The Local Honeys
The Local Honeys
La Honda Records
2022
Although this is The Local Honeys third album, it is also Linda Jean Stokley and Montana Hobbs’s debut for La Honda Records. They say it’s their first to really express who they are and where they’re from, hence the eponymous title; not that it strays far from what you would expect, bluegrass and folk drawn from their Kentucky roots, close harmonies and narrative-framed songs that reflect their rural background, identity and the issues that affect both. Co-produced by Jesse Wells, it thickens the soundscape, layering fiddles and banjos over electric guitars, keyboards and effects that also draw on 90s alternative rock.
It opens with the sole cover, a spooked deep groove southern gothic reading of Jean Ritchie’s The L&N Don’t Stop Here Anymore, a lament for the collapse of the state’s coal mining industry. It’s followed by Last Mule In The Holler, which, with a melody calling to mind Tanya Tucker’s Delta Dawn, is one of several songs referencing equines. The song is a tribute to a Kentucky mule, The Red Rooster, a World Grand Champion Walking Mule approaching the end of his days. The track opens with a recording of Hobbs’s father, Monte, who taught her everything he knew about mules and stubborn folk. It sits alongside perhaps the most downbeat of the numbers, Stokley’s Dead Horses, with its chorus of “I never got used to watching horses die/They die badly, it has kept me up at night”, a song about the stark realities of animal husbandry (“The saddest thing I think/That I ever saw/Was a little buckskin pony/Mourning from her stall/The mama lay beside the fence/Under a tarp out in the rain/Peeking from the plastic/Was her honey-colored mane”) and how the “once-prized domestic pet/Ain’t worth the price of hay/They’ve been turned out on to strip mines/Get to starving once it’s snowed”. When she notes “I suppose we’re all just animals/With slightly different hides”, the metaphor strikes home.
Country swing and trumpet carry Dear Woodrow (A Song For Maggie), a song based on a character Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove, a prostitute wishing that her mean old Texan lover would one day give up chasing Comanches and bandits and park his boots by her bed instead of leaving dollars under the pillow. It’s followed by another story-song, The Ballad of Frank & Billy Buck, which, musically and lyrically inspired by Tom T. Hall, is a spirited modern-day murder ballad based on true events in Kentucky, in which two teenage hitchhikers kill the old man who gives them a ride and take off with his truck and dog.
The most extended cut at just under six minutes is the slow swaying woody rhythm of Toadstool, written by Stokley during her daily walks around the farm soaking in the healing power of nature during the pandemic, while Better Than I Deserve is Hobbs’s tribute to her grandfather, an orphan who lied about his age to become a US Navy pilot during WWII, the title being his self-deprecating, humble life motto.
Stokley’s waltzing and semi-yodelling Dumbass, Nebraska returns to Lonesome Dove, honouring the song’s protagonist, Clara Allen, who, rather than spend her days waiting for Texas Ranger Augustus McCrae to finish taming the West, moved and married a horse trader in Nebraska, making a home but suffering tragedy when her sons died, and her husband was kicked in the head by a horse, leaving him in a coma throughout the book.
Hobbs’s final contribution is the deceptively upbeat, banjo-bubbling If I Could Quit, which draws on personal experience with family and friends to address the opioid addiction rife in Appalachia and the vicious circle of medication. Opening with the line “My favorite horse is buried on this farm”, it ends then with Throw Me In The Thicket, Stokley’s love song to her childhood home, growing up on an orchard surrounded by plants and animals, and how it shaped her (“I was riding high from toes to crown/My head held up, my heels thrust down/That’s the way I carry myself today”), the title asking for her to be returned to the soil from which she came when she dies (“Let the earth reclaim my body/Let the worms devour my insides/It’s fed me now for, oh, so long/I’ll feed it for days by gone”).
This is an album about The Local Honeys finding themselves; you’re highly advised to find them too.
The Local Honeys is released on 15th July via La Honda Records
Pre-Order via Amazon | Rough Trade
Website: http://www.thelocalhoneys.com/