Pieta Brown and Greg Brown

I Never Told and If I had Known: Essential Recordings, 1980-1996

Slender and 29, Brown is neither very big nor very old--though she is tall, especially with her dark brown hair pulled back in a tight bun and her tan denims tucked into her red cowgirl boots. But she already sounds old. Her nasal alto has the imperturbability and implacability of an ancient farm building standing in a cornfield soaking up the sun.

The song is "I Never Told," the title track from her second album, one of the most impressive singer/songwriter projects of the year. Because Brown strums an acoustic guitar, she is most often described as a folk singer, but on this slow-moving song there's more than a hint of country in her belief that wisdom can be found in the rural landscape of her native Iowa. She wishes she could be a "rusty windmill," the "sunset on the windshield," and that "summer dress hanging on the fence." And there's more than a hint of blues in her admission that wisdom comes with a price--accumulating rust, dwindling light, and fading cotton.

It's unnerving to hear such a weary, knowing voice coming out of such a handsome young woman. It's intoxicating to hear song after song that stirs together folk, country, and blues so thoroughly that you can't tell where one stops and the others begin. How does she do it?

A clue could be found three feet to her right at the Roots Café. Hiding his weathered face beneath the lowered brim of a gray cowboy hat was Bo Ramsey, whose electric slide-guitar fills and solos toughened and tautened Brown's songs. Anytime she threatened to get too literary or too meditative, a stinging blues lick would yank her back to earth. Ramsey has co-produced both of her albums--last year's Pieta Brown and this year's I Never Told--just as he had for the similar sounding Lucinda Williams and Kevin Gordon. Just as he had on eight different titles for Pieta's dad, the 54-year-old Greg Brown.

For Pieta is heir to a musical legacy. Since the early 1980s, Greg Brown has defined and refined a distinctive music that might be described as the Sound of Iowa. The son of a Pentecostal preacher and the grandson of farmers who played music after hours, he grew up in the state's small towns and returned to live there after forays into New York, Minneapolis, and Oregon.

He has always drawn his imagery from the local farms, fishing creeks, and two-lane blacktops, and he has always contrasted the pleasures of small-town communities and green woods with the challenges of paying the bills in such circumstances. The Mississippi River runs along the eastern border of Iowa, and Greg has always acted as if it connected him to all the country, blues, jazz, and folk musics of America's middle.

For a long time, it seemed as if Greg Brown were a one-of-a-kind artist, a songwriter with a voice so distinctive that no one could imitate him. But in recent years, it has become obvious that he inspired a whole Midwestern school. Not only has his daughter emerged as a major singer/songwriter, but his affinity with the Ozarks' Iris DeMent was formally acknowledged when they were married in Kansas City last November.

Several musicians who have appeared on Greg's albums have gone on to make respectable records themselves--including Pieta, Ramsey, Karen Savoca, Prudence Johnson, Dave Moore, and Kate McKenzie. When Red House Records last year released Going Driftless: An Artist's Tribute to Greg Brown, the admiring singers who volunteered included not only DeMent, Williams, Savoca, and Pieta but also Ani DiFranco, Gillian Welch, Mary Chapin Carpenter, and Lucy Kaplansky.

Just what the Greg Brown school of Midwestern music consists of can be found on the first major retrospective of his career, If I Had Known: Essential Recordings, 1980-1996. The first disc contains 17 of his most popular songs, the staples of his delightful live shows. The second disc is a DVD copy of Hacklebarney Tunes: The Music of Greg Brown, a 46-minute documentary directed by Jeffrey Ruoff and Andrea Truppin in 1993.

The movie opens with Greg Brown and Bo Ramsey sitting inside a small white box of a farmhouse in Hacklebarney, the section of southern Iowa near Eldin. Greg is wearing a white tank top, a straw cowboy hat, dark sunglasses, and a jaw-tracing beard, giving him an odd, Amish-bohemian look. The two old friends are banging out the chords to "Pretty Boy Floyd," written by another Midwestern country-folk-blues singer, Woody Guthrie.

Midway through the song, the film cuts to Garrison Keillor, who hired Greg as a weekly guest for his Prairie Home Companion public-radio show in 1983 and transformed him from a struggling local artist into a national figure. "Greg Brown has the voice and something of the style of a 70-year-old black blues singer," Keillor tells the camera. "But he's from Iowa, and his life is more like mine than Mississippi John Hurt's or Muddy Waters'." Indeed, Greg's music suggests what Son House might have sounded like if he had grown up in Lake Woebegon.

Hacklebarney Tunes explores the rolling green fields and brick-lined main streets near that farmhouse, which once belonged to Greg's parents and which is now his home. He sings a hymn that he used to hear in his father's holy-roller church; he sings a Civil War ballad that his grandmother sang to him as a child; he sings Hank Williams' "Lost Highway." Ramsey describes how he heard the blues and rock buried in Greg's folk songs and offered his services to bring those qualities to the surface. Jimmy Chapman, a childhood pal, recounts the times he and Greg went fishing in Plum Creek.

"People all said, 'There ain't no fish in there,'" Brown sings on the title track of the new anthology. "Well, grownups, they ain't always right/ Jimmy and me walked home slow that night/ right down Main Street in our P.F. Flyers/ with two five-pound bass, making grown men liars." It's a lovely evocation of a Midwest childhood, but Greg never settles for sentimentality, so he adds a chorus that adds a foreboding of loss to the pleasure and makes two boys' memory universal. "Jimmy, if I had known/ I might have stopped fishing right then/ It's just as well we don't know/ when things will never be that good again."

A similar tug-of-war between the rewards and losses of rural life lend a tension to most of Greg's songs. He can recall how his grandmother captured "the taste of summer" in a song called "Canned Goods," but in "Worrisome Years" he declares, "I thought it was supposed to get easier to pay your bills/ can you please tell me, 'When does the good part start?'" In a song about his grandma, "Ella Mae," he makes Hacklebarney sound like a paradise full of red-winged blackbirds, white-bubbling streams, and homemade bread. But in "Our Little Town," he admits, "I don't have to read the news or hear it on the radio/ I hear it in the faces of everyone I know/ The boards go up; the signs come down/ What's going to happen to our little town?"

Pieta Brown, who sang "Ella Mae" on last year's tribute album to her father, has absorbed all these lessons. Her new record reveals the sources of her six originals by adding the old folk ballad "Little Sparrow" (aka "Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies") and "Going Away Blues" by Memphis bluesman Frank Stokes. At the Roots Café, she added the old gospel hymn "Get Righteous and Go Home." Her own grandmother song, "Nobody's Rose," describes a tough-minded woman who's not going to give away her flower to any man who comes along.

The granddaughter has inherited that toughness; when she sings of the blood running through her and her lover on "Blood Song," her drawn-out and twisted vowels sound like both an intimate promise and a dangerous threat. On the pretty, lazy country song "Wish Me Luck" she confronts the central dilemma of small-town life--should I stay or should I go?--with her father's characteristic ambivalence: "There are so many places I know in this little town/ but there ain't one that feels like home/ Everybody's knocking down that big old world out there/ I'm just trying to pick up the pieces on my own."

Wherever she may roam, whatever she may do, Pieta Brown will always sound like Hacklebarney. She thus reassures us that the Sound of Iowa--perhaps the most underrated invention of the 1980s--will outlive her father.