When a package from Jon Byrd arrived in the mail, my thoughts turned to his Down at the Well of Wishes (reviewed 18 February 2012) as an example of superior rooted songwriting. I was unprepared to learn that Route 41 features no Byrd originals. Each of the 10 cuts is courtesy of a singer-songwriter friend or friends to whom he is linked by Nashville and shared Southern upbringing. (Now a Nashville resident, Byrd was raised in Alabama.) This decision is a generous one. The art of song interpretation hovers close to extinction, especially by contemporary country and folk artists.

On another level Route 41 is depressing or exhilarating, depending on how you look at it. The former: if these writers are so good, why aren't they famous? The latter: wow, these are incredible songs. Many of us think, with ample reason, that Nashville songwriting has devolved into brain-crushing pifflery. Of course, there's the East Nashville scene, consisting of mostly unfamous musicians who, though they wouldn't mind having hits, aren't writing for the charts. To my ear a fair amount of this, however admirably intentioned, is less than first-rate, sufficient to generate a degree of suspicion about the would-be genre label "Americana." Besides, self-promoting slogans aside, "Americana" often seems devoid of roots worthy of the name. So I will do Byrd and associates the favor of characterizing the songs here as country of a convincing kind and, when not exactly that, folk of a hard-hitting sort.

In the latter category is the modern-day murder ballad "Just Another Gun" by Al Shelton, so disturbing in its depiction of evil that it recalls, from another time, the ghastly deeds depicted in tradition's "Knoxville Girl," "Banks of the Ohio," "Pretty Polly" and other classics. Shelton's narrative, on the other hand, takes off from the sort of domestic-violence horror you hear just about any day if you follow the news. The story is related from the point of view of a psychopath who murdered his wife years before and, so far anyway, has gotten away with it. The subtext, by the way, will not please NRA members.

Though Byrd's own songs as well as those to which he's drawn tend toward the seriously gloomy, humor is not entirely absent along Route 41. The opener, James Kelly's "George Jones (Has Never Sung About My Girl)," is at once a send-up and a celebration, rendered in a drolly comic voice. Then again, Davis Raines and Pamela Jackson's "Going to Montgomery" addresses the musical and racial paradox of that Alabama city, raising the specters of Hank Williams and Martin Luther King, two very different men with very different legacies. Greta Lee's "Walk on By" is not to be confused with Leroy Van Dyke's 1961 mega-hit, one of the greatest cheatin' songs ever. Lee's gets its harrowing quality from its utter, yet near-banal, realism. It envisions an encounter every person who has experienced romantic heartbreak -- which is to say everyone who's ever been in love more than once -- will recognize all too uneasily.

The album's 10 cuts are marvels of the craft of composition. It's one record that all singer-songwriters, many of whom need the lessons conveyed, would do well to hear. Yet even one who thinks himself informed -- I refer to myself -- will wonder at the obscurity of the contributors. Counting collaborations, I toll up 13 names. I recognize Adam & Shannon Wright (Adam is longtime country star Alan Jackson's nephew), Peter Cooper and Will Kimbrough. If their work is accurately represented on this disc, I would like to hear a whole lot more of Kelly, Lee, Shelton, Raines, Jackson, Mando Saenz, Baker Maultsby, Chris Richards, and Dave Marr & the Star Room Boys.

And -- finally and importantly -- let us not fail to praise Byrd's smartly delivered conversational vocals and the small country band that backs him and the songs with wonderful attention to the stories and the emotions. - Rambles.net