Sturgill Simpson returns to Kentucky roots with new album, upcoming John Prine tribute

Two years ago to the week, you would have thought Sturgill Simpson had given up on anything resembling country music. That’s when the Breathitt County native and overall Americana music renegade released “Sound & Fury,” an anime-inspired song cycle of synth-rock and psychedelic invention. It was truly the sound of another country.

This fall, however, we have Sturgill’s latest chapter in a musical journey that follows no corporate whim but rather his own restless muse. Titled “The Ballad of Dood & Juanita,” the new album (Simpson’s seventh) is a full-blown Western saga that jettisons the electronics of “Sound & Fury” to detail the frontier saga of an Eastern Kentucky free spirit domesticated by love and nearly ruined by its criminal uprooting. Oh, yes, and the musical backdrop is now bluegrass.

First things first. The leap from “Sound & Fury” to “The Ballad of Dood & Juanita” wasn’t as abrupt as it sounds. In 2020, the year separating the two recordings, Simpson gathered some of bluegrass’ most heralded pickers (fiddler Stuart Duncan, mandolinist Sierra Hull, guitarist/vocalist Tim O’Brien, banjoist Scott Vestal and bassist Mike Bub among others) for the two-volume “Cuttin’ Grass” album series. The project rewired the country and country/soul-leaning songs from Simpson’s first three albums with bluegrass arrangements.

That at least preps us for “The Ballad of Dood & Juanita.” But where the “Cuttin’ Grass” records seemed more like stylistic experiments, the new album is focused on narrative cohesion. This is a storytelling work, an old-fashioned Western parable of good and evil, of love and death, of heritage and retribution. The bluegrass instrumentation quickly becomes a supportive and authenticating tapestry for this Civil War-era saga.

The storyline deals with Dood, the song-described “son of a mountain miner and a Shawnee maid.” Anyone misjudging that heritage does so at their own undoing. “He’d stretch you up and burn you,” Simpson sings in his now-familiar Waylon Jennings-style balladeering voice, “for callin’ him half-breed.”

Along comes the lovely Juanita who soothes his savagery, wins his heart and introduces Dood to domesticity and family life. The bliss is short-lived, however. Juanita is kidnapped by the villainous Seamus McClure. That sends Dood and his most trusted aides – a mule, a hound and a rifle – into the wilderness to rescue her.

It’s an arduous but eventually victorious (and ultimately vengeful) journey that plays out in a brisk 28 minutes. Despite the brevity, the story seems quite complete, its cinematic imagery played out through a variety of vocal guises (a military ensemble, a stoic narrator, a pack of bluegrass harmonizers and Simpson’s own country persona) with the string music accompaniment complimenting but never intruding.

Simpson devotes nearly half of the album to specific tunes about its characters. Dood’s rambunctious but steadfast devotion is introduced on the two-part “Ol’ Dood,” his mule’s might is detailed (along with a hearty instrumental jam, one of the very few on the album) during “Shamrock” and his devoted hound is remembered in the folky requiem “Sam.”

The instrumentation is never overdone. In fact, it often provides a welcome sparseness and space for the songs to breathe on their own. The effect is not unlike another master Western storytelling album, Willie Nelson’s 1975 classic “The Red Headed Stranger.” How apt it is, then, to have Nelson deliver a cameo is the midst of the cantina-flavored “Juanita” not through singing but with a brittle sampling of his Django Reinhardt-inspired guitarwork.

Sturgill Simpson meets Willie Nelson for a Western-themed fable? Seems apropos, don’t you think?

Simpson, John Prine and ‘Paradise’

“The Ballad of Dood & Juanita” isn’t the only grassroots treat Simpson has for us this fall. Simpson offers a similarly, string band-savvy reading of “Paradise” on the upcoming John Prine tribute record, “Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2” (the first volume was released in 2010.)

Simpson performed “Paradise” with Prine, who died from COVID-19 in April 2020, several times in recent years. This tribute recording is played faithfully straight, underscoring Prine’s remembrance of childhood summers in Muhlenberg County and the land’s decimation from strip mining with antique accents of fiddle and guitar as well as one of Simpson most conversationally devout vocal performances.

Simpson’s version of “Paradise” was the last song recorded at The Butcher Shoppe, the Nashville studio Prine founded with Grammy-winning producer David Ferguson. The building has since been demolished.

Scheduled for release on Oct. 8, “Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows: Songs of John Prine, Vol. 2” is keeping the rest of its song/performer lineup under wraps for now. The only other confirmed artist is Brandi Carlile, who cut a version of Prine’s final composition, “I Remember Everything.”

Proceeds from the tribute album will benefit UNICEF USA’s COVID-19 Relief Fund.