Half-consciously listening to the radio one day, I sat up and paid attention when this fantastic song came on. It rocked, all right, but it had a mellow country feel, too, and a great singer whose voice was both countryish and down home. It seemed like what a meeting of rock and country really ought to be, yet it didn't even have a steel guitar. I'd never heard the song before, nor the singer, and I was ready to call the station and find out who he was, when the announcer came back on and said the song was "Covered Wagon" by Danny O'Keefe, the first song on what has since become my favorite album of the past few months.

Like many of the new singer-songwriters. O'Keefe started by doing traditional folk and blues material, to the extent of backing up Rev. Gary Davis for a time. Unlike so many others, however, he's gone past his sources and made something new; his music, while partaking of all he's heard and played, is uniquely his own. From rock, folk, country, and pop he has created his version of sophisticated country pop. There are songs with a more obvious folk flavor or a more obvious pop style, but most of the album defies categorization.

Side I is by far the better and includes three standouts: it begins perfectly with "Covered Wagon;" followed by "A Country Song," which opens very quietly with just piano and guitar and then builds in volume and intensity for three and a half minutes, with other instruments and voices entering at various points. By the end the music alone, apart from the lyrics, has become powerful and moving; Danny's voice soars above everything and the girl chorus sends shivers down my spine. "Steel Guitar" deserved to be a classic. It concerns a girl named Carole, whose father teaches her to play music, to drink whiskey like water, and who tells her she can go far with "an easy laugh and a steel guitar." With the help of her steel guitar Carole finds the right man, but:

To make a long story short they had a couple of children

And Jack went to war and the enemy killed him

And Carole got his pension and a purple heart

And every night 'til two she just rips'em apart

With a steel guitar

She says ya don't need a man

With a steel guitar

Now she plays country music and she's paid up her dues

And ya oughta drop in, brother, if you got nothin' to lose

She can steel a guitar just like she steals a heart

And they come every night to get picked apart

By a steel guitar

By a real guitar.

The tone is affectionate, even happy, and you can't help but smile in spite of the song's sadness.

Side 2 is uneven: "Bottle Up and Go," the only song Danny did not write, does not fare especially well, and there are two songs which are merely pretentious: "Rev. Stone" and "Come Dance With Me." Of the others, "Canary" is particularly good.

Danny, who plays guitar, is backed by two groups of musicians, one of them from Muscle Shoals, where the album was largely recorded. In addition, there are superlative string and vocal arrangements by Arif Mardin and Jimmy Haskell. For once, the band and the strings fit together perfectly. There's no sense of superfluity; the settings are both appropriate and imaginative.

One beauty of this record is that it has none of the clumsy, raw, incompleteness of so many debut albums. It's as though Danny had waited until he was ready, until his songs were finished works, until the rough edges had been polished down. It's been worth the wait: Danny O'Keefe is a beautiful album. (RS 80)

MELISSA MILLS