Various Artists – Down To The Promised Land: Five Years Of Bloodshot Records

“Can’t you see the moon/From Texas to the New York islands?” In his hilarious, crooning, send-it-up-and-salute “Bloodshot’s Turnin’ Five”, Robbie Fulks sums up the “so there” style of that cheeky upstart label, which, with its roster of critical darlings both vintage and fresh, has all but secured the perimeters of country music in five short years.

While other record labels large and small dissipated in the late 1990s with restructuring, more restructuring and all the attendant attrition, Bloodshot’s trench-digging, piggybank-smashing, hell-bound fury in the direction of what they perceived as rock and country music malaise delivered the scrappy indie to something like durability. To celebrate, Bloodshot prepared, with infinite care and manifest pride, a mission statement: 40 previously unreleased songs that reflect the substance of the label’s taste, history and intentions. The result is a historic document, whose lapses, insignificant in context, seem stridently to illustrate the label’s sense of purpose.

The collection opens with the Yayhoos’ roughneck-rock “Oh! Chicago”, with its spot-on tag, “You must be kind to a redneck girl and her high-class dream”). It’s a bow to the label’s hometown, and by extension, the thriving music scene has that nurtured it. Not incidentally, the selection also honors forerunners of the Bloodshot stable. The Yayhoos is an occasional side project of Dan Baird, formerly of ’80s rumble-and-roots-rock outfit the Georgia Satellites, and Eric “Roscoe” Ambel, producer of the Bottle Rockets, Blue Mountain, Blood Oranges, et al.

What starts at home in Chicago ends on the road. Track 40 bookends the veteran Yayhoos with a newish band; Red Star Belgrade, recent emigres from Raleigh to Chicago, perform AC/DC’s “Highway To Hell”. Transformed to a dust-blown ribbon of twang-rock, the song not only reminds listeners of the project’s title, but also concludes it with an empathetic portrait of recklessly striding out on tour. Bloodshot merch sales can pay for gas to the next town.

Neither the Yayhoos nor Red Star Belgrade are signed to Bloodshot, but when you give a milestone party, you invite other friends and favorites. The 38 tracks between are loaded with these, including Giant Sand, Chip Taylor, Bare Jr., Johnny Dowd, Deanna Varagona (Lambchop), the Supersuckers and Amy Nelson (Willie’s daughter), the Hollisters, Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel and Graham Parker.

Also present are extended family — i.e., bands who have had tracks on one or more of Bloodshot’s landmark compilations, including Chris Mills, the Handsome Family, the Cornell Hurd Band, Hazeldine, Duane Jarvis, the Texas Rubies, Mike Ireland, and Nora O’Connor. Both Ryan Adams and Caitlin Cary of Whiskeytown also are represented, each with solo tracks.

Treatments of covers are clever and wise throughout. Bloodshot roster linchpins Alejandro Escovedo (with Kelly Hogan on harmony vocals) and the Waco Brothers are represented by their live show-stoppers, Mick Jagger’s “Evening Gown” and The Who’s “Baba O’Riley”. Neither has the impact of the nightclub versions, the latter having generated mass beer showers and worse on occasion, but both are essential to the Bloodshot story. The Handsome Family covers Bill Monroe’s “I Hear A Sweet Voice Calling”, in which Brett Sparks’ mournful baritone laments the loss of a child in a story that might almost have come from his wife Rennie’s pen. Whiskeytown’s Cary reveals a charming and fluid voice in a George Jones spiritual, “Please Take The Devil Out Of Me”.

The Texas Rubies sing a convincing a cappella “Blue Diamond Mine” in a harmony that could have come straight from second-generation Scots in songwriter Jean Ritchie’s own Appalachia. Anna Fermin gives Don Gibson’s classic “Oh, Lonesome Me” new life as a dejected, despairing ballad. Nora O’Connor’s clear, expressive and easy range make a country-soul classic of Tom Waits’ “Looks Like I’m Up Shit Creek Again”. The Unholy Trio, featuring Freakwater’s Dave Gay on bass, tackles Public Enemy’s “Bring The Noise”, and Devil In A Woodpile takes a side trip to a 1940s New Orleans street corner with Robert Brown’s toe-tappin’ jiver “Easy Ridin’ Mama”.

Most intriguing are the cuts on which bands cover each other. Sally Timms joins the Sadies for an endearing rendering of the Handsome Family’s “Milk And Scissors”. The Meat Purveyors race lickity-split through Split Lip Rayfield’s uproarious hillbilly romp “Sunshine”. Chris Mills and Deanna Varagona give a poignant and heartfelt treatment of Escovedo’s “The Last To Know”. British pub-rocker Graham Parker illustrates that passion is no ordinary word in his reading of the Waco Brothers’ take on U.S. politics, “See Willy Fly By”, backed by the Wacos themselves.

The singles are easy to pick. Ryan Adams’ hook-fraught, lust-as-conundrum “Monday Night” stands with his best work — burnished, timeless pop, fleshy with Ambel’s production and omni-instrumental fills of dulcitar, percussion, lap steel, keys, etc. Mike Ireland’s “I’d Like To” is an achingly beautiful, real-life love song, with Michael Deming’s perfect piano providing depth and grace notes, heft and lilt to Ireland’s soul-filled delivery of a resonant contemporary sentiment: “I’ve kept everyone out for way too long/I’ve kept nothing but doubt/Nothing lasts long/But I think I could open my eyes/I think I’d like to…with you.”

The Old 97’s answer Ireland’s take with an offhand, if not outright surly, acceptance of the good, the bad and the ugly of the inter-gender thing on “Making Love With You”. Giant Sand’s track, “Hard On Things”, is the metaphorical confession of an all-around klutz, only too aware of the personal, as well as tangible, destruction in his wake. Moonshine Willy, among Bloodshot’s first acts, resurfaces here with “Turn The Lights Down Low”, in which band leader and scribe Kim Docter balances a thoughtful story of parallel lives with a sterling hook that unleashes her rich alto.

Jon Langford has been a touchstone and launchpad throughout Bloodshot’s history, and he is everywhere on these discs. Perhaps his finest foray is a semi-degenerate duet with Chip Taylor (author of “Wild Thing” and “Angel Of The Morning”), in which the two recount the first Bloodshot tour of the U.K. in 1997. “It was Brixton, didn’t we rock the town that night…It was the wrong part of the city, it was the wrong part of the world/But we plugged it in and we played for friends and some drunks and a young French girl.”

The extent to which fans find any given track satisfying, or not, will depend largely on taste, and in a crowd this large there are bound to be lesser lights. Neko Case and Hazeldine may not be represented by their best work; tracks by the Riptones, the Grievous Angels, Trailer Bride, the Blacks, Rex Hobart, Split Lip Rayfield, Bare Jr. and the Supersuckers are as good as those acts get, but they don’t particularly stand out in this all-but-blinding firmament.

Down To The Promised Land plants the flag: Bloodshot has dug in for the long haul in the scars of broken hearts, the edges of a highball glass, the humanity of really bad ideas, the parch of a hangover on a long, dusty road, the truth of Johnny Dowd: “It’s loyalty, not romance.” To a one, these songs are ground with the everyday grit of falling down, struggling up and carrying on with whatever it takes, taking wry pleasure, straight, wherever you can. May the party never end.