Alt Country

If Nashville left its battered soul lying facedown in the gutter outside the Ryman, who could blame an outlaw gang of punks, loners, and dreamers for stealing it for themselves? Way before it had a name, alt country had a voice in a Nudie-suited ex-Byrd, Gram Parsons; in the captivating "Love Hurts," he wraps his hangdog vocal around Emmylou Harris' fallen-angel surrender like a briar 'round a rose. Uncle Tupelo's dustbowl-etched cover of "No Depression," the Carter Family's pie-in-the-sky gospel remedy for hard times, gave birth to an entire movement before the band split in two (forming Son Volt and Wilco, alt-country heavyweights in their own right). And in the fancy-filled, Texas-sized tale "If I Had a Boat," Lyle Lovett — sans Large Band, with the tinkle-jangle of an acoustic six-string behind his weathered-cowhide voice — proves alt country isn't all about headaches and heartbreaks. In Next Steps, we hear from a Hall of Fame legend, a one-man record-producing machine, and the youngest girl in a 14-kid family — all as alt from one another as they are from the mainstream.

As you dig deeper, you'll hear how alt country isn't just alt from mainstream country — it's also alt from itself. Producer Rick Rubin strips country legend Johnny Cash down to the bone, leaving just a guitar and that amazing, gravel-racked voice, on "Delia's Gone," the she-done-me-wrong-so-I-killed-her-dead kissin' cousin to "Folsom Prison Blues." Before Whiskeytown's wunderkind frontman, Ryan Adams, started spitting out solo albums the way a Vegas slot machine spits out quarters, he strung the pedal steel with apologies, knocked back the first of a dozen shots, and gorgeous'd-up his misery in "Excuse Me While I Break My Own Heart Tonight." And is it possible that Iris Dement time-traveled from another dimension, leaving her washboard and Model-T behind, unexpectedly deposited in cyberspace a century later? Listen to her Opry-fied twang on "Infamous Angel," pristine as an Appalachian spring, and make the call yourself. In Deep Cuts, a coal miner's daughter digs into her roots cellar, we find a daughter of the South in the Great White North, and more.