When Willie Nelson dueted with Toots Hibbert on “Still Is Still Moving To Me”, a tune written by Nelson but performed on Toots & the Maytals’ 2004 album True Love, it wasn’t merely an occasion to wonder which singer brought better ganja to the session. The track offered proof that certain Nelson songs could work in a reggae stylee, and that Nelson’s idiosyncratic singing style could, too. Unfortunately, that magic doesn’t extend to Willie’s full-length reggae experiment, Countryman.
The project actually dates back to the mid-to-late 1990s, when Nelson recorded it with producer Don Was. The album was shelved by Nelson’s label at the time, Island Records. Some of Countryman is pleasant enough, and it’s more than a little interesting to hear steel guitar, dobro, Mickey Raphael’s harmonica and Nelson’s own acoustic guitar picking play against the gentle tug of island riddims. The material ranges from the Jimmy Cliff classics “The Harder They Come” and “Sitting In Limbo” to Johnny & June’s “I’m A Worried Man” (with a guest appearance by Hibbert), as well as dubbed-out versions of Nelson’s own “Darkness On The Face Of The Earth”, “One In A Row” and “I’ve Just Destroyed The World”, among others.
But the mood of the album is a little too irie. Some of the songs are grim in their subject matter and require a little more gravitas in the delivery. Instead, Nelson and the musicians (some of whom played in the late Peter Tosh’s band) give the album a breezy, cheesy groove better suited to a Red Stripe beer commercial. Rather than the great synthesis of reggae and country music it could have been, Countryman sounds like Willie had a little too much herb and got up to sing karaoke at the Kingston Four Seasons.
