Tomi Lunsford – High Ground

Tomi Lunsford’s father Jim played fiddle with such country and bluegrass legends as Bob Wills, Reno & Smiley and Roy Acuff. Her great uncle, Bascom Lamar Lunsford — widely known as the “Minstrel of the Appalachians” — wrote “I Wish I Was A Mole In The Ground” and “Old Mountain Dew”. This legacy, coupled with Tomi’s previous work in her family’s country band, the Lunsfords, might lead one to assume that her solo debut would be a bluegrass or old-timey record.

High Ground, recorded in Nashville but still unreleased in the States, is certainly a rootsy affair. But while it sometimes recalls the solo albums of Hazel Dickens, it just as often evokes the magnificent jazz and blues-inflected recordings of the early-’70s Bay Area combo Joy Of Cooking. Whether Lunsford is yearning over the freight-train rhythms of “Postpone My Love” or ruing the fate of the outlaw “Jimmy Teel”, her vocals bear a striking resemblance to the supple, soulful singing of former Joy Of Cooking co-leader Terry Garthwaite.

Lunsford wrote or co-wrote all the material on High Ground, most of which animates rural life and culture. Yet as the following passage from “The Green River Below” suggests, her narratives also possess a certain universality. “The green river below it carries my love/Tho’ folks try to tell me he’s in heaven above/So gentle it seems it could never bear pain/So quiet it flows to a far delta plain.” Emmylou Harris could do far worse than to record this willowy Appalachian ode to longing and loss.