Twenty Greatest Albums of the CU Era: Allison Moorer, Blood

Allison Moorer

Blood

2019

Released as a companion piece to a full memoir, Allison Moorer’s Blood demonstrates her mastery as a storyteller across multiple media. As great as her memoir is– it’s an essential read for any country music fan– it’s the album that takes a headier approach to unpacking generational trauma and where Moorer’s gifts shine brightest.

The notion that art is somehow more valuable when it’s strictly autobiographical is one of the most thought-terminating beliefs that’s taken root in the twenty years I’ve been writing about music. Moorer understands that, as Blood takes the well-documented horrors that she and her older sister, Shelby Lynne, experienced in their childhood, and uses it as inspiration for a song cycle of rare insight, rather than resorting to the types of “true crime” narrative tropes that would reduce the listener to a trauma voyeur.

Moorer’s long been adept at shifting narrative voices, but she’s never used that skill to take multiple perspective on the same sets of events. Here, she shifts between first and third-person narrators, from the point of view of a child who’s trying to make sense of the world around her to an omniscient narrator who can speak empathetically to the interior life of the perpetrator of unspeakable crimes. Moorer’s thoughtful approach ensures that, while this story is fundamentally hers, she is not always the main protagonist. 

It gives Blood a structure that reflects how widely the impacts of trauma spread. Moreover, it allows grace and empathy to be extended to relationships complicated by both familial bonds and by violence. That Moorer accomplishes this on one of the most tuneful and beautifully performed records of her career makes Blood one for country’s canon.

Additional Listening:

More from Moorer

Moorer’s got at least three other canon-ready records in her catalog, and two of them fall within the scope of this feature:

  • The Duel, a ferocious and sharply observed treatise on both personal and global politics and how they intersect.
  • Down to Believing, on which she reunited with producer Kenny Greenberg, and dug into the messiness of grief, addressing both the dissolution of her marriage to Steve Earle and her response to her son’s ASD diagnosis.

And the Sister Act

Shelby Lynne’s put out some essential records in the last two decades, too.

  • Identity Crisis is the best encapsulation of her attempts to define her artistry after her breakthrough with I Am Shelby Lynne.
  • She’ll turn up in our year-end with her latest, Consequences of the Crown, which sounds like the true-in-spirit follow-up to I Am.

Country Universe: A 20th Anniversary Retrospective

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