Americana Pie

Sales-wise, at least, 2004 was the year Nashville got its groove back. Heavy hitters such as Tim McGraw, George Strait, Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban and Shania Twain all dropped platinum records, but what has the city more excited than it's been in years is the fact that it finally managed to anoint a couple of new stars. Kid Rock copycats Big & Rich wedded honky-tonk and rap sensibilities and came up with a million-seller; Gretchen Wilson came roaring out of the Illinois cornfields with "Redneck Woman and emerged as the feistiest, orneriest female country singer since Tanya Tucker. Meanwhile, both in Music City and out in the sticks, the loose confederation of disparate genres that march under the Americana banner trudged on, touted by critics and mainly ignored by mainstream rock and country radio. And that's a shame, because even though Americana is deluged with lots of mediocre product, these ten CDs blow the doors off just about everything that came off the major-label assembly lines. And they're all better than Wilco's latest overrated opus.

1. Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose (Interscope). Who woulda thunk that the Coal Miner's Daughter and Jack White and his bag of Zep riffs would go together this well? Lynn's storytelling panache and vocal chords are in fine fettle, White and his band of Midwestern garage-rockers are out for blood, and Van Lear Rose is one kickass album of Appalachian acid rock, a stone-cold classic for hipsters and hillbillies alike. There's Sun-style boogie ("Have Mercy), hell-hath-no-fury revenge tales ("Mrs. Leroy Brown, "Family Tree), foot-stomping hollers ("High on a Mountain Top) and the alternately psychedelic and pummeling White-Lynn duet "Portland, Oregon, which was easily the single of the year. Of course, country radio saw it differently: The album got almost no airplay outside of adult-alternative and college-rock stations. Which is sad, 'cause it's one of the greatest ever to come out of Nashville.

2. Drive By Truckers, The Dirty South (New West). Poetic tales of small-time coke dealers, reluctant warriors, desperate moonshiners, redneck sheriffs and cancer-stricken towns, all set to menacing boogie beats and 100-proof three-guitar throb. Doesn't get much better than that. Throw The Dirty South in with Southern Rock Opera and Decoration Day, and you have one of the great three-album runs in rock history, a stretch equal to the Stones' Beggars Banquet/Let It Bleed/Sticky Fingers era or the Beatles' Rubber Soul/Revolver/Sgt. Pepper's period.

3. Sam Phillips, A Boot and a Shoe (Nonesuch). Dry as a sidewinder's rattle twitching over desert sands, Phillips's haunting neo-cabaret pop is spare, elegant and intelligent. Though she's deliberately shorn away most of her Beatles-esque borrowings, she can't quite shake her knack for crafting the kind of gorgeous melodies that give you goose bumps even when you hum them. The sumptuous tunes -- centered around Phillips's Marianne-Faithfull-like voice -- are set to minimalist guitars, super-crisp drums and, as on the swellingly superb "Reflecting Light, the occasional string quartet.

4. Los Lobos, The Ride (Hollywood). Affairs as studded with guest shots as this one normally have label calculation written all over them. (See Santana, Carlos.) But Los Lobos has never been a normal band. Here the boys invite in some of the people who've influenced them, others whom they've influenced, and a few like-minded contemporaries, coming up with their strongest start-to-finish set since Kiko. Highlights include Dave Alvin's dusty cover of "Somewhere in Time; the joyous gutter fiesta of "Kitate with Tom Waits and Martha Gonzales of Quetzal; the ass-shaking Cafe Tacuba collabo "La Venganza de los Pelados; and soul-drenched remakes of two 1980s Lobos classics -- "Someday with Mavis Staples and "Wicked Rain with Bobby Womack, to which Womack appends his L.A. funk classic "Across 110th Street. Take it to the bank: Los Lobos is the greatest rock band of the past twenty years, and decades from now, rock historians will still be digging their records and wondering why contemporaries U2 moved so much more product.

5. Various Artists, Black Power: Music of a Revolution (Shout!). Black people have always been better at embedding messages in their music than whites, and this double-disc compilation of Nixon-era African-American anthems is proof positive that shaking your ass and using your brain are not mutually exclusive propositions. Who needs the leaden, hectoring screeds of Country Joe and the Fish, Phil Ochs or even Rage Against the Machine when you can get much the same messages -- coated in soul and dripping with funk -- from Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, Les McCann and Eddie Harris's "Compared to What, the Staple Singers' "Respect Yourself or the Isley Brothers' "Fight the Power?