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I suppose it is not all that unusual to follow in one's father's footsteps, though that is not the choice I made and so I have a hard time relating to it. When Pam Tillis hit the scene in the late 1970s, I distinctly remember there being somewhat of a publicity focus on this element of her rise. The children of big stars can't ever catch a break, it seems to me, because they are always swimming upstream against a current of largely negative opinion about whether they might have actually caught too much of a break due to their parent's industry pull. Pam Tillis the country star sings nothing like her father, of course, since he is a man and she is a woman and their styles are both distinct and original. At least she is not a man, in other words, or there would have been no end to the comparisons. Nowadays, many young country fans may not even be aware of her pedigree, and so she is in a much better position to continue to wield her own sword, a sword evidently forged with the sort of pain necessary to the making of good country songs, if you believe everything written about her in her Wikipedia biography.

Beyond remembering when she emerged as a force in country music I had not really kept up with Tillis's career until I happened to catch her act at South By Southwest (SXSW) in 2005. I enjoy haunting the Day Stage at SXSW and happened upon a beautiful set early one day, when I was probably as wrung out and bleary-eyed as her band appeared to be. But Tillis herself was clear-eyed and all business as she and her band performed a brilliant set. I was struck by her achingly beautiful rendition of Heart Over Mind, one of her father's tunes. This was a throwaway song for her, or at least a giveaway, as I was able to download a free copy of it later from the SXSW site. But with this one song she announced herself to me as a distinctive country stylist, well-informed but unique, and breathtakingly talented.

Her new CD, Just in Time for Christmas--to my mind a thoroughly post-modern work of recording art--reinforces my opinion of Tillis as an accomplished and beautiful song stylist whose brilliance lies in her ability to interpret and, at times, reinvent the country genre. Her set opens with a rendition of the pop standard Have Yourself A Merry Lil Christmas recorded in an arrangement reminiscent of Patsy Cline. This is followed by a stirring country arrangement of Julie Lee's Beautiful Night, which turned out be my favorite song on the CD, though I cannot really justify that choice, except to say I hadn't heard it before, and that counts for 95% of my enjoyment on every one of the hundreds of Christmas CDs I hear each year. (I also enjoyed the ultra-religious, Nashvillified Light Of The World, for more or less the same reason.)

But although she seems to set off on this excursion on her far-right foot, walking after midnight directly towards Nashville, the journey takes a different direction on the fourth selection, the cool, jazzy Christmas Waltz, where she demonstrates an unexpected competency for singing scat. From there, she continues to get everything right: changing styles seemingly at will, performing a duet with her father, Mel Tillis, tossing off a wonderful homage to another country legend on Willie Nelson's Pretty Paper, (one of the most unusual and poignant Christmas pop tunes ever written,) and, finally, hiding the ubiquitous Silent Night inside a medley (though she doesn't completely swat this pesky mosquito of a song, she at least doesn't leave it buzzing around in my head too long.)

I hung around after her set that day at SXSW, and while I could never seem to catch her eye in that roomful of music industry heavyweights, I managed to hang out with a couple of members of her band long enough to get a couple of nice photos. And her music certainly caught my eye. Though her star may never shine as brightly as her father's in Nashville, her brilliance seems to me to be no less, both as a talented vocalist in her own right but particularly as an inventive interpreter of the country genre.

--Richard Banks
(Reviewed in 2007)

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From the liner notes:

Musicians:
Bob Patin: Piano, Strings and Arrangements
Eddie Bayers: Drums and Percussion
Kent Slucher: Percussion
Brent Mason: Electric and Gut String Guitars
Biff Watson: Acoustic Guitars
Stuart Duncan: Fiddle
Tommy White: Steel and Dobro
Craig Nelson: Upright Bass
Darin Favorite: Acoustic Guitars

Background Vocals: Jana King Evans, Lona Heins, Julie Lee, RP Harrell, RJ Jacobs, Susan Burr, Kevin Shorey, Katherine Westmoreland, Tanner Westmoreland, Sandra Dudley, Jeff Hall, Steve Gatlin, Rudy Gatlin, Pam Tillis

Vocal Arrangements: Jana King Evans, Jeff Hall, Pam Tillis

Pam Tillis

Just in Time for Christmas

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Track List