With his latest offering, "13 Hillbilly Giants," Robbie Fulks has delivered us something priceless ­ a piece of our own history. Like an archeologist probing the barren desert wastes for the secret trap doors to ancient tombs, Fulks has located the mythical Music City and carefully excavated the musical middens of our past, the past the Music Machine has for years been burying deeper and deeper in the trash heaps under piles of Lee Ann Rimes records, Lonestar videos and schmaltzy, over-produced, least-common-denominator crossover hits cleverly disguised as country music. Fulks has discovered where pharaoh's music boxes are buried, taken his whisk broom and painstakingly removed the dirt from his archeological find to reveal lost treasures of Nashville's Golden Age.

With a representative selection of obscure but solid country songs, Fulks takes us back to a time when Music Row was the Tin Pan Alley of the South, to a time when song quality was measured by the level of emotional intensity conveyed and the truth common folks found in a lyric and recorded performance.

Like any archeologist in search of lost civilizations, in rediscovering these 13 relatively obscure songwriters (except for Porter Wagoner, Bill Anderson and Jean Shepard, all the others have disappeared from the mainstream country music scene) Fulks has exposed sociological secrets and tribal taboos about Nashville and country music today. For in unearthing these artists, Fulks has uncovered pristine examples of the kinds of songs the Nashville machine no longer favors or even allows: drinking songs, divorce songs, and cheating songs.

After making a list of about 75 potential songs for the project, Fulks decided he only wanted to record songs by people who had a body of work.

"Once I formulated the no-one-hit-wonders rule, about 30 dropped off, and when it became clear that I couldn't afford to hire a dedicated pedal steel player, a lot of the more modern stuff dropped off," Fulks wrote from his home in Chicago. "Of the remaining 25 or so, I just made hard choices. When I had picked 10 that I was dead solid on recording, I chose the rest based on what was needed for variety and representation of important sub-styles. That's how the decidedly non-obscure Porter/Dolly got on; I really wanted to do 1960's Grand Guignol C&W and anybody but Porter seemed second-best."

Fulks seems uniquely qualified to pull off a project like this. Not only is he a fan and an accomplished song stylist, he is an earnest student of the music. One senses that this is the altar Fulks worships at, that this record is about paying homage and dues to seminal influences and forgotten pioneers. "Bill Carlisle, Jean (Shepard), Jimmy Murphy, Dave Rich, and Benny Martin were going to be on it no matter what," Fulks said.
Those familiar with Fulks' 1996 Bloodshot Records release, "Country Love Songs," will instantly recognize the influence of these artists on his songwriting and his sound. In the liner notes for "13 Hillbilly Giants," Fulks describes the artists as "monomaniacally fixed on their work and unapologetically true to their strange selves." He also observes "they seem to have missed the announcement that there is a certain way of doing things."

The plan was to cut "13 Hillbilly Giants" and sell it to fans via his website in order to finance his next record of original material (Bloodshot has since agreed to release the record this Fall). With Joe Terry (Skeletons) on keyboards, Robbie Gjersoe on guitars, Lorne Rall on bass, (all of whom performed on Fulks' "Let's Kill Saturday Night" album), Gerald Dowd on drums, and Al Murphy on fiddle, the album was recorded in just two days. In the studio, engineer Steve Albini and Fulks sought to approximate the old-timey sound of the originals.

"I think the idea of live-to-two-track recording is a pretty vital part of capturing the antique vibe," Fulks explained. "Since nobody can redo anything and there's no fixing things in the mix (as there is no separate mix session) everybody's flying right along the edge, as in the golden days. Obviously, musicians and engineers have to be superior to do this."

Lyric brilliance and country wisdom abound in the collection of songs on "13 Hillbilly Giants." The songs are pithy and direct. Whereas today all but the most banal, cloying, and saccharine emotional content has been ruled unfit for public consumption, Fulks has dusted off forgotten gems like Bill Anderson's 'Cocktails' ("Cocktails tore up family, cocktails tore down my home") and Benny Martin's 'By The Law Of My Heart' ("I may be free by the law of the nation, I'll never be free by the law of my heart") that cut directly and succinctly to the raw emotional quick.

