The music and lyrics of John Stewart are a part and parcel of rural Americana, but it's not the Merle Haggard or Buck Owens viewpoint but the Sherwood Anderson/Woody Guthrie type of fondness that Stewart evokes so expertly. His songs are about shattered dreams and the ever-roaming, rambling ethos so basic to all country and western music. But his music really isn't C&W—only in the sense that the images and towns revolving in his tunes are distinctly American might one pin that label on him. What Stewart has to say just seems to work best within the framework of an acoustic backdrop with occasional autoharps, fiddles and banjos added at times.

Stewart was born and raised in California, the son of a harness racing man and was a frequenter of the turf circuit from Golden Gate to Del Mar. He learned guitar in his teens and in his early 20s he joined the Kingston Trio, replacing Dave Guard, and contributed many of their most interesting efforts in his eight years with them, moving from campus to campus, town to town, Colgate grin to album cover smile. In 1968 he left to move in his own direction, formed a duo with Buffy Ford and joined the presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy.

Offset against common country and western tunes like "You Can't Look Back" and "She Believes In Me," the first LP here contains extended portraits in song of his youth and travels: "California Bloodline" is a curiously convincing love paean that spans the country in its imagery, while "The Pirates of Stone County Road" recreates boyhood games and the haunting voice that warns "you'd better be getting up to bed now."

"Mother Country" is a short-story-in-song about an old newspaper clipping and old man Stuart, who was going blind and had to drive his horse "Sweetheart On Parade" one more time. Throughout, Stewart's Ian Tyson-like, truck-driver-mellow voice evokes and conjures a pastiche of musty-attic images and backporch Midwest wideness that is unique in its scope: lines like "I still can remember Pa coming home drunk with the boys from the Union Hall Station" and "I have not been known as the Saint of San Joaquin and I'd just as soon right now pull over to the side of the road and show you what I mean."

Stewart's most recent LP, Willard, continues the vision and offers a whole new combination of people and places. Stewart moves from Big Joe, who "drives semi-rigs through the roads in Ohio" to Willard Jefferson, who is "a loner, livin' by the railway with his soldiers of glass" and an epiphany about his father who "lost a boy at Belleau Wood and never really understood what the medals from the President were for." Other highlights include the rave-up "Friend of Jesus" and the tempestuous "Golden Rollin' Belly." Stewart has totally avoided any traditional country and western type efforts—his lyric development in evident as he sings about the All American girls in their parochial school uniforms, his boyhood in Pomona and Placerville.

Not since the halcyon days of Fred Neil have I heard such a combination of lyricism and melody that transfuses the state of this country and codifies the hurts and belly-laughs that are wrapped up in life and love. To be sure, this time around Stewart has the aid of some talented folks—Doug Kershaw, James Taylor, Charlie McCoy, and Norbert Putnam all appear, along with producer Peter Asher. But all along you have the feeling that Stewart could have done it all by himself. He has moved through plenty of changes in his 30 years, mostly unnoticed because of his period of sterility with the Trio, but these two albums of bittersweet correspondences are a noteworthy legacy to his well-traveled and spatially spectral imagination. (RS 66)

GARY VON TERSCH