Rating:
Genre:
Country
Release Date: 04/24/2001
Last of My Kind may be the first ever soundtrack to a book. Nashville musician
Paul Burch wrote the gritty
folk tunes on the album as an accompaniment to his friend
Tony Earley's Depression-era coming-of-age novel,
Jim the Boy. Like
Earley's universal
Mark Twain-esque story,
Burch's songs come right from Americans' subconscious, from the collective myth of
Americana crystallized in
Huck Finn,
Tom Joad, and
Jay Gatsby. With a similar flair to the
Coen brothers' barn-raising
O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack,
Last of My Kind fits well with the raspy narratives, creepy
ballads, and back-porch stomps of
Harry Smith's brilliant
Anthology of American Folk Music.
Burch's songs have their own stories to tell, whether he's singing of the game of life in a pure, clear voice on
"Up on the Mountain"
("Where the honeysuckle grows/The world below laid out plain for me to see like a board of Monopoly") or recounting the story of a murderous farmer in the spooky shuffle
"Harvey Hartsell's Farm." Burch's brilliance lies in the fact that he has created a period album pulled out of the past but imbued with a contemporary relevance and resonance that make it just as poignant as a novel of the same sort. As he sings in the title track, "Today I came to realize that I am the last of my kind."
~Charles Spano, All Music Guide
Cart 0 items
Listen
