And now, an ode to gingham…

[Video][Website]
[6.11]

Jonathan Bradley: “Kitty Wells dresses,” sings Laura Cantrell, were “modest and sweet.” So too is this rather plain stroll through country music nostalgia.
[4]

Alfred Soto: In which Cantrell recasts Dolly Parton’s “Coat of Many Colors” for the sake of another country icon. Very pretty, and Cantrell’s voice is crystalline, but it does little besides excite a No Depression fan.
[6]

Edward Okulicz: I thought I’d missed Laura Cantrell’s voice, and I suppose I have, but what I miss more is her A-game songwriting or equally wondrous gift for picking covers. Her singing is so warm and sweet but her best songs have never settled for mere nostalgia, they have always had intelligence and emotional depth that made her both a gifted interpreter and a devastating observer in her own right. This song is merely fond when it needs to be vividly reverent.
[5]

Ian Mathers: I’d only ever previously heard Cantrell on a Peel Session duet version of Ballboy’s ”I Lost You, But I Found Country Music,” which happens to be the best possible version of a modestly devastating song. “Kitty Wells Dresses” is a gorgeously wrought piece of complicated wistfulness, but two things are holding me back from adoring it like I do her turn on “I Lost You, But I Found Country Music”; on the one hand, we’ve got a song about heartache versus this song, which is about cultural codes that, in some cases, stand for various strains of heartbreak. And on the other, I’m too far away from those cultural codes to do much more than admire the craft of “Kitty Wells Dresses” (and, for that matter, of Kitty Wells’ dresses). If I’d grown up in certain parts of America, or even just on a diet of country music, I believe this would put a tear in my beer.
[8]

Martin Skidmore: “Every girl’s dream”? The dress sense of Kitty Wells? Surely not. Try image-googling her name. This is folky country, paying tribute in a bizarre way to a great singer. It’s sung without any detectable emotion, and no irony I can spot, and while it’s pretty enough, its subject matter mystifies me.
[5]

Jer Fairall: The sweet, plainspoken, slight off-keyness of her voice is the first thing that sells me on this, coming as it does from the exact opposite end of what it is that so alienates me about today’s pop country. The rest of the song turns out to be just as genuine in its humble, deeply felt sentiment, a tribute to virtues worth celebrating for the sheer wonder they once inspired in their audience, rather than simply “tradition” for the sake of it. Possibly the best artist tribute song since The Replacements’ “Alex Chilton,” and oddly enough for some of the same reasons.
[8]

Iain Mew: I have to admit to not knowing who Kitty Wells was before looking it up, but to me this sounds like a cloying and overworked confection and the chorus about how the dresses are “every girl’s dream” jars a lot. Hate the way she sings “Paree” too.
[3]

Chuck Eddy: Despite key adjectives like “old-fashioned” and “modest” that I read as much as rationalizations for Cantrell’s stodgy folkie musical aesthetic as fashion signifiers, I’d like this homage to frugal clothes-shopping habits more if it wasn’t for all the clunky historical name-dropping. (A common tactic in alt-country, probably even more than in Nashville country, that’s supposed to let the legends’ greatness rub off on the current performer in our minds even though they probably don’t deserve to be mentioned in the same sentence.) I’d also like it more if it sounded less modest and old-fashioned. And maybe even if Laura didn’t pronounce “Paris” funny. On the other hand, it’s still a pretty song about pretty dresses. And hey, I shop at thrift stores, garage sales, and flea markets myself. So especially in this economy, I relate to the cheapskate stuff.
[6]

Anthony Easton: My mother, when I grew up, did hysterically funny impressions of Kitty Wells until we asked for it a little too much, and she stopped doing it, because she was worried about being cruel to Ms Wells. Not because of any respect for Ms Wells, but because she spent most of her life being essentially kind to people. My mother is very smart, and very plain, and very kind. Essentially kind, in the best Christan way, and I learnt about all sort of things from her Kitty Wells impression. I learned not to be cruel for the sake of being cruel, and I learned that making fun of someone for their god-earned talent was excessive, and I learned to sing in church, loud and pure, because G-d didn’t really care about quality as much as enthusiasm. I was thinking all of this a few weeks ago, when my friend Sholem talked about me having this urbane gay wit, and this old weird America side — and my momma, in all of her earnestness, had a wicked wit and righteous anger. She moved on to sarcastically decimating those who deserved it. All of this sounds cloying, but one of the reasons why I love country music, deeply, is that it allows for earnestness and sentimentality to be legitimate. I learned to love country music when my mom sang it to me as a kid, when I heard my dad’s copy of Folsom Prison Blues, and when the radio played on the way to school, to scouts, on trips to southern Alberta for Easter or Christmas. I still listen to Country radio when I travel more than a few hours. Nostalgia may be toxic, but like any opiate, it makes me feel better in the midst of pain. I am sitting here, in the middle of the biggest city of Canada, on the morning of Easter Sunday, and I yearn to go back home for a couple of weeks. I am tired and frustrated, and worn out and all I wanna do is go home and visit my mother and watch TV and play cards, and eat ham and scalloped potatoes for dinner. The song is pretty much the embodiment of Cole Porter’s sharp line about the power of a cheap tune, except my Mother and Ms Wells and Ms Cash were never cheap, and I would never be as thrifty, or virtuous or holy as they are.
[10]