In 2005, Cindy Lovell, executive director of the Mark Twain Museum in Hannibal, MO, contacted Grammy award-winning producer/musician/singer/songwriter Carl Jackson. Lovell had an idea she thought might interest him. Her concept was to produce a unique audio tribute to commemorate Twain on the 100th anniversary of his death in 2010. In short order, Jackson and Lovell dived into the project. But the complexity of including all the performers in what would become a star-studded two CD set meant it couldn’t be released until September 2011. It was worth the wait.
To tell the story of Samuel Langhorne Clemens from cradle to grave, the core of this fusion of “Words and Music” are the voices of narrator Garrison Keillor, Clint Eastwood as Twain, and Jimmy Buffett as Huckleberry Finn. Interspersed throughout the spoken-word story of Twain’s life are songs about the author or his creations performed by Jackson, Vince Gill, Emmylou Harris, Doyle Lawson & Quicksilver, Rhonda Vincent, Bradley Walker, Sheryl Crow, The Church Sisters, Brad Paisley, Marty Raybon, Val Storey, Joe Diffie, and Ricky Skaggs. Any wonder it took so long to coordinate this project? With the exception of Crow’s acapella “Beautiful Dreamer,” all the songs are original reflections of the life and times of Samuel Clemens in country, bluegrass, or “Americana” musical settings. This should come as no surprise considering Jackson’s pedigree.
Perhaps inevitably, disc one is the more engaging of the two. That’s largely due to the fact it traces Twain’s childhood through his time on the river through his years out west and finally to his marriage and birth of his daughters. Keillor, Eastwood, and Buffett easily move back and forth from biography to autobiography to passages from Huckleberry Finn, demonstrating how Clemens’s childhood was used in his fiction. We get few other non-autobiographical sketches or stories, although Eastwood delivers a credible version of the “Genuine Mexican Plug” incident where a young Clemens learns it’s no easy feat to tame a wild horse. Near the end of disc one, Angela Lovell reads passages from Suzy Clemens’s biography of her father, and these are very happy memories indeed.
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