Brennen Leigh – Prairie Love Letter
Self Released – 18 September 2020
Following on from the somewhat under the radar release of last year’s McKay & Leigh album, the latter returns with her Robbie Fulks-produced solo album tribute to her birthplace on the state line between Minnesota and North Dakota. If you like old-time country, then really, this is as good as it gets.
Featuring Fulks on guitar, Jenee Fleenor on fiddle, bassist Dennis Crouch, mandolinist Paul Kramer and Noel McKay on harmony, it opens with Don’t You Know I’m From Here, a jaunty tale of the narrator leaving their hometown and their old self (“full of vinegar back in ‘99/Guitar in the back seat, big time on my mind”) and returning after things didn’t work out, to find “it does not look the same and nobody knows my name”.
Co-penned with Melissa Carper and featuring McKay and Courtney Patton on harmonies, calling to mind the country flavours of Little Feat’s Willin’, the fingerpicked Billy and Beau notes how “the heart wants to go where the heart wants to go and you can’t undo it” as it unfolds an unrequited love romantic triangle as three kids grow up together, both the narrator and her closeted gay friend Billy having a crush on farm boy Beau. It tells of their friendship before Billy headed off to college in Chicago to make a name for himself while Beau joined the rodeo and hasn’t been heard of since, although he apparently “broke a lot of hearts including Billy’s and mine”.
A family memory provides the source of the string band sounding The John Deere H, as, joined by Fulks on banjo, Shad Cobb on fiddle and mandolin by Matt Flinner, she sings in the voice of her father remembering the first time, aged eight, having to stand to reach the pedals, he drove his dad’s second-hand tractor as “he showed me how to check the spark and set that flywheel turning” and how he’d “give my right arm to be on that farm with the John Deere H again”.
Accompanied by fiddle and mandolin, memories (“every year I’m getting older and he just stays twenty-four”) are centrefield again for North Dakota Cowboy, recollections of platonic youthful friendship (“He’d never put a hand on me though I know he loved me so”) with a boy with eyes “green as Norway pines” who, with a troubled mind, “rode off into the prairie sky in his rusty yellow Ford” to break numerous hearts and how “When the ice breaks up in Springtime and the little calves are born”, she, “smoking with the windows down” still looks for him whenever she’s back in Fargo.
McKay and Patton again harmonising and coloured by banjo and fiddle, it’s back to family for There’s a Yellow Cedar Waxwing On The Juneberry Bush, this time, memories of going down to the lakes of Minnesota with her to pick berries and being taught the lesson of God’s love and bounty. And, from relatives to faithful family pets with Little Blue Eyed Dog, one of two McKay co-writes, which, joined by Tim O’Brien on fiddle and Alison Brown on banjo, is a lively string band hillbilly celebration of Leigh’s dog, Bjorn, a stray with one blue and one brown eye that she took in and which coincidentally echoes a similar story on the new Kathleen Edwards album when she sings “I thought that I was saving you/Now I’m wondering who rescued who”.
Again featuring O’Brien, here on octave mandolin, with cello from Kaitlyn Raitz, It’s followed by the second co-write, the self-explanatory cowboy campfire styled I Love The Lonesome Prairie (“The lonesome prairie wind is like a lifelong friend/No, the prairie’s not lonesome to me”). That contrast between urban and rural continues with an ode to her hometown of Elizabeth Minnesota as, accompanied by Pete Finney’s pedal steel, she muses that, while letters from a friend make the bit city sound exciting, she’d rather be by the cold Pelican River with “the smiles of old Norwegians”, “my dad’s homegrown tomatoes and my grandma’s scalloped potatoes” and “the call of the loons in the night time”. The song’s bittersweet twist being that these are her homesickness dreams and that “it’s been years since I’ve been gone/ I work all day and evening”.
There’s memories too in the simple fingerpicked Prairie Funeral, a folksy hillbilly spiritual of sorts that tells of a simple funeral service for an old man in “a pioneer church made out of sod”, his burial in the plains he loved and the gathering of friends and family “telling tales of back when they were young” before the banjo, fiddle and accordion come out and “the old farmers cried in their flannel sleeves when we sang that song from the old country”.
It begins its final run with You’ve Never Been To North Dakota, another love letter to the landscape “alive with green/Thimbleweed and columbine and clover” and birdsong, delivered in the voice of an eighty-year-old resident telling those who don’t know of its wonders and beauty before they disappear with time and progress with the news of “The oil trucks coming through” that don’t give a damn about a prairie.
It’s followed pointedly by the defiant protest You Ain’t Laying No Pipeline which, with Shad Cobb on fiddle and Fulks on banjo is based on the 2016 controversy of oil development in the sacred Native burial lands at Standing Rock Sacred Stone Camp and set to a tune strikingly evocative of Will The Circle Be Unbroken as she sings “You’ve got a mansion, tall and splendid/You’ve got your own island in the Caribbean/Got your own hotel and your own airplane/But you ain’t laying no pipeline through this land” because “this piece of earth don’t belong to no one”.
It ends superbly with the crooning pedal steel keening waltztime cowboy lullaby Outside the Jurisdiction Of Man which, inspired by Willa Cather’s My Antonia and the newly-orphaned main character’s move to his grandparents’ home on the plains of Nebraska, speaks to the ineffable beauty of unspoiled nature with “not another soul in sight for miles and miles around” and a wish to be buried “ ‘neath the work of God’s own hand”. A wonderful evocation of the land and the lives it shelters, if such a thing as the Freedom of the State exists, then Leigh should be awarded it forthwith.
Photo Credit: Kaitlyn Raitz