Highlander

Missy Raines grew up in the northeastern corner of West Virginia near the Pennsylvania and Maryland borders. She came of age listening to and working the festival circuit with other performers from the greater Mid-Atlantic and Washington, D.C. Regions. And she’s included some of them on her latest album.

Danny Paisley, for instance, really tears it up as he duets with Raines on an old Loretta Lynn song called “These Old Blues.” Dudley Connell, a founder of the Johnson Mountain Boys, serves up a similarly fiery vocal assist on the chilling “Ghost of a Love,” written by Ray Cline.

Fellow West Virginian Kathy Mattea offers vocal assists on Raines’s own “Who Needs A Mine,” cowritten with Randy Barnett. This bitter commentary condemns the latest outside corporate power to ravage and victimize Appalachia: pharmaceutical giants. As Raines notes sardonically:

Who needs a mine
To kill us dead
When a little pill
Works fine instead

Laurie Lewis guests on a mystical love song called “I Would Be A Bluebird,” written by Nathan Bell. “Looking to You,” another Raines original, shines with similar romantic intensity.

Another standout is Raines’s eerie gospel composition, “Are You Ready to Say Goodbye,” which features producer Alison Brown on double banjos. In the lyrics, Raines cautions that:

Life is short, it ends fast
Like a ten story fall
Hear the chorus of souls passed
At the end of it all

Credit is also due to Raines’s fine band (joined on various cuts by Darol Anger, Michael Cleveland, Ben Surratt, producer Alison Brown and other notables).  Propelled by Raines’s dynamic thumping and slapping bass figures (she’s won the IBMA’s Bass Player of the Year award a mere 10 times!), Allegheny — featuring Ben Garnett, Ellie Hakanson, Eli Gilbert and Tristan Scroggins —  really pulls out the stops on their reprise of the Bill Monroe instrumental “Panhandle Country,” where they are joined by Rob Ickes on resonator guitar. The band similarly shines on the dazzling “Fast Moving Train,” written by Shad Cobb.