine invited old friend Mickey Clark to play one of his originals. Then it was time for Prine’s stunning “Lake Marie,” just before the Family that began the evening climbed back onstage, along with O’Brien and guitarist Bob Britt. 

 

They moved through songs from Hank Williams, Steve Young and Jimmy Martin before inviting Jeannie C. Riley up for her signature hit, the Tom T. Hall-penned “Harper Valley P.T.A.” (and for some lengthy, hilarious pre-song patter).

 

Prine and McLaughlin sang their co-penned “Daddy’s Little Pumpkin” and Rooney sang Waylon Jennings’ “Waymore’s Blues,” and then the Family finally got uniformly seasonal, with a gentle “Silver Bells” and a McCoury-assisted race through “Christmas Time’s A Comin’.” Now 11 strong, the Whole Damn Family ended the show with Prine’s “Paradise,” about a western Kentucky town that got co-opted and ruined by a coal company that “dug for their coal ‘til the land was forsaken” and then “wrote it all down as the progress of man.” 

 

That town was not alone in its plight: In late 2011, little remains that is quaint, pure or unspoiled. With hundreds of hard-lived years between them, the Family onstage could be better described as grizzled than as unspoiled: The music business swallows Pollyannas, and John Prine swallows razor blades. But Tuesday night’s show gifted its witnesses with a rare kind of purity. No one emerged more famous than they were at night’s beginning. No one was selling CDs, musicians profited only in free beer, and there’ll be no tour, album or DVD to follow. It was a night of songs given and received for the playing, the singing and the hearing.

 

I like the part in How the Grinch Stole Christmas where Dr. Seuss explains that the holiday “came without packages, boxes or bags.” The Whole Damn Family show came without adornments, without stage outfits or synced-up video screens or set lists, rehearsals or swag. It was music for music’s sake, naked as the eyes of a clown.

 

All photos by  Kim Jameson