Tom Russell: The Rose of Roscrae - review

The tabular content relating to this article is not available to view. Apologies in advance for the inconvenience caused.

The Rose of Roscrae

(Proper Records)

You might expect a Texan writer of songs covered by Johnny Cash and Ramblin' Jack Elliott to be a gnarled old timer with a Stetson, guitar and voice as tough as cacti.

Tom Russell owns the hat and the guitar but there the similarity ends. Born in California and based in El Paso, the singer-songwriter, 68, makes sophisticated and inquisitive American roots music, the product of a peripatetic past that variously includes writing detective fiction, teaching criminology in Nigeria and driving a New York cab.

His new album The Rose of Roscrae continues his project to put the "western" back into country music. A successor to 1999's The Man From God Knows Where, about his ancestors' emigration to the US, it is a vast and ambitious folk-rock opera about a young 19th-century Irishman drawn to a new life as a cowboy in the west following a thwarted love affair.

Sprawling profusely over the course of two-and-a-half hours, it incorporates traditional Irish music, modern barroom rock, frontier ballads and Tex-Mex fusion. Russell's dramatic deep tones, as the hero Johnny, are joined by a large cast of guests, from Irish singer Maura O'Connell to the Swiss Yodel Choir of Bern.

It is novelistic in scope, full of detailed historiography and musical verve, a proud addition to the great American tradition of the immigrant epic.

© The Financial Times Limited 2015. All rights reserved.
FT and Financial Times are trademarks of the Financial Times Ltd.
Not to be redistributed, copied or modified in any way.
Euro2day.gr is solely responsible for providing this translation and the Financial Times Limited does not accept any liability for the accuracy or quality of the translation