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Buddy Miller Buddy Miller BiographyUniversal United House of Prayer finds Buddy Miller’s feet planted firmly in the territory that the roots-country musician staked out over the course of five previous records. Again Buddy effortlessly blends a dozen American styles and idioms, again he evokes the mongrel force that breathed life into America’s best mid-century pop and folk music.
Yet his latest disc is also something new. The tip-off comes at once, at the top of the first track, a cover of Mark Heard’s mid-tempo rocker “Worry Too Much.” We hear the rapturous gospel voices of Regina and Ann McCrary (daughters of Fairfield Four founder Rev. Sam McCrary); Buddy then begins to sing of an everyday landscape where inhumanity and impoverishment portend despair (“It’s the force of inertia/The lack of constraint/It’s the children out playing in the rock garden/All dolled-up in black hats and warpaint”). To this problem, the next song, a black-gospel-inflected treatment of the Louvin Brothers’ “There’s A Higher Power,” gently states the answer. |
