AT THIS POINT, it’s almost a tradition that aging roots music icons find a third, fourth, or fifth act in partnership with some latter-day guru of cool. Think Rick Rubin and Johnny Cash, Jack White and Loretta Lynn, Joe Henry and almost everyone else.
But the latest such pairing is, on the surface at least, the most incongruous yet. Jessi Colter, a soulful country singer most famous for being the widow of Waylon Jennings, has made an album (The Psalms) with Lenny Kaye, the rock historian, producer, and guitarist most famous for his lifetime membership in the Patti Smith Group.
Unlike all those other musical odd couplings, this one is not cross-generational. Colter is only three years older than Kaye, but it was always a long way from CBGB to the Grand Ole Opry. Yet here they are collaborating, on an album of Bible verses set to music no less. But when you look a little bit below the surface, this pairing makes all the sense in the world.
The origins of this album go all the way back to 1995, when Kaye, who has always kept up his career as a music journalist, was in Nashville helping Waylon Jennings write his autobiography. One morning, he walked into the living room and beheld Colter at the piano, her Bible open before her, laying down chords and improvising melodies as she sang from the King James Version of the Psalms. It was, Kaye has written, “one of the most beautiful expressions of belief I had ever witnessed.”
Later, after Waylon’s death in 2002, Kaye began nudging Colter to record her psalms. Finally, in 2007, she was ready. In one session that year and two the next, they cut all the piano and vocal tracks, and some of Kaye’s guitar, mostly in single takes. Then it was Kaye’s turn to procrastinate, as he spent the next decade going to those tapes in odd moments, “decorating” them sparingly with a little organ here, some more guitar there, some drums and percussion, and even a smattering of harp.
Now we have it, and we can hear what Kaye heard 22 years ago, and why it works.
This kind of Spirit-driven performance might come naturally to Colter, whose mother was a Pentecostal preacher. Kaye’s affinity for the material, he says, dates to his fascination with the minor-key Hebrew songs of the cantor in the synagogue of his youth. But what he does here is also very much like what he has done for the past 45 years with Patti Smith, building a musical infrastructure for the ecstatic utterances of a mystic poet. He’s just traded Smith’s improvised conflation of Van Morrison’s “Gloria” with “Gloria in Excelsis Deo” for Colter’s keyboard channeling of King David’s “Who is the king of glory?”
“Psalm 23,” while recorded on the spot, was pre-written with contemporary classical composer Kenneth LaFave. But the other 11 of these psalms were completely improvised. And Kaye’s decorations have done nothing to detract from that spontaneous expression. Some of Colter’s improvised melodies do cohere into song structures. Some are more like the chanted psalms we Catholics are used to hearing on Sunday morning. But even those gain momentum and structure from the dynamics of Kaye’s backing tracks.
Ultimately, what we hear on this strange and beautiful recording is still what Kaye heard when he walked in on Colter two decades ago: A woman at prayer. And her deep personal engagement with these ancient songs quietly draws the listener into the fundamental acts of gratitude and surrender that are at their heart.
Danny Duncan Collum, author of the novel White Boy, teaches writing at Kentucky State University in Frankfort.
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