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- Record Label: New West
- Release Date: May 22, 2020
- Summary: The latest full-length release for the singer-songwriter and his band features songs used in the Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen play Coal Country, about the deadly West Virginia mine disaster in 2010 that killed 29 people.
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- Record Label: New West
- Genre(s): Country
- More Details and Credits »
Score distribution:
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Positive: 9 out of 10
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Mixed: 1 out of 10
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Negative: 0 out of 10
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May 22, 2020With Ghosts of West Virginia, he's created some of the most eloquent music he's written in two decades.
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May 20, 2020Ghosts of West Virginia astutely captures and empathically chronicles the lives of people that have suffered through an unspeakable tragedy in an attempt to make a living, day by day, year by year, generation by generation.
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May 20, 2020Instead of digging up coal like the miners grippingly depicted in these new songs, the Hardcore Troubadour and the Dukes unearth anthemic gems for America's marginalized.
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May 21, 2020It’s a taut and intense collection of songs that connect just as well without the visuals of the play they were predominantly written to accompany. GOWV displays once again that Steve Earle is one of America’s most captivating, unvarnished, provocative and talented singer/songwriters.
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Classic Rock MagazineJun 17, 2020Even if Earle occasionally falls back on roots music autopilot, the power of this work is undeniable. [Jul 2020, p.89]
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May 21, 2020Earle serves here as a trusted travel guide, offering a nuanced portrayal of a time and place (21st-century Appalachian mining) that likely feels a world away for the majority of his listeners.
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May 26, 2020There are more reflective moments, like Time Is Never on Our Side and If I Could See Your Face Again, where fiddler Eleanor Whitmore sings a widow’s part. Numbers such as Black Lung complete the evocation of thankless blue-collar toil, though Earle has done as much before on 1999’s The Mountain, when no one was voting for Trump.
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