Laura Cantrell

Laura Cantrell's fourth full-length, Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs of the Queen of Country Music, reflects exactly what it is, a collection of covers associated with Wells. It may seem unusual that, given the six years that have lapsed between brilliant Humming by the Flowered Vine, that a canny songwriter like Cantrell would issue an album (almost) exclusively of covers, until you hear it. Produced by Mark Nevers, Cantrell's top-flight cast of players includes Chris Scruggs (BR5-49, M. Ward), multi-instrumentalist Fats Kaplin (Tom Russell, Andrew Hardin, Kane Welch Kaplin, Paul Burch), Paul Niehaus (Calexico), and BR5-49 frontman Chuck Mead. Cantrell wrote the title track, a beautiful, lilting, midtempo country song driven by acoustic guitar, bass, and fiddle; the protagonist is looking back on her youth after seeing a photograph of Wells in a magazine in a black gabardine dress (which went against the dress code for female country performer sin the early '50s). She explains with requisite poetry and sparse elegance exactly why Wells is such a sacred figure in the history of country. Wells scored with "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels" in 1951, paving the way for Patsy Cline, Tammy Wynette, Dolly Parton, and virtually every female artist who followed. Cantrell follows this lovely song with nine covers of songs associated with Wells, with a simple presentation that manages to convey Wells' own plain-sung but emotionally smoldering delivery on topics that depicted love, sex, and heartbreak in a shockingly frank manner for the era. These include the better-known material like "....Honky Tonk Angels," readings of Jimmy Work's "Making Believe," Zeke Clements' "Poison in Your Heart," Fred Rose's and Hy Heath's "I Gave My Wedding Dress Away," Wells' and J.D. Loudermilk's "Amigo's Guitar," the Anglin Brothers' and Johnny Wright's "One by One" (sung as a fine duet with Mead), and the wrenching closer, "Searching for a Soldier's Grave," written by Roy Acuff. A hit in 1956 for Wells, it addressed the loss of American soldiers in WWII, but resonates in this version as a poignant reminder of the cost of war. Cantrell's all-too-brief Kitty Wells Dresses contains its object's sense of sophisticated vocal economy that still conveys the power of truth in the human heart with elegance and grace, making it a fitting tribute for all the right reasons. - AllMusic.com

According to country singer Laura Cantrell, opting to ply her trade in New York City rather than in her native Nashville, the home of country music, has worked to her advantage

Daniella Zalcman for The Wall Street Journal
Laura Cantrell at her home in Jackson Heights. She will perform Thursday at Hill Country Barbecue in Midtown.

"Sometimes that little bit of separation from the subject you're fascinated with gives you an ability to focus on it," Ms. Cantrell said recently in her Jackson Heights apartment. For close to 11 years she has been focused on recording and performing music that reflects a Country & Western curatorial acumen honed over a lifetime of enthusiasm. Her first three full-length albums, beginning with 2000's "Not the Tremblin' Kind," earned her support and praise from the likes of Elvis Costello, They Might Be Giants, and especially the late English tastemaker John Peel, who made her a minor star in Britain when he called "Tremblin' Kind" his "favourite record of the last ten years and possibly my life" on his beloved radio program.

But in the six years since her 2005 release "Humming on the Flowered Vine" (her sole long-playing entry not released via the Brooklyn-based Diesel Only label, which is run by her husband, Jeremy Tepper), Ms. Cantrell has faced seismic shifts in both her personal and professional lives, beginning with the birth of her daughter in 2006. That arrival may initially have seemed like an impediment to her burgeoning music career, but in fact, Ms. Cantrell said, it proved auspicious.

"We've sort of been sitting out all the big changes," she said. "The last wave of selling records in big stores and of artists at a certain tiny level having some presence in big retail is over. We had a great relationship here in New York with Tower Records and Virgin. I went and played in-stores at both of them. We caught the very last gasp of that before it went away. Now they're gone."

