Six Signposts on a New Country Mile

By JAY COCKS

Randy Travis has come a long way by respecting country music's traditions. Other acts out there, though, are raising a ruckus by tangling up those roots with all sorts of other music. Six signposts for this new country mile: Rodney Crowell, Steve Earle, the O'Kanes, Nanci Griffith, K.T. Oslin and Lyle Lovett.

Rodney Crowell and Steve Earle, both Texas-bred, are the new country's hell raisers. Crowell's CBS album, Diamonds and Dirt, is a benchmark for country, a seamless blend of strong beat, gritty humor and surprising tenderness. Crowell, 37, who is married to another gifted performer, Johnny Cash's daughter Rosanne, is a Renaissance man in a bolo tie. He is an adept guitar player, a deft producer and a wondrous songwriter whose major problem is letting his head get in the way of his heart. "If I can keep my brain out of my music, everything will be great," he says. "But whenever anybody asks, I say 'I play country music, and I play a little rock 'n' roll.' When I'm finally pinned down, I have to say I'm country."

It is no struggle to pin down Steve Earle, however. "Stylistically, I'm a country singer, and I will always be a country singer because I talk like this," he says in a striking Panhandle rasp. "What I'm doing is country and rock, and I don't think they are mutually exclusive terms." It is no easy matter to convince everyone, though. Guitar Town, his seminal 1986 MCA album, was full of great tunes -- Springsteen on a two-lane blacktop -- and should have settled all conflicts of style. But, he reports, "I'm at war with the record company on the West Coast about using steel guitar and mandolin, and I'm at war with Nashville over drums being too loud. But I think everyone is starting to become more comfortable with what I am."

At 33, four times married, Earle seems occasionally to be dedicating himself to Faron Young's country credo: "Live fast, love hard and die young." A fracas with a trouble-oriented Dallas cop last New Year's Eve will bring him to trial on an assault charge July 25, after finishing his new UNI album, Copperhead Road. He could be referring to both his legal exploits and his musical experiments when he predicts, "It's safe to say I'll never get on the Grand Ole Opry now." Copperhead Road mixes pertinent politics and a heavy beat and makes no apologies for either. Says Earle, neatly wrapping up and dismissing the deepest country conventions at once: "Anybody who is writing 150 positive love songs is lying about something."

Love is a subject much considered by Nanci Griffith, 34, who likes to call herself "just a little folkabilly songwriter," and K.T. Oslin, who surprised everyone -- herself most of all -- by winning a Grammy in March for her hit RCA single 80's Ladies. It was from her first album, and Oslin is 46. "It's dreamlike," says Oslin, a sometime actress. "I feel like I'm playing the role of a country singer. But I'd rather be starting now than ending now." Both women were brought up in Texas; however, where Oslin's writing and performing are foursquare, Griffith is delicate but deliberate. She started writing in grade school, she says, "mainly out of self-defense, 'cause I was so lousy at guitar." She admires the work of such fiction writers as Eudora Welty and Carson McCullers, and in tunes like Love Wore a Halo (on her strong- selling MCA album Little Love Affairs), Griffith can be heard trying to chase that same magnolia-and-nightshade muse to ground.

Her songs, delivered in a winsome, not entirely wholesome voice, have a strange after-echo that makes them kissing cousins to the work of Lyle Lovett, 30, who has sung occasional harmony with Griffith but has more in common with an unorthodox satirist like Randy Newman. "I've never been to jail, never been arrested, and I don't do drugs at all," says Lovett, with no apparent regret. "It wouldn't work for me. But I do what I want with my music, so I get away with murder there." Raised in a Lutheran family outside Houston, Lovett, whose gentle eyes are set into the lean, long-jawed face of a back- alley shiv artist, acts straight but makes intrepid music. Listen to the recent Pontiac (MCA), and you can really hear him cut loose in tunes like If I Had a Boat: "The mystery masked man was smart/ He got himself a Tonto/ 'Cause Tonto did the dirty work for free/ But Tonto he was smarter/ And one day said kemo sabe/ Kiss my ass I bought a boat/ I'm going out to sea."

The whirligigs of sound woven by Jamie O'Hara, 37, and Kieran Kane, 38, go even deeper than the roots Travis usually cites. The O'Kanes, as the boys bill themselves, hail respectively from Toledo and Queens, N.Y., but they sing harmony like the Everly Brothers and play extended riffs on guitar and mandolin that kick tunes like One True Love out of the country and into the cosmos. Their two CBS albums (the recent Tired of the Runnin' has made it to No. 21 on the country charts and spawned a Top 5 single besides) are flawless but far from slick. At their frequent best, the O'Kanes can plunge back farther than Nashville, all the way to the spooky, spiritual mountain music of the Carter Family and the Tenneva Ramblers. "I don't recognize it," admitted a brand-new O'Kanes fan at a recent Rochester concert. "But I like it."

"People our generation and younger have grown up with a rock music attitude surrounding us," O'Hara says. "That means we share a rebelliousness and a willingness to take some chances." Those chances, even when they are as respectful as Travis' or as roughhouse as Steve Earle's, are already paying handsome dividends. There's new times in country at last. And good times too.

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Nashville and Jeannie Park/New York