Hardscrabble.

Wayne Scott watched his son ascend to a place as a successful Nashville musician and smiled when Scott did well enough to buy him a Gibson Hummingbird guitar to replace the one the boy, his brother and his friend drowned in a swamp when Darrell was 5 and wanted to see whether guitars would float. (They do, sort of, but they emerge considerably worse for wear.)

He smiled some more when Darrell founded his own label and signed his dad as the debut artist: Wayne Scott’s first album, This Weary Way, came out in 2005 on Full Light Records. It was full of old-school country music — the kind Wayne loved the most — and a writer from the Chicago Sun-Times called it “the soundtrack to the hardscrabble life of a real country man.”

And no one argued.

The son’s own albums have been stylistically divergent, always grounded in American roots music forms but never devoted singly to Wayne Scott’s kind of country. But a few years ago, Darrell gathered some of country music’s greatest session players, including Country Music Hall of Famer Charlie McCoy and masters such as Pig Robbins, Dennis Crouch, Kenny Malone and Lloyd Green, and they recorded 16 of his most country-inflected songs. Wayne came to the studio and sang some lead vocals on a song called “The Country Boy,” one he wrote 36 years ago with his teenaged boy.

“You’ll never know the loneliness and sorrow he goes through / The country boy has been there, that’s what makes him sing the blues,” he sings, evoking pains, conflicts and hard-won knowledge. The stuff Wayne lived. The stuff Darrell grew up on.

Read the rest at The Tennessean.

Darrell Scott's The Long Ride Home, is released today.

Here's my favorite poem of his ...