Hank Erwin, or at least this recording, showed up at my doorstep one day last fall, as far as I knew at that moment just one of too many singer-songwriters seeking my attention. My response was a cynical consequence of exposure to performers who either are not all that good or at least are not to my taste. I've ceased caring much about the difference. Either a recording appeals to me, or it doesn't. At this stage the surprises, while not yet nonexistent, are relatively few.

The Copper Album proved to be one of the surprises. After listening to it a couple of times, I vowed to review it at first opportunity. When that opportunity arose, I sat down for a final listen to round up my thoughts just prior to writing. Then I discovered that it was nowhere to be found. The CD had settled somewhere within the mountain of discs ringing my desk, leading me to despairing thoughts that it was gone for good. It wasn't, happily. I stumbled upon it this past weekend, and it's been on the player ever since, including at this moment.

Erwin doesn't sound exactly like anybody else, but if one has listened to as much music as I have over the course of a long enthusiasm for rooted songs in all their variety, one may think a little of the later-career Waylon Jennings, who was based in country but who had begun to transcend it by incorporating rock and folk while singing lyrics that often kicked their way beyond the Nashville basics. Waylon's signature became his original "Waymore's Blues," a rewrite of a 19th-century hobo lament known variously as "Jay Gould's Daughter" and "Milwaukee Blues."

The back cover pronounces "all songs written, arranged, and produced by Hank Erwin." Since the effort is uniformly successful, that tells us Erwin is a gifted artist indeed. He also sings movingly, and he tells stories eloquently. He is equally proficient on acoustic and electric guitars (especially, in the latter instance, in something like the stringy Jimi Hendrix style). He says that his songs tend to be true, which makes, for example, "Sally" all the more harrowing. It concerns the fatal crash of a bus occupied by musician friends from whose company mere circumstance had kept Erwin that day.

Like Gordon Lightfoot's "Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald," "The Dirge of the Edward L. Ryerson" concerns a real-life iron-ore freighter. Erwin learned about it while serving in the Merchant Marines. The ship didn't meet a tragic end, but after half a century on the Great Lakes, it could no longer meet the technical requirements for 21st-century commerce, and it was put in dock, then junked. Erwin makes an engaging, touching ballad out of this, but as with everything else here spares the sentimentality.

A couple of the cuts -- "I Am Not to Blame" (about a murderous psychopath) and "You're Dead" -- are as unnerving as anything you've heard in a while. "Hell or Harlan" caused me to reflect that just about every song that mentions Harlan, Kentucky, is worth hearing in my experience, and this one does nothing to carve out an exception. It even quotes the floating line "goin' back to Harlan" from the lyric folksong "Shady Grove," though Erwin does put "ain't" in front of it. "Daddy Laughed" nods to the venerable blues practice "laughed just to keep from cryin'." If there could be any doubt about it, Erwin has his feet in deep American musical soil.

The Copper Queen speaks in three vernacular musical languages more or less at once, though some cuts choose one over the other. That language is never less than lucid and expressive, the melodies consistently attention-grabbing. If I hadn't misplaced the album, it would have been on my best-of-2021 list. I won't let it get past me twice.

[ visit Hank Erwin's website ]