NYT March 7, 1999 Chroniclers of Wayward Souls By ANN POWERS Country has long been packaged as the classical music of simple American folks. The transformation of hillbilly entertainment into an official repository of our national traditions has extended from the fancy naming of the Grand Ole Opry in 1927 to the appointment of William Ivey, the director of the Country Music Hall of Fame, to the chair of the National Endowment for the Arts in 1998. Not only Nashville's music industry, but also the "alternative" country made by rock- and folk-schooled rebels can be discouragingly orthodox, its vintage trappings turning cultural preservation into historical tourism. Yet country music is also grounded in dislocation -- in the stories of people facing upheaval in their home towns, their families, their daily life. This is a modern music, tied like the blues to the journeys of working people across America and the encroachment of the city on rural life. The poor wayfaring stranger is as much a honky-tonk cliche as Mama making cornbread, and as country's patina grows ever more nostalgic, even that character's vagrancy becomes strangely fixed. Exile has become another form of home in country, invoked with a warm glow. Country music finds its power in the tension between nostalgia and the need for change, a contradiction mined on two new albums by established iconoclasts. "The Mountain," by Steve Earle with the Del McCoury Band, investigates country's most classical form, bluegrass. "What I Deserve," by Kelly Willis, is more eclectic. Both Earle and Ms. Willis succeed where many of their contemporaries fail by keeping their focus on restlessness. "The Mountain" (E Squared, CD, CD 1063-2) is an art project in denim and work boots, a self-conscious effort by Earle to pay homage to the bluegrass pantheon if not enter it. "My primary motive in writing these songs was both selfish and ambitious -- immortality," he writes in the album's liner notes, and on some songs he has achieved an almost eerie timelessness. It's hard to believe that the murder ballad "Carrie Brown" or the funeral hymn "Pilgrim" hasn't been sung by anonymous town criers for a century, but it's also easy to forget that the plaintive form of "country jazz" that Earle is reproducing emerged a mere half century ago. Working with the virtuoso ensemble the Del McCoury Band, Earle matches venerable themes of heartbreak and war, workingman's struggles and outlaw romance to his casually expert compositions. His patented rocker's snarl meshes with Del McCoury's unearthly wail to form a link across the generations of country renegades. The album's musicianship is notable; its guest roster features many of bluegrass' finest players plus the alternative-country stars Emmylou Harris, Gillian Welch and Iris DeMent. But Earle's songs make "The Mountain" more than a fine generic exercise as they trace a path of displacement throughout American history. Earle has often chronicled the violence of modernization; his early forays into country-rock updated that theme with a Southernized Springsteen sound and a countercultural attitude. Like those early albums, "The Mountain" uses its musical focus to further a strong social agenda. Earle seeks a common voice grounded not in wistful memory but in thorny reality; his ramblers are the former high school football heroes, drug dealers, gas station attendants and homeless people of the New South. "The Mountain" finds counterparts for those characters in Civil War tales and corny love songs. The album begins with "Texas Eagle," an ode to trains made unsentimental by its acknowledgment of the American rail system's economic woes. It moves through Irish immigration and the Depression's Dust Bowl before settling in heaven's waiting room with "Pilgrim." There is nothing but motion on "The Mountain," nothing but anxious progress. Earle drives this point home with the album's title track, in which the miner who declared his undying pride of place in "Harlan Man" finds his beloved mountain ravaged and himself devastated by the march of industrial capitalism. In Earle's ruthless vision, those who stand fast against cruel change can only hope for obsolescence. By setting his anthology of wandering to the lonesome tones of bluegrass, Earle disturbs the complacent aura that can sometimes overwhelm country classicism. Kelly Willis challenges a different set of rules with "What I Deserve," her new album for the independent label Rykodisc (CD, RCD 10458). Ms. Willis made three albums for MCA Nashville in the early 1990s and had modest success, but she never fit into the industry machine. Living in Austin, Texas, she allied herself with the line of singer-songwriters that travels between country, folk, and rock. Free to explore fully the place where those poles meet, Ms. Willis has emerged with a rich representation of the unsettled life. It begins, like so many in pop, with a bad love affair. "Take Me Down," written with Gary Louris of the Jayhawks, is a sweet swoon of co-dependency; the title track, also written with Louris, chronicles a more complicated crisis. Set to a loping beat knocked off-kilter by Chuck Prophet's phase-shifted guitar, "What I Deserve" is the confused lament of an ambitious woman. Refusing to take solace in prayer, the beauty of nature or any other old-fashioned balm, Ms. Willis lambastes herself for never slowing down and the world for suggesting that she should. This particularly feminine, very current perspective on emotional ambivalence enriches "What I Deserve." Ms. Willis has a honey-lemon voice that can be as soothing as a lozenge, and it works that way on a lullabye like Paul Kelly's "Cradle of Love," but she mostly she uses it in the service of more wayward desires. She offers painful tales of lost love but then expresses the resolve to move on. Hovering between romantic fantasy and deflated realism, Ms. Willis taps a rare subtlety of feeling. "What I Deserve" often returns to the subject of contentment, something Ms. Willis doesn't pretend to grasp fully. "If I ran so far that my life can't follow me, would it keep the world from up and swallowing me?" she sings in "Fading Fast"; with such a phrase, she makes the saga of the wayfaring stranger internal and completely contemporary. Like Earle, Ms. Willis knows that the itinerant world is no paradise, but she's not willing to pretend that there's any other place like home, even for a simple country girl.