James Szalapski’s Heartworn Highways, shot in 1974/1975 but released in 1981, is a jaw-dropping moment of prescient timing—a raw document of a handful of musicians who wiped the slick o ff of country music and took it back to its early 20th-century folk and blues roots, filmed just before most of those musicians had recorded their first professional notes. This reissue of the soundtrack, part of a Record Store Day 2016 deluxe repackaging of the film, retains the rough purity of its music in unedited, full-take form.
With one or two live-show and studio exceptions, these are pass-the-guitar performances, songs played passionately at a kitchen table or in a living room by young artists openly hungry for music, any music, all music. To hear Townes Van Zandt sing “Pancho And Lefty” and “Waiting ’Round To Die” in his Houston trailer, Steve Earle flog out “Darlin’ Commit Me” like it’ll be his last performance or Guy Clark run through “L.A. Freeway” to test out an acoustic guitar he’s just repaired, is to be present at the birth of some of the most important songwriting legacies in American late-20th-century music.
—Eric Waggoner
