Music |
Universal United House of Prayer
Buddy Miller
By
Published: Jan 01, 2004
Category:
Country
Music lovers who are familiar with Buddy Miller — which is to say, each and every fan of the music known as “alternative country” — will tell you he can do anything.
He can sing “high lonesome” like a backwoods wailer from the hollow.
He can sing rugged and soulful as Otis Redding.
He can write classics.
His guitar solos have the ring of inevitability, whether he is cutting like Led Zeppelin, swamp-rocking like John Fogerty or delivering a solo so brilliantly understated it can go right by you unnoticed.
His duets with his wife, Julie Miller, are precise and delicate as cut crystal.
For almost a decade now, he’s been the guitarist in Emmylou Harris’s band — yes, he’s good enough to stand up there every night and do “Love Hurts” with her.
And, in a home studio that’s more living room than not, he produces CD after CD that listeners cherish for their integrity, depth and what Steve Earle calls “the best voice in country.”
But Butler doesn’t think that many of his fans would have predicted that Miller — — who was born white and Jewish in New Jersey — would make the greatest gospel recording since the Staples Singers.
That Buddy Miller is a servant of the Lord, we know. You can’t go to a Buddy-and-Julie concert and not hear their story: In a narrative style reminiscent of Gracie Allen, Julie likes to tell of her conversion to washed-in-the-blood-of-the-lamb Christianity. That was in the early ‘80s, when the Millers lived in New York City and were just starting to make a name for themselves. Then Julie disappeared. "Buddy and the band were at the bar that we were playing," says Julie, "and they were wondering where I’d gone, and I called him and said, ‘Buddy, you’re not going to believe this, but I’ve just met some Christians and I’ve given my life to Jesus and I can’t come back.’" Shawn Colvin took Julie’s place in the band. Julie’s old Bible, which had been holding up a leg of their couch, now became Buddy’s companion. A few months later, Buddy was in Texas with Julie and on the path of his own conversion.
Buddy Miller would be the last person in the universe to push Christianity — or anything — on you. For all the authority of his musicianship, he is modesty incarnate. In interviews, he emphasizes his self-described weaknesses. He can’t — he says — do that professional musician thing and work as a session man on other people’s records, because, he believes, “With every note I play, I feel like I’m ruining somebody’s career." On stage, his uniform is black jeans, nondescript shirt, and a baseball hat pulled down over his long grey hair. He can’t stand to hear himself sing, even on record: “When I came in to do a sound check the other day, they had recorded a sound check and they were playing me. I told them to turn it off.” Clearly, this is not a guy with big ego needs.
Which might explain why “Universal United House of Prayer” begins with a guitar chord, a shake of a tambourine — and the wail of two female gospel singers, Regina and Ann McCrary (daughters of Fairfield Four founder Rev. Sam McCrary). They’re on nine of the CD’s eleven songs, and they’re key; with the McCrarys singing, Miller morphs into Roebuck Staples, that pillar of gospel. And not just any gospel — socially conscious gospel.
So there are inspiring, violin-and-drum propelled songs that proclaim:
when burdens seem to overcome there’s a higher power
whose faithful and refuses none there’s a higher power
then why ask men to help you through there’s a higher power,
they’re helpless pilgrims just like you there’s a higher power
let’s sing it shout it walk it talk it
there’s a higher power
lay down your soul ’cause Jesus bought it.
there’s a higher power
But there is also a nine minute fourteen second version of Bob Dylan’s “With God On Our Side” that couldn’t be more political — that is, politics as seen from the Heavens, where we are judged for our acts as well as our beliefs. Songs like Dylan’s make this CD a religious meditation on the Iraq War. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine Miller choosing to record these particular songs at any other time.
But nothing would be more bone-headed than to see this CD as an anti-war screed, or to regard it as a diary of this terrible year. It’s a much more ambitious effort than that, and a much more significant accomplishment — like the songs of Stephen Foster, or, more recently, the Band, Buddy Miller’s music sums us up.
Here is our pride. Here is our hope. Here is our confusion, as we chase the wrong dreams. And here, off to the side, loving us more than we can know, is a God who will help us across these raging rivers. No matter that Butler isn’t a Christian — Buddy Miller can make the lost believe, the blind see and the lame walk.
Record of the year.