So it's appropriate that Ms. Cantrell's fourth full-length recording, which arrives this week, simultaneously courts history and progress. "Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs of the Queen of Country Music" compiles nine covers of songs popularized by the titular 91-year-old legend (the title track, an original, was co-written by labelmate Amy Allison). It was recorded in Nashville using some of that city's most ardent young traditionalist musicians. It is also Ms. Cantrell's first full album that is primarily available in America via download.

Three years ago, Ms. Cantrell, 43 years old, released a download-only EP that, she said, pointed the way, if not to a clearer future, then at least to a more accountable one. "If you're a little label then you know the heartbreak of going through a physical distributor," she said. "Stock sits in a warehouse somewhere and you're never getting paid cause of the way the returns work. That old model was a difficult way for [small] record companies to exist. The digital way kind of removes all of those issues and allows you to get paid sort of on time. The music business has historically been a great way to lose money so we've sort of been more selective about how we're going to lose money and how we're going to make it back. Such is the world these days."

Meanwhile Ms. Cantrell's creative world has, she said, continued to benefit from her 1989 relocation to New York. "I feel part of a larger roots-music community here in New York that's not just about country music," she said. "It's record collectors, it's radio people. And we get to see such great music in New York. I've seen every little phase of alternative country parade through the clubs of the Lower East Side over the years."

For Teenage Fanclub drummer Francis MacDonald, whose own Shoeshine Records has released Ms. Cantrell's Diesel Only recordings in Britain, the artist's adopted city is as key to her identity as her Nashville roots. "Laura has a profound respect and appreciation for both the history of traditional country music, and of Nashville as a mecca," Mr. MacDonald said. "But as an adopted New Yorker her artistic self has also been able feed on what a cool, happening, progressive, cosmopolitan city has to offer. Not least of which being the musicians to work with and songwriters to cover."

Indeed, when Ms. Cantrell takes the stage at Manhattan's Hill Country Barbecue on Thursday for a release party celebrating "Kitty Wells Dresses," she will be backed by a local band with credits ranging from Ryan Adams and the Cardinals to Chrissie Hynde of fhe Pretenders, Ronnie Spector and Bruce Springsteen.

"Think of all the southern writers who had to flee the South to get anything done and come here have their new York period," she said of her geographical separation from Tennessee. "I've just had a long, extended New York period."

- Bruce Bennett - The Wall Street Journal

Kitty Wells was best known for her megahit from the ‘50s, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels”. That song made her the first female country singer to top the U.S. country charts. She became the first contemporary female country star and set the template for the plainspoken, tough talking country female vocalists that followed in her wake. Fans have christened Wells the “Queen of Country Music”, and modern singer-songwriter Laura Cantrell certainly shares that sentiment. Cantrell’s latest release Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs of the Queen of Country Music includes a heartfelt version of “Honky Tonk Angels” in addition to eight other songs associated with Wells and one original song in tribute to the Queen, “Kitty Wells Dresses”. Cantrell takes a restrained approach to the material. She lets the little trills in her voice convey the emotional depths. Cantrell refuses to milk the lyrics, which could tempt a less sophisticated singer. She knows that Wells’ strength could be found in her sense of self-possession. The instrumentalists play tight, decorating the songs with a light touch, but they stay in the background. No one takes a long solo, including Cantrell. The result is a finely crafted album that recalls the vintage sound of country music past.

- Steve Horowitz - PopMatters

Nashville-raised, New York City-based singer-songwriter Laura Cantrell has been compared to country music queen Kitty Wells practically since the day she started, most famously by Elvis Costello, who once observed that "if Kitty Wells made 'Rubber Soul,' it would sound like Laura Cantrell."

Wells, 91 years old and married to fellow country singer Johnnie Wright, is the oldest living member of the Country Music Hall of Fame and perhaps the greatest living essayer of heartbreak ballads.

Cantrell performed at a Wells tribute concert organized by the Hall in 2009, which inspired Cantrell's just-released tribute disc, "Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs of the Queen of Country Music." The title song was written by Cantrell, the rest are some of Wells' best-loved numbers, “songs I'd lived with and loved for a long time," says Cantrell.

In a phone interview with Click Track, Cantrell, who plays Jammin' Java on Saturday, talked about meeting Wells, making the album, and her long ago days as a Hall of Fame tour guide.

