Blue Mountain began making music in the green hills of North Mississippi seven years ago, and now there are growing enclaves of fans all across the country. Cary Hudson and Laurie Stirratt write the songs and they play the guitars while Frank Coutch accompanies them on drums. With the addition last year of George Sheldon on bass, the band has rounded into a solid four-piece group, people who are comfortable with eachother, like cousins.

I’ve seen them play in Laurie’s kitchen. She’s always cooking something, so it smells good in there. On the windowsills sit old glass bottles, Native American artifacts found in those same hills, a tin sign that hung on the side of some store fifty years before. A woodburning stove sits in the corner. They have lots of dogs. A man might say it feels right homey there.

I’ve heard so much music in that room. The walls wear the memory of it the way the heart bears an invisible scar. When they talk about the music they heard growing up you see the shine of love in their eyes, a reverence for the songs that shaped them and inspired them to make their own.

Laurie talks lovingly of her family and the instruments they played, and how there was always music in the house when she was growing up. Cary talks about Skip James and Robert Johnson and The Who, and all the great guitarists he listened to. To see him play is to hear a distillation of all that rock and roll combined with the mastery of a style completely his own. Frank turns me on to old Hank Williams tunes and delights the crowds with his own rendition of “Mama’s got a Squeezebox” while hammering on his drums. George jams and grins and sweats in the corner, and late at night on his own piano sometimes plays a primal kind of Frankenstein music that lives in George’s fingers.

Before they went on the road the last time, they let me watch them rehearse. Frank wasn’t playing his drums, but he was tapping the beat on his leg, and George was in there with them in Laurie’s kitchen. They were playing without a crowd, or lights, or smoke, not in an overheated room with people talking, just in the kitchen with a few small amps hooked up. And as it usually happens, the Wizard (what I call Cary behind his back) got to doing some of his wizardry on his guitar, and even Frank, there at the end of the table, who has heard something like it hundreds of times before, was smiling and shaking his head. Cary was making a sound come out of that electric Gibson that was totally of its own being, some pleasureful and powerful living thing that flowed within that place like something that had been trapped and was in the process of escaping. It steamed and rattled, hooted and whistled, and you couldn’t stop from moving your body to it, letting the music live inside you for a while.

I spent some nights in the studio this spring, watched them play and sing solos and listen to songs over and over, checking this, reducing that, adding that. Dan Baird was helping them, and there were so many positive vibes in that room that it felt great just to stand in it and hear the music pour.

These songs were mixed by Mark Howard at Teatro. They all worked hard putting this one together, Frank and Laurie and George and Cary, and it’s so nice to see all these songs finished and breaking more new ground for BLUE MOUNTAIN. Here’s one true thing for you: The truly good only get better.

It’s kind of them to let me hang out in Laurie’s kitchen and listen to them play. They’d be doing it even if they didn’t have a record label. Doing it because they love it. If you get to do what you want with your life, then it’s cool. And if you happen to make somebody else happy along the way, like somebody really enjoying a book you wrote or a song you recorded, then its way cool, and everything is usually mostly right in those green hills where we all live.

-- Larry Brown July 25, 1999 Yocona, MS