Natalie Merchant is no exception when it comes to the trend toward simplicity. The House Carpenter’s Daughter veers off the paved pop highway on which we are accustomed to her traveling, onto a serene folk dirt road.
We catch a glimpse into what may have inspired her diversion in a letter written to the listener inside the beautiful album cover which, true to the genre’s organic nature, she designed herself. At her hometown public library, 16 year-old Merchant discovered the three-album collection of The Anthology of American Folk Music. “It permanently altered my view of American music,” she writes. “I had never heard music so raw, obscure, eccentric, heartfelt and unadorned.”
She is loyal to these initial impressions of folk. She tells stories of lost love, seafarers, and death in her characteristic narrowly contained vocal range, some times acappella, at others accompanied by only a guitar and banjo. More elaborate arrangements like the bluesy “Soldier Soldier” sound slightly more contemporary, and the toe-tapping “Down on Penny’s Farm” has the band hooting in the background, but neither venture far from The House Carpenter’s Daughter’s mellow mood.
The album’s tranquility suits its autumn release, transporting you to a rocking chair by the fire or on a country home porch. Songs evoke images of rustling fields browning with the approach of winter, of sweet-smelling apple orchards and the kaleidoscope of fall colors dancing in crisp air.
Amidst folk art and portraits are Merchant’s personal accounts of her relationships with each song. The album opens with shrill fiddle cries in “Sally Ann,” Merchant’s favorite song by the Horseflies, a band she used to see in Ithaca, NY. Other songs are resurrected hymns like the 18th Century Protestant “Weeping Pilgrim,” or dusty gems from the trials of laborers like the polished and pleading “Which Side Are You On?” written by a Kentucky wife of a labor organizer for the National Miner’s Union.
The album is especially poignant with the recent death of Johnny Cash. Merchant covers the “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow” she learned from the Carter family trio, among them Maybelle, mother of June Carter, wife of Johnny Cash.
In a world held hostage by technology, Merchant rescues and returns us to a time before music headed out the door to the big city. And in the final song, “Poor Wayfaring Stranger,” she cradles you like a baby in her arms, singing you to sleep.
