Annie Lou,
Tried & True
(independent, 2014)


In her non-musical life Annie Lou is Anne Louise Genest, who lives in a small town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, and who looks like your friendly neighbor. On stages and CDs she's a singer-songwriter working within the familiar tradition of the Appalachian string band. Curiously and unexpectedly, however, she doesn't sound like anybody else.

Reviewing her previous album, Grandma's Rules for Drinking, in this space on 6 April 2013, I remarked that when I first heard it, it made no impression whatever. I put it aside, only to rediscover it and this time listen to it, at which juncture I was struck by how wonderfully inspired her plain-spoken, low-key approach turns out to be. These days it is happily the case that lots of able musicians are performing within rooted genres. We reviewers are inundated with releases, and most in some way put forth theatrical gestures intended to hit us over the head within a cut or two's listening time. Annie Lou, on the other hand, is -- metaphorically speaking -- sitting in our living room, guitar or banjo in hand, accompanied by a handful of like-minded pickers, and singing straightforward, warmly melodic songs about mostly quotidian matters. We're not prepared for that.

Recorded in Toronto, Tried & True is, as advertised, life as recognizably lived, except for the somber protest ballad "My Good Captain" with an atypically elliptical narrative that seems open to varying interpretations. (For what it's worth, mine is homophobia-fueled murder under cover of war and combat.) More characteristic are songs like the title tune, the plaintive "Haunted," the wry "In the Country," the quietly resigned "Roses Blooming" and the tongue-in-cheek "Envy Won't Leave Me Be" (which initially registered in my ears as "Henry Won't Leave Me Be").

This isn't exactly Grandma's Rules revisited, even if the two recordings have much in common. Tried seems an older record -- minus the high-school hijinks of "Cluny is So Tall!" and "Plaid Parade," in short -- and the occasional McGarrigles-colored touches are less apparent. Here and there instruments associated with country music (if of another era) break though the standard banjos and fiddles (Burke Carroll's pedal steel, Sly Juhas's drums), as in the late Hazel Dickens' "It's Hard to Tell the Singer from the Song." The other non-original is an especially inspired choice, the rarely covered hymn "Weary Prodigal," which I suspect Annie Lou learned (directly or indirectly) from Sara & Maybelle Carter's 1966 Columbia album, An Historic Reunion.

There are plenty of good recordings, but few that are good in the unique fashion of Tried & True.




Rambles.NET
music review by
Jerome Clark


10 January 2015


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