Various Artists – The Horse Whisperer (soundtrack)

The first sounds that hit you from the Horse Whisperer soundtrack are a fat, Tejano-style accordion riff and yodeling. So far, so good. What we have here is Dwight Yoakam singing “Cattle Call”, which is something I always wanted to hear without quite being aware of it. This minor classic is followed by a set of 12 songs, old and new, performed by a short list of the most distinctive voices in country and western music today: Lucinda Williams, Emmylou Harris, Raul Malo, Iris DeMent, Steve Earle, and others.

This amalgam of talent, slated for an April release, was pulled together by MCA President Tony Brown and the producers of the Robert Redford film. But while soundtracks so often ramble through disjointed stabs at pop hitmaking and pseudo-classical mood music, these songs comprise a coherent survey of a contemporary western sound. We hear modern renditions of old cowboy love songs and western swing numbers, as well as newly hatched studies of hard, lonely lives.

The tunes, most of which were “inspired by” rather than appear in the film, were chosen to “wistfully echo the values of the ranching life of the wide open West,” explains Patrick Markey, one of the film’s producers, in the liner notes. Life lived according to deliberate choices; the rewards of sacrifice; attention to the seasons; and the comfort of love are all explored here in a variety of settings and moods. The performances, all produced by different people, exhibit a refreshing looseness and immediacy.

The real gems include Iris DeMent’s performance of Howard Hausey’s “Whispering Pines”, a late 1950s hit for honky-tonker Johnny Horton. Gillian Welch and David Rawlings offer their first recording since the 1996 release of their auspicious debut Revival, the haunted “Leaving Train”. Emmylou Harris sings a heart-stopping piece of folk mysticism (“Slow Surprise”) penned by blues-folk singer/guitarist Chris Smither. Earle’s layered “Me And The Eagle” more or less slayed me with its vivid imagery and drunken waltz time. And Allison Moorer delivers a smoky and enticing preview of her July debut on MCA with her own “A Soft Place To Fall”.

Much of the buzz around this record has focused on the reunion of Jimmie Dale Gilmore, Butch Hancock and Joe Ely, who, as emerging lights in the Texas singer-songwriter scene of the early 1970s, recorded a collection of songs as the Flatlanders that would be reissued years later as More A Legend Than A Band ( Rounder, 1990). Here, they resurface as the Hill Country Flatlanders, reflecting the topography of their adopted Austin home, with a spacious ballad called “South Wind Of Summer”. Rumors persist that the trio may do another record together, which would be good. They probably wouldn’t all feel compelled to sing on the same song; when they do here, it sounds a bit forced.

Don Edwards, the cowboy baritone, co-stars with Redford in the film, and here he offers “Cowboy Love Song”. If this doesn’t stir the brave romantic in you, you should be poked with a branding iron. If he’d lived 50 years earlier, Edwards would have been a movie star, and maybe he will be yet.

The fact that this is a soundtrack bodes well for its success in the record stores, which in turn bodes well for the music. Soundtracks of popular movies sell like crazy, no matter what’s on them, and the idea of thousands of fans looking for the George Strait cut (a mysteriously slow “Red River Valley”) and stumbling onto Iris DeMent’s crystalline backwoods warble just warms my heart.