So why after all this time ain't John Stewart a star?

Damifino. The guy is good, but here it is, his sixth solo album (he used to be with the Kingston Trio) and his third label (Capitol and Warners were the others), and still practically nobody is on to him. Maybe this fine album will finally do it for him, but I'm not taking any bets.

Stewart is a sort of cowboy country-folksinger, and before you growl, "Jesus, another one of those," please note that John has been at it longer than virtually all of the current competition, he can sing real nice and has a deep, tough, uh, masculine voice, does not sound in any way like a wimp from the green pastures of suburban Los Angeles, and writes songs that are so pure and so real that they'll stop you dead in your tracks. I'm afraid I'll never understand the kind of perversity that elevates the likes of John Denver and Kris Kristofferson to superstardom and reduces Stewart to writing "Ol' lonesome picker/Nobody cares what dues you paid/You played one too many beer halls/And there ain't nobody come."

Cannons in the Rain isn't quite California Bloodlines, which John recorded in 1969 and which remains one of the great unknown albums of our time, but it does quite nicely anyway, full of songs that keep growing on you the more you listen to them. Only a couple of bummer cuts: "Armstrong," a cliche-ridden, obvious protest song that Bobby Goldsboro might have written given a sudden attack of social conscience, and "Lady and the Outlaw," which John fucks up with an inane spoken introduction apparently intended as a parody of Kristoffersoh's infamous bullfrog vocal style, and which rapidly degenerates into a mindless joke that seems to have amused the Nashville cats in the band immeasurably but which grates on more (sniff) refined ears.

Small enough price to pay, however, for gems like "Chilly Winds," "Anna on a Memory," "Road Away" and "Wind Dies Down." "Chilly Winds" is a beautiful Stewart-John Phillips collaboration harking back to John's Kingston Trio days, but the song fits comfortably into his current repertoire. As an artist/composer Stewart has not so much altered his style as continued to refine it, to the point that he can take the stock motifs of country-folk—ridin' trains, ramblin' the highways, leavin' your true love behind—and place them in a context so fresh and unexpected that if you didn't know any better you'd think he'd invented them himself. He has also been aided by some excellent production and by Nashville's best efforts. Even the occasional violins appear to know their place and stay wisely subdued in the background. (A lesson learned from sad experience, one supposes—Stewart's first album sounds as if it were done by the guy who scored those old Nelson Eddy/Jeanette MacDonald Royal Canadian Mounted flicks.)

Stewart sounds much like a singing Sherwood Anderson, minus Anderson's bitter pessimism. He (together with John Prine, whose approach is quite different) is our most American songwriter, his vision shaped by his hearing of the beating of the heart of the country. Even his periodic cornball sentimentality is so quintessentially American that if nothing else it proves his sincerity and his involvement with his materials—and so can easily be forgiven. His characters, usually small-town types in a world without small-town certainties, are misfits by definition, but hardly Prine grotesques. They're all running to or away from somebody/someplace and they're all outside whatever is around them (lovers, home, the law, the world), but there is no mistaking their dignity or courage or decency. They may be wrong (of one, Stewart sings "All his Holy Roads/Were sidetracks just the same") but they are heroes just the same.

Give John Stewart a chance. He's one of the best we've got and it would be a damn shame to lose him. (RS 138)

JEROME CLARK