MARK COLLIE & HIS RECKLESS
   COMPANIONS
Live at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary
Wilbanks 1694

www.wilbanks.com
http://www.markcollie.com
 

Country singer/writer Collie’s inspiration for this arresting disc came from hearing Johnny Cash’s Folsom and San Quentin prison LPs and knowing that Merle Haggard (as an inmate in the audience) had found direction for his life there. Armed with a batch of new compositions on crime and retribution, Collie took a posse of stellar sidemen plus Shawn Camp, Kelly Willis and blues guitarist Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown to Tennessee’s maximum-security Brushy Mountain pen (home of Martin Luther King’s assassin James Earl Ray and, in fiction, Hannibal Lecter of Silence of the Lambs) for a knock-out 2001 performance that got lost in record company limbo until now.

Collie’s expertly crafted songs are free of overkill. There’s acceptance of responsibility and even a moment of humor among the dead men walking. As for bandits on the run, “Maybe Mexico” bids farewell to a woman left behind. In “Rose Covered Garden,” a warden’s beautiful daughter’s love comes to naught. Roaring “Folsom Prison Blues” is like an homage to Cash’s discs. Essentially, the CD begins in the spirit of Cash and ends with vestiges of a Lomax field recording as the prison’s choir boards a vibrant “Gospel Train.” — Bruce Sylvester