Songs are covered for many reasons. Perhaps the most honest and heartfelt of which is to honor a beloved artist, someone who we have lost, and so, with no more of their music to further bless and enrich our lives, we can at least take comfort in and give thanks by playing those great songs that they left us. W. C. Beck not only does this, but he does it twice, in the form of a brace of recordings, choosing songs that perfectly fit into his own heartland folk/Americana sound, by artists who were close to his heart.
“Every Drop of Water” honors Jerry Jeff Walker and if in him we had an artist who sang it like he had lived it, Beck slows things down and steps slightly away from the more obvious country style of the original, and in doing so seems to compress the worldly wisdom of the lyrics into something beguiling. By the time he rounds the chorus off with the line “every drop of water shapes a stone,” it sounds like nothing less than a missive from Confucius himself!
The second tribute comes in the form of John Prine’s “Blue Umbrella,” and again, it is Beck’s ability to get to the heart of the song through pace and poise that makes the song both faithful to the original yet able to reveal something new.
I always say, or at least used to say before today, if you cover a song, you should bring something new to it. Well, W. C. Beck has proven me wrong, and rightly so. It is not anything new being added that makes these songs so powerful, so poignant, so brilliant; it is his ability to enhance the depth, delicacy, heart, and humanity that were always there.
