 The Man From God Knows Where, subtitled “An Immigrant Song Cycle” is an inspiring, complex, and mammoth project--nearly 75 minutes long--in which singer/songwriter Tom Russell, by telling the story of his Irish and Norwegian forebears and, most especially, the archetypal tale of his own father, tells the story of America.
And he’s chosen an extraordinary group of guest performers to help him do the telling. The great, grainy Irish alto Dolores Keane embodies Mary Clare Malloy, who relates her immigration in an eponymous tune, then cautions her daughter about avoiding big city temptation in “When Irish Girls Grow Up.” Singing harmony for Keane on the latter is Iris DeMent, who also embodies a frustrated farm wife dreaming of foreign glamour in “Acres of Corn.” DeMent’s presence suffuses the project--her shivery soprano is a virtual time machine on the traditional “Wayfarin’ Stranger” and “The Old Rugged Cross.” She also duets with Russell on “Throwin’ Horseshoes at the Moon,” a tribute to Russell’s dad, Charlie, who gambled big, lost more often than he won, and died broke in 1997, and on the disc’s closer, “Love Abides,” about all the people who came, “Hand in hand across the mountains, and the ragin’ rivers wide, til they reached the distant ocean, or found a place where love abides.”
Of course, some folks never find that place. In what is Russell’s masterstroke, he recruited legendary artist Dave Van Ronk to twice sing the part of “The Outcast.” Before he turned to the blues in the 1950s, Van Ronk was a “trad jazz” singer, and he slides his way through this raucous tune, counterpointing the trumpet and trombone of Hank Bones, happily growling: “I’m the black sheep, the philanderer, the louse, the souse, the rake, the remittance man, the snake--the bloody outcast.” Russell himself takes on the slightly more sinister role of “The Man From God Knows Where,” a hanged Irishman whose ghost drifts through America. (This song owes more than a little to the traditional “Days of ‘49,” about the California gold rush.) And Norwegian singers Sondre Bratland and Kari Bremnes recount the often-neglected saga of Scandinavian immigrants to the Midwest.
But if you’re attempting nothing less than to tell the story of America, heck, the one guest vocalist you really need is...Walt Whitman. With all the clicks and pops intact, the Good Grey Poet’s aged voice declares:
“America, centre of equal daughters, equal sons,
All, all alike, endeared, grown, ungrown, young or old,
Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich,
Perennial with the earth, with Freedom, Law, and Love.”
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