Joe Ely, Butch Hancock, Wayne Hancock, Robert Earl Keen, and Jo Carol Pierce provided and performed songs for the play Chippy, written by Jo Harvey Allen and Terry Allen on commission from the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, where the show premiered in 1994. On this recording of the score, the singer/songwriters, backed by a Texas band featuring Lloyd Maines (Dobro, steel guitar, acoustic guitar, electric guitar, lap steel guitar), Richard Bowden (fiddle, mandolin), Glenn Fukunaga (bass), and Davis McLarty (drums), compete with each other to sound more like the successor to Hank Williams, cutting newly written traditional-sounding country tunes. Occasionally, Ely, Pierce, Jo Harvey Allen, and Barry Tubb recite bits of dialogue from the play, which seems to concern matters of prostitution, oil wells, and religion in Texas, although no clear sense of the plot comes out in the recording. Ely's \"Cold Black Hammer\" (for which he is credited with \"Explosions, Pump Jack, Piano, Hisses, and Horns\") veers into Tom Waits territory, while Keen and Butch Hancock's \"Morning Goodness\" comes off like \"Afternoon Delight,\" just earlier in the day. The album is a minor entry in the discographies of the principal performers, but fans should look out for it. ~ William Ruhlmann
0:00 \"Goodnight Dear Diary\" (Joe Ely)
2:40 \"Across the Great Divide\" (Jo Carol Pierce)
4:44 \"Chippy Narration\"
5:50 \"Buildin' More Fires\" (J. Ely)
9:15 \"Wind's Gonna Blow You Away\" (Butch Hancock)
