Artist:     Shealee

Album:     Head to the Stone

Label:     Self-released

Release Date:     5.19.19

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Gather around everybody. Shealee has the floor on Head to the Stone, a solo album of elegant and richly rendered Americana from the co-founder of acclaimed bluegrass and roots music wanderers Henry River Honey, who emerges here as a natural-born storyteller. She is deserving of a captive audience.

With a determined and fetching voice, the confident Shealee summons the soft luminescence, hardscrabble clarity and classy strength of Emmylou Harris and Dolly Parton to embed herself with well-developed characters, like the troubled Lillian of the earnest, wheeling ballad “Red Dirt Girl” – a softly strummed and tenderly plucked tale of emptiness, heartbreaking loss and addiction. Into the rowdy, countrified jump blues and buoyant organ of a sweltering “Too Hot (To Get Married)” she dives with a bride who has cold feet and a wicked sense of gallows humor. And in the twangy, upbeat “Saigon,” Shealee journeys through Vietnam with an expatriate’s sense of adventure and discovery, accompanied by seductive murmurs and tendrils of pedal steel.

Simple country and folk melodies, gracefully articulated with acoustic and electric guitar, sawing fiddle, subtle piano and warm vocal harmonies, guide Head to the Stone through beautifully constructed scenes, as Shealee’s fluid lyrics go with the flow in dealing with messy realities. Descriptive, incisive and full of compassion, her songwriting borrows from the closets of Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt and tries on their old clothes. Finding them a good fit, Shealee patiently awaits their muse in the yearning opener “Susanna,” but adds more color and a mix of vintage and modern styles throughout, as the swiftly moving title track is slathered in steely dobro, this dark dirge contemplating death and the grave. Shealee is carrying the shovel. Near the end of Head to the Stone, “Constant Lover” swings gently in the moonlight in a reflective mood, wracked by memories of someone who was “ … my weakness until my dying day.” Shealee could have the same effect on her followers.

—Peter Lindblad