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Randy Travis comes full circle (almost)

Comments (0) By Jonny Whiteside Wednesday, May 27 1998

Right now, Travis always has somewhere else to go; he's already late for a TV talk-show taping, and the interview is terminated. Yet when he emerges from the bus moments later, he doesn't dive for the waiting limo, but stops to chat with, pose for and dispense autographs to the fans, who've waited hours for this chance.

You and You Alone is certainly not among Travis' best work, but every country performer's career is similarly peppered with successful concessions that count as artistic missteps - anything to keep the career rolling. If Garth Brooks, with his recent six-disc, 66-cut box set, wears Nashville's Number of the Beast, then Randy Travis is a hillbilly John the Baptist, raising a beautiful voice in the wilderness. Possibly the last, best hope for an increasingly moribund idiom (one now fragmented even further by the ham-fisted artistic recidivism of the New Depression bands and droning Americana singer-songwriter movements), Travis might well initiate another revolution. If only he'd apply more of that outspoken prescience to his music. At the very least he knows what's going wrong, and apparently does not intend to give up what becomes, with each passing year, more and more of a struggle.