AFTER Porter Wagoner & Dolly Parton, George Jones & Tammy Wynette, Johnny Cash & June Carter, Gram Parsons & Emmylou Harris, and latterly Mark Lanegan & Isobel Campbell, here comes another "country coupling", this time between American heartland rocker and Farm Aid founder John Mellencamp and June's daughter Carlene.
It is not an out-and-out ampersand partnership; instead Sad Clowns & Hillbillies is billed as John Mellencamp featuring Carlene Carter in a Nashville collaboration that forms only part of the Cougar's 23rd album of worn leather Americana melancholia, bittersweet folk balladry and blue-collar political disillusion. Indeed Mellencamp's fellow vocalist on the stand-out electric blues rocker Grandview is not Carlene but country queen Martina McBride.
Carlene is prominent, however, on Indigo Sunset and the Dixieland, rootsy Sugar Hill Mountain, originally written for their soundtrack project for Meg Ryan's Ithaca. Amid the bluegrass-tipped Mobile Blue and Battle Of Angels, the album's conversation piece will be Easy Target, a protest song inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement that seeks to mend "our country's broken heart".
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