"Don Rigsby - The Midnight Call (CD, 2003)

It's number 13 in "The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (Vol. 1, 1883)", thus in folk-scholar shorthand "Child 13," after the compiler, Harvard Prof. Francis James Child. Hundreds of years old, known throughout Northern Europe and North America as "Edward" or "The Two Brothers," it relates a horrifying episode in which a man comes home bathed in blood, finally confessing to his mother that he has slain his brother. I don't know if Calvin Rigsby had the ballad in mind when he wrote "Blood on My Hands," but his song certainly sounds like a relative, except that in this one the man in blood-soaked clothes admits to his wife that he has killed her brother.

Bloody old ballads in their authentic form have long been part of the bluegrass repertoire. One thinks, for example, of "Banks of the Ohio," "Knoxville Girl," "Poor Ellen Smith," and "Pretty Polly." There may be only one traditional song - Jimmie Rodgers's version of the ballad which in other variants is "St. James Infirmary" or "Tom Sherman's Barroom" -- on Don Rigsby's new album, but it is heavy to groaning with story-songs immersed in the darkest themes of folk and country music: violence, accidental death, alcoholism, divorce, defeat, despair. There are not, shall we say, lots of laughs to be had on The Midnight Call.

The song that provides the title, by Dixie and Tom T. Hall (who appear to be writing just about exclusively for bluegrass artists these days), turns to the paranormal for an eerie saga of a dying mother's urgent psychic message to an errant son. The other Hall/Hall composition, "Little White Cross Out on Highway 13," expresses the grief of parents whose daughter, about to graduate from high school, dies at the hands of a drunk driver. One could easily imagine the Blue Sky Boys ("The Butcher's Boy") or Hank Williams ("When God Comes to Gather His Jewels") at their most doleful handling something this emotionally raw.

There is also Jerry Salley and Joanie Keller's "Dying to Hold Her Again." Here a widower goes home from work every day to drink himself senseless: "Now he's under the table/Dying to hold her again/The bottle's his weapon of choice/To do himself in." Unflinching, undoubtedly well crafted, but certainly not easy to listen to.

I guess how you feel about this album depends on how much you're willing to let music demand of you. Rigsby has assembled a star-filled band - Stuart Duncan, Vassar Clements, Rob McCoury, Jim Hurst, and more - and the arrangements and harmonies expertly come together to fashion a distinctly rooted yet just as distinctly modern bluegrass sound. Rigsby is,of course, a fine singer. When his subject isn't death, he can handle a sad and worthy faded adult-love song such as Larry Shell and Larry Cordle's "What Lays Down the Road," which is quite lovely (even as the English major in me tries not to bridle at the grammatical error in the title), or Larry Shell and Kim Williams's "Green Ivy Vine."

Rigsby is to be commended for having the courage and commitment to tackle difficult subject matter and to eschew cabin-on-the-hill or girl-from-old-Kentucky clichés. Still, next time a little humor amid all the gloom sure wouldn't hurt.