Natalie Merchant – The House Carpenter’s Daughter

Give Natalie Merchant credit. Freed from a major-label contract, she might easily have elected, with her first independently released solo album, to give full expression to a sense of social consciousness that’s sometimes been overbearing. Instead, on The House Carpenter’s Daughter, she unfurls interpretations of traditional and contemporary folk songs that shine a light away from herself and onto the work at hand.

Kicking off with the melancholy ballad “Sally Ann”, written by fellow upstate New Yorkers the Horseflies, the album serves notice right away of its understated elegance. Bracketed by swells of accordion and violin, Merchant sings the verses against a backdrop of spectral acoustic guitar and candlelit percussion. Likewise, songs such as the 18th-century hymn “Weeping Pilgrim” and the 1940s Kentucky milltown ballad “Owensboro” employ slow-plucked banjo and a weepy fiddle to underscore plaintive messages about maintaining dignity in the face of despair.

While most of the album mines similarly somber themes, Merchant does ratchet up the tempo on occasion. For “Soldier, Soldier”, an old children’s “jump rope” song, she constructs an arrangement akin to Willie Dixon’s “Spoonful”, albeit with a stronger swing component. Even better, her cover of the Carter Family’s “Bury Me Under The Weeping Willow” proves she’s no slouch when it comes to offering up sprite bluegrass.

The House Carpenter’s Daughter breathes new life into material that should never be allowed to fall into obscurity. Merchant has said elsewhere that these songs “remind us of our humanity, of what we share.” With this album, she proves herself to be a gifted emissary.