The face of Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, Johnny Cash’s 1964 concept album, is lined with the stylistic wrinkles of its time, including Cinemascope production and unnecessary sentimental touches like the military-music stylings bookending “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.”
Fifty years later, though, the gaze from that face remains unflinching because of Cash’s ironwood voice. When he stands beside the Apaches and Seneca he calls brethren or inhabits one man’s more personal heartbreak in “White Girl,” he’s gravely and wholly convincing.
Look Again to the Wind is almost as convincing. Almost, that is, because the various participants cannot speak in the literally one voice Cash brought to Bitter Tears, and also because the passage of half a century tests the timelessness of any classic.
Peter La Farge’s aforementioned “Ira Hayes” is, on this tribute as on the original, a centerpiece meant to honor and mourn the man who helped raise the flag at Iwo Jima during World War II and who fell to alcoholism and depression a decade after the war’s end.
Kris Kristofferson retells the tale with authoritative empathy, his battered vocals adding no prettiness to the man’s hard luck. Joe Henry’s modern-Americana production is crisp, yet cautious.
Throughout the record, Henry thoughtfully fits sound to mood, whether that sound is the rollicking bluegrass for Steve Earle’s vengefully gleeful take on “Custer” or the folk-rock shuffle surrounding Kenneth Pattengale and Joey Ryan (aka The Milk Carton Kids) as they harmonize the hurt in their version of “White Girl.”
Nobody really alters either the songs or their own approaches—for example, of course Emmylou Harris is gorgeously somber on “Apache Tears”—but the predictability is welcome here. Look Again to the Wind is, like its predecessor, an attempt to remember what began to be lost after America was “found.”