How did this project come about?

Initially I was approached by the Country Music Hall of Fame to do a program for them in 2009 based around a new type of exhibit they were launching dedicated to Hall of Fame members…I think they asked me because I'd been a longtime, very vocal fan of hers…To get asked to do that concert gave me a reason to dust off some old songs of hers and think of her career and why she was important. Once I put the work into that, I realized maybe I should make a little recording that documented the work we did to learn her songs.

What about her [resonated with you]?

To me her voice was always very interesting. She's not the flashiest singer. She's not someone who now is remembered as one of the great vocalists. I always thought she was very underestimated. She was very emotional as a vocalist, but with this underlying restraint. When you pair that up with the material she was doing in the early '50s which was very frank and very refreshingly open…on matters of the heart or domestic matters, that was a pretty potent combination.

[She’s underrated in part because] she's had a drama-free life. She didn’t die young, she didn't have a splashy divorce.

She's sort of had a conventional life in a way, [although] I think that's a superficial view. I think anybody who's been a partner in a show business couple in country music in the '50s and '60s, that had to be a very gypsy lifestyle. But because they were southern and Christian and conventional on the surface, I think people just overlooked what might be interesting about her.

You worked [as a teenaged tour guide] at the Hall of Fame. What was the big thing on the tour that everyone always wanted to see?

In Studio B, where a lot of records were made, including Elvis's Christmas record, people would get all Holy Elvis at the piano. There were a lot of touching things, like items found at the Patsy Cline plane crash site that belonged to her. One of the things I loved to do was, there were some films of Jimmie Rodgers in Kinescope, and I loved being the person who started the film because I got to sit in the room a little bit and hear his songs.

When you did the Kitty Wells tribute show, was she there?

Unfortunately she couldn't come to our concert but I did get to go see her last summer. She and her husband had already [approved] the song I wrote for her and invited me over. They were just a normal elderly couple, watching NASCAR on mute on a Sunday afternoon. She's 91, he's 97 now. They wanted to know all about the songs I'd chosen. They were very normal people, very down to earth, not too worried about the songs I'd chosen or about being legendary…If we'd never gotten to do anything else positive from the record, that alone was kind of adorable.

- Allison Stewart
- The Washington Post

Many tribute albums end up being overstuffed affairs in which a litany of famous names offer tossed-off versions of beloved songs by the artist they are supposedly honoring. That’s the opposite of “Kitty Wells Dresses: Songs of the Queen of Country,” on which country cult fave Laura Cantrell offers a loving homage to one of country’s earliest stars. The Nashville-born, New York-based Cantrell dusts off some honky-tonk classics, brightens them with the aid of hotshot helpers and manages to keep a traditional feel throughout.

Compared to Loretta Lynn, Dolly Parton or Patsy Cline, history may have overlooked Wells a bit, but as the first female singer to top the country charts, her influence is unquestioned. Cantrell smartly doesn’t try to reinvent such hits as “Poison in Your Heart” and “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels,” concise country classics that have no trouble standing the test of time. Cantrell’s clear voice expresses both vulnerability and sturdiness, serving broken-hearted couplets well (“The way that you two-timed me is a sin and it’s a shame / You even said you’d like to change my name”). The tasteful touches of fiddle and pedal steel keep things somber but never weepy.

Don’t think that Cantrell is strictly an interpreter, though. Opening track “Kitty Wells Dresses” is the set’s lone original but also a highlight that would fit in nicely on any vintage jukebox.

-David Malitz - The Washington Post

Nearly forgotten today, one-time country queen Kitty Wells, now 91, is lovingly honored by Cantrell. It starts with a new song, the title cut, an acknowledgement of Wells’ good taste in attire as well as music. Cantrell then serves up an assortment of covers, ranging from Wells’ signature song, “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels,’’ to a patriotic tear-jerker, “Searching for a Soldier’s Grave,’’ all done in classic country style. Cantrell’s approach couldn’t be more dignified, a quality that makes her a near-perfect interpreter of Wells’ work.
-Larry Katz - Boston Herald