Listening to......Doug and Telisha Williams

This is the album getting the most air play around my house the past week or so. It was one of those haphazard radio discoveries. Driving home one day I heard these words coming at me, delivered in the rollicking bluesy/honky tonk fusion I love so much:

"I'm stuck between last call and alter call

Save my soul or have a ball

Put a stop to my sinnin' ways or

put it off another day.

Maybe I'm not livin' right

but sometimes I still see the light

on the crooked path I walk

between Sunday morning and Saturday night. "

Maybe it's just the fact that I spent much of my formative years in a pretty hardcore hellfire and brimstone backwoods church (and then underwent the inevitable rebellion that sort of thing generally entails), but I nearly ran off the road when I heard it. I'd say that's some pretty good songwriting. And the rest of the album is just as impressive. The title track, "Ghost of the Knoxville Girl," gives an old bluegrass murder ballad a new twist by telling the story from the victim's perspective. A few other favorites: "Learning to Drink Whiskey," "Loretta's Ballad" and "I Wonder."

Doug and Telisha Williams hail from Martinsville, Virginia and you can read more about them here. I love their sound: emotive, raw, alternately rowdy and reflective. But even more than that, I'm just floored by their songwriting. Honestly, I can't imagine how I haven't heard about them before now. The English major in me wants to talk about how this album calls to mind "southern gothic" writers like Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, but that might be overkill. Just take a listen.