Various Artists”Tulare Dust: A Songwriters’ Tribute to...

Various Artists

“Tulare Dust: A Songwriters’ Tribute to Merle Haggard”

HighTone

This is the other tribute to Hag, and there isn’t a better present you could give a country music fan. Where October’s high-profile “Mama’s Hungry Eyes” album boasts a load of top country stars, this one has just one bona-fide hit maker: Dwight Yoakam, whose solo reading of “Holding Things Together” is a reminder of just how big an influence, as a singer and a writer, the man from Bakersfield has had on the Kentucky string bean.

Marquee power or no, the other 14 respected singer-songwriters on “Tulare Dust” give performances that couldn’t be more loving or more sensitive. Arkansas-born Iris DeMent suffuses “Big City” with old-timey wistfulness. Texan Robert Earl Keen pulls the pathos out of “Daddy Frank” but never turns maudlin in this tale of a happy family band led by a blind mother and deaf father. And Lucinda Williams virtually becomes the world-weary, ever-put-upon protagonist of “You Don’t Have Very Far to Go.”

The songs are not by and large Haggard’s best-known, which further bolsters the impression the album creates that each artist picked a song from Haggard’s extensive songbook that had a strong personal meaning for him or her. The acoustic instruments and the spare arrangements give the album a folk-bluegrass accent and living-room folksiness.

Also included on the project are Joe Ely, Rosie Flores, Billy Joe Shaver, Peter Case, John Doe, Marshall Crenshaw and the executive producers, Dave Alvin and Tom Russell. All give heartfelt testament to Haggard’s remarkable ability to capture, time after time, the struggles, the yearnings, the heartaches and the joys of the working man and woman with sentiment but without sentimentality.