Inside The Album Sat A Photograph That Explained Everything
Tucked within the liner notes of Mountain Soul was a picture of the father of Patty Loveless with his face darkened by coal dust and that quiet image looked less like decoration than the very reason the record existed
What if she stopped chasing radio and went all the way back home
Loveless was at the height of her country career when one bluegrass set made her ask that different question
She had no need to reinvent herself because through the 1990s she had accumulated million selling albums and No. 1 singles and a CMA Female Vocalist of the Year award
But underneath the polished Nashville records was an older sound she had carried out of eastern Kentucky
Her father had been a coal miner and at home he listened to the Stanley Brothers and Flatt and Scruggs and the mountain music surrounding Appalachia
Loveless had never completely buried those influences and she slipped acoustic sections into her concerts and stripped her country songs back until fiddle and dobro and harmony exposed what had always been underneath
A 1992 Appearance Reopened The Door
After that 1992 appearance with Ralph Stanley Loveless and her husband and producer Emory Gordy Jr. began imagining a full record built that way
Then they waited while songs accumulated quietly for years
By 2001 Nashville had changed and nobody could promise that mainstream country radio wanted an acoustic album filled with mountain music and gospel and bluegrass
Epic was cautious enough to keep promoting material from the previous album of Loveless while Mountain Soul was aimed toward bluegrass and Americana and classic country and public radio audiences and the label openly acknowledged that mainstream airplay was uncertain
She Made The Record Anyway
There was Daniel Prayed from Ralph Stanley and I Know Youโre Married from Reno and Smiley and the devastating coal country ballad Youโll Never Leave Harlan Alive from Darrell Scott
Ricky Skaggs and Travis Tritt and other players joined an acoustic record deliberately stripped of the machinery surrounding contemporary country
Mountain Soul received little mainstream radio play yet became one of the most acclaimed records of her career
Its reception carried her onto the Down from the Mountain tour where she found herself reaching listeners who told her they did not normally listen to mainstream country at all
And there decades after hearing the Stanley Brothers in her childhood home Loveless stood beside Ralph Stanley onstage
She later remembered watching him close those shows and wishing her father could have seen it
The photograph inside Mountain Soul no longer felt like decoration and it looked like the reason the record existed
By returning to the music that raised her Loveless proved that the sound of home had never left her voice and success had only given her the strength to follow it all the way back