Search - Dick Curless :: Traveling Through

If you consider soulless, emotionless, insipid country music to be a disease, your antidote is right here. Dick Curless recorded his swan song on Christmas Day 1994 and passed away five months later, just before the record was released. Wrapped within a tasteful, pared-down setting and with an utter lack of pretension, his full and flexible baritone wrings an incredible amount of feeling from these honky-tonk weepers, cowboy ditties, gospel songs, and blues. In an age where country is as much about marketing schemes as it is about music, Curless doesn't seem to have cared whether anybody heard these songs (and nobody, it seems, has heard them), but Traveling Through remains one of the most genuine country albums of the '90s. --Marc Greilsamer