Blue Collar Tired switches between slide and pedal steel guitar to reflect Mike Cullison's diverse background which began in the small clubs of Oklahoma City before he moved to Atlanta in 1988 and to Nashville in 1995.
The songs are a blend of country and rock with a honky tonk feel as familar and well worn as an old pair of jeans.
"This song is about some old boys I know" Cullison drawls on the intro to the self explanatory opening track 'Wish I Didn't Like Whisky'. It's a weary song which sets the tone for the life of struggle and strife documented over the course of the album's 13 songs.
We are led along a dusty trail of hard drinking, dead end jobs and heartache with the fleeting consolation of listening to Hank Williams or finding the love of a good woman.
The album cover of a black coffee and half eaten sandwich sums up the mood of the title track which narrates a dawn to dusk existence trying to make ends meet.
Most of the songs are Cullison originals although there are a couple of covers. We have Buck Owens' ‘Waitin' In Your Welfare Line’ - a sad tale of unemployment and and sleeping in a telephone booth and a very loose and boozy version of the Canned Heat classic 'Going Up The Country'.
|
Miss Maggie Rose has the best lines: "Our love grows/It's one for all time/ Shakespeare could have used us / For one of his rhymes" and provides some temporary relief from the endless highway of loneliness and pain.
But the the most poignant song is saved for last. 'The Grapes of Wrath Are Ripe Again' makes the point that the Okies who followed the trail of tears of Route 66, and were immortalised by John Steinbeck, are not just an historical footnote but a portent of the hardships we face today.
It's a bleak message but this Cullison is not a man for false optimism. It's this stark, no nonsense honesty which impresses the most.
From a strictly musical perspective there nothing new here. Cullison would probably maintain that there doesn't need to be - his message seems to be that what was good enough for Hank is good enough for me.
|
