It’s an oddity, to be sure, one part archival and one part new. A few years ago, after drummer Don Heffington passed, bassist-producer Marvin Etzioni unearthed a stack of tapes from the early 1990s that featured himself and Heffington recording two-track demos alongside their former Lone Justice bandmate Maria McKee for her second solo set, You Gotta Sin to Get Saved. He shared his find with her, thinking that she might want to turn them into a solo project of some sort. Instead, she encouraged him to seek out guitarist Ryan Hedgecock and turn it into an old-new Lone Justice album. Along the way, additional treasures from other one-off sessions—and a fiery live track—were discovered and added to the prospective album.
Etzioni, as he explains in this thoroughly entertaining and insightful interview, oversaw the album’s creation. It required using those original recordings as a stub and then overlaying new parts—Hedgecock’s guitars and harmonies, primarily. Tammy Rogers (of the Dead Reckoning crew) contributed fiddle and strings, David Ralicke horns, Greg Leisz steel guitar, and Benmont Tench piano. The only non-overdubbed instrument: drums. If Heffington—who Etzioni calls “our Ringo” in that interview—was absent, they let it be.
The result is a way-cool collection. The opening cut, “You Possess Me,” is a showcase for McKee’s vocal prowess, similar in many respects to the soundscape sculpted on “Breathe,” while “Jenny Jenkins” harkens back to early Lone Justice with a call-and-response between Hedgecock and McKee. “Rattlesnake Mama” continues that old-school vibe; it’s more raw than the version found on the 1999 This World Is Not My Home collection. “Teenage Kicks” is, as I noted upon its release as a single in June, “two-and-a-half minutes of frenzied fun.” (Between then and now, of course, a lot of the questions I posed in that piece were answered.) “Wade in the Water,” on the other hand, is akin to eavesdropping on history; it’s a jubilee song that dates to the days of slavery.
“Nothing Can Stop My Loving You,” a classic country song written by George Jones and Roger Miller (and first sung by Jimmy Dean), is an uptempo delight from a 1984 concert that finds Jo-El Sonnier, who was on the same bill, joining in on accordion.
The rockabilly-flavored “Skull and Cross Bones” is another fun outing. The song dates to 1956, when Sparkle Moore (aka Barbara Morgan) released it as the flip side to her debut single, “Rock-a-Bop.” “Alabama Baby” is another old-time gem, first recorded by the Armstrong Twins in the late 1940s. It has the feel of a Folkways field recording, just about.
Everyone reading this likely knows the story behind “I Will Always Love You,” which Dolly Parton has said she wrote on the same day in 1973 as “Jolene.” It’s been covered many times through the years, most notably by Whitney Houston, with most of those renditions coming after Houston topped the charts with it for 14 weeks in late 1992 and early ’93. My favorite versions, however, have always been Parton’s original, which topped the country charts in 1974, and Linda Ronstadt’s 1975 cover on her Prisoners in Disguise album. This new-old cover embraces the same low-key approach as those early recordings; the addition of fiddle—courtesy of Rogers, I imagine—is a nice touch.
A cover of the MC5’s “Sister Anne” ends the album on an odd note. One of my favorite music-related memories is of McKee plugging in her electric guitar and ripping through a handful of stripped-down songs at Tower Records in South Philly circa 1993, including an incendiary “Sister Anne.” She kicked out the jams, ripped it to shreds, made it her own. This version lacks the frenetic energy that I remember, yet is a boogie-woogie good time until near the end, when a brass section takes over for a minute-plus.
Still, as a whole, the album is fiery and fun. Highly recommended.
The Old Grey Cat 
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