Both 'Bury The Bottle With Me' and 'Cocktails' are bona fide drinking songs, but they aren't like 'Driving Nails In My Coffin' or 'Pop-A-Top,' where drinking is treated as a logical extension or natural manly reaction to a woman who's left or of home life gone wrong. No, in these songs imbued with an unflinching realism Nashville would never tolerate today, drinking is the problem and the blame sits squarely on the shoulders of the man lifting the bottle. What happens at home and to others is the result of drinking, not the cause. There is no glorification of drinking or sympathy for alcoholism in these songs, only pointedly effective confessions of the destruction that flows from the bottle. Given the brewing industry's support of many of the acts on tour today, it's little wonder there are no songs like Hylo Brown's 'Bury The Bottle With Me' in the Top 40. The only way an artist could record 'Bury The Bottle With Me' today is the way Mr. Fulks recorded it ­ with his own money, outside the parameters and control of the country music power structure.

There's a stone in yonder graveyard with my name carved in it deep
It don't tell my life story, these things it can't repeat
So bury the bottle with me 'cause it's what tore me down
And I won't be alone when they lower me in the ground.

On the first listen through the album, it is apparent these are not songs by robotic, bottom-line-driven music-making machines or assembly-line songwriting Ph.D.'s. These are songs by what Fulks describes as "inhabitants of an unkinder, less gentle nation" who "would not have thought to deny that our lives are marked not only by sentimental indulgence but insuperable limits."

As an example of the classic cheating song, Fulks has chosen Jean Shepard's 'Act Like A Married Man.' Like the great Kitty Wells response to "I didn't know God made honky-tonk angels" in her "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-tonk Angels,", Ms. Shepard brings a moral uprightness ­ and a subtle touch of feminism - to the cheating situation by rebuking a married man's offers.

You say you'd like to take me out so we can paint the town
Well I don't care a thing about your kind of runnin' 'round
The town will go unpainted if you depend on me
I don't intend to wreck my life with a man who isn't free

In Bill Carlisle's 'Knot Hole,' Fulks has resurrected a genre that went the way of the pterodactyl, the hillbilly comedy novelty song. This tune is done in an over-the-top style and is full of cornball country humor that simply has no place on the menu offered to the radio listening public today.

I heard they're gonna start makin' dresses outta wood
It'd sure be nice, if they could
But there's just one thing you ain't thought about
What you gonna do if the knot falls out?
Knot hole, knot hole, you oughta seen what I saw through the old knot hole.

On Gordon Terry's 'Lotta Lotta Women," the lone uptempo number on the album, Fulks and his ensemble "out-dwight" Dwight Yoakem. Musically reminiscent of George Jones' rollicking, loose-jointed hit 'White Lightnin',' the song is a telling example of just how close together country and rock and roll were at one time.

In the lyrics of Frankie Miller's 'Family Man,' we find true family values, not the smarmy, sentimentalized, simplistic, self-righteous platitudes our politicians and multi-millionaire televangelists espouse for public consumption today.

Well, the day is bright and sunny and the fish will surely bite
Boys down on the corner got a poker game tonight
But I can't do neither one, they'll have to understand
Gotta bring home the bacon 'cause I'm a family man

Robbie Fulks has a reputation as a Nashville subversive, a Che Guevara armed with nothing more than furious personal conviction, razor wit, and considerable talent suicidally charging the impersonal, homogenized corporate windmills of the Music City machine. He gained a certain notoriety for thumbing his nose at Nashville and the country music business powers-that-be with his underground hit, 'Fuck This Town,' on his 1997 Bloodshot Records release "South Mouth," which led to a brief major label deal with Geffen Records. With the issuance of "13 Hillbilly Giants," his musical insurgency has come full circle. By doing an album of obscure old Nashville material that the Nashville corporate honchos not only wouldn't touch today, but would be hard put to even recognize it as their own, Fulks has played the ultimate practical joke on the machine. Mr. Fulks is besieging the Music Capitol once again, but this time the attack is being made with the machine's own cast aside weapons.

Contact William Michael Smith at: wms-at-rockzilla.net

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