By Mark Brown, News Popular Music Critic
Monday night's show at the Paramount Theatre was part concert, part aural comfort food.
The O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack was hot long before Sept. 11, which tells you there were plenty of people out there with a hunger for real music in an era when so many songs are just background noise.
The ensuing Down From the Mountain tour was an instant sell-out (even with $90 tickets), and with good reason.
Dedicated to folk legend Dave Van Ronk, whose death was revealed on Monday, the show gloriously basked in America's simplest and best music, reaching back through the 20th century for landmark pieces of folk, country and blues, all done with spare instrumentation and impeccable taste by some of the most talented musicians this country has ever produced.
Rather than the frothy songs written nowadays, the classic songs reeled out at the Paramount dealt with the simplest and most important matters -- life, love and death.
Be it Norman and Nancy Blake working through You Are My Sunshine, Emmylou Harris' delicate Love Hurts or Chris Thomas King playing the delta blues, the show never wavered from sincere, reverent treatment of songs that most of us haven't heard in years.
A small grove of microphones was set up at the front of the stage, creating a sound field the musicians had to negotiate to sound right.
While it's hard to pick the best out of a night of stellar performances, Patty Loveless delivered the most passionate moments in her cover of Darrell Scott's heartbreaking song of poverty and fate, You'll Never Leave Harlan Alive.