The Musical Box

charlie louvin.

“I was just wonderin’ if anybody in Lexington dances on a Sunday night.”

That was the question country forefather Charlie Louvin posed to a modest sized crowd at The Dame last night. In a Valentine’s weekend that saw a flood of exemplary touring acts saturate the region, it was a wonder anyone still had the stamina to show up, much less get up on their heels and move around.

But once Louvin introduced a grandfatherly charm to Kris Kristofferson’s Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends, sure enough, two couples made their way to the front of the stage and danced along with the serenade.

For Louvin, 81, the tune was part of a primer in country music tradition that rightly placed his own solo work, as well as the groundbreaking material he recorded in the ‘40 and ‘50s with brother Ira Louvin, front and center.

If anything, the Louvin Brothers songs - most notably 1956’s Let Her Go, God Bless Her - possessed an even greater sense of innocence than when they were first recorded. Admittedly, some of that appeal came from the renewed and worldly perspective Let Her Go gained once a singer in his 80s took the reins. But aside from a huskiness that has understandably grown into Louvin’s voice, the song was still delivered as a conversational and unspoiled confessional.

Not so with the show closing Cash on the Barrelhead. Long one of the Louvins’ feistier anthems, last night’s version packed the spark and twang of a vintage Merle Haggard tune. Of course, such an observation all but presented itself given that Louvin ably tackled Haggard’s electric blue collar classic Workin’ Man Blues earlier in the 90 minute set.

Vintage material by the Monroe Brothers, the Delmore Brothers and Carter Family along with ‘60s and early ‘70s gems by Bill Anderson and Dallas Frazier as well as one of Louvin’s more storied solo hits, See the Big Man Cry, fleshed out the set. But that landmark Louvin Briothers sound was inescapable. Hearing an elder renaissance country man like Louvin dig into the polite but solemn gospel of The Christian Life on a Sunday night - in a bar, no less - made for a moment full of heartwarming musical tradition, soul and no small amount of irony.