Flatlanders

More a Legend Than a Band, recorded in Nashville in 1971, was a masterpiece of the "high and lonesome" Texas country style created by an outlaw C&W supergroup -- Joe Ely, Jimmie Dale Gilmore, and Butch Hancock -- a musical family of great depth and resolute individuality. The album's acoustic approach (guitars, Dobro, mandolin, fiddle, and string bass) and the loping rhythms of this short-lived septet, which was based in Lubbock, TX, mix lead singer Gilmore's expressive voice and Steve Wesson's quavering musical saw for a plaintive sound that is beautifully evocative of prairie vistas. The songs, chiefly written by Gilmore and Hancock, revolve around the escape from and return to the unrelenting uniformity of the West Texas landscape and small-town life. Gilmore's writing has a spiritual quality (evidenced in "Tonight I'm Gonna Go Downtown," an enthralling glimpse of existential rootlessness) wholly reinforced by his eye for telling, unpretentious images ("Have you ever seen Dallas from a DC-9 at night?/Well, Dallas is a jewel, oh yeah, Dallas is a beautiful sight").

In the years after More a Legend Than a Band was recorded, Ely, Gilmore, and Hancock developed into independent-minded artists and arresting performers: Ely as a dyed-in-the-wool roots rocker and versa-tile singer; Gilmore as a honky-tonk troubadour in the best Lone Star tradition; and Hancock as a Dylanesque folkie and movingly poetic songwriter. They reconvened exactly 30 years after cutting their masterpiece to record the solid, workmanlike Now Again; although it holds together just fine, it doesn't resonate. Fans, however, were delighted to have more Flatlanders music at long last, even if tempered by its, well, ordinariness. Wheels of Fortune, the individually written second effort by the reunited principals, was just a little bit more ordinary. Sometimes what becomes a legend most is to remain a legend. (DAVID WYCOFF/BUD SCOPPA)

From 2004's The New Rolling Stone Album Guide