Country cracker Christmas

>> Stave off Satan with the Louvin Brothers

by AL SOUTH

-- Annie Dufresne eyes the linguistic divide -- Genetically programmed for your listening pleasure -- Depressing sounds for the holidays -- Electronic sounds for the hard-to-please -- The sound of Christmas evil -- This year's bumper crop of comp CDs made easy -- DJ sets in your Discman this season -- Stuffing the R&B renaissance in your stocking -- Country cracker Christmas -- This holiday season, rock the Chanukah bush in style -- Some seasonal jazz hints -- Yuletide mood swings

I can't think of a better way to celebrate the schizoid spirit of Christmas than to listen to the music of the Louvin Brothers. Born and bred in the poorest, nastiest and most insanely Baptist part of Alabama, Ira and Charlie Louvin sang some of the sweetest country harmonies known to man or Jesus.

For the first half of their career, their record company permitted them to release only gospel tunes, not wanting them to appear hypocritical before their Bible Belt fans. But though the brothers complied, the devil had their ear. Especially Ira's.

Legendary for being just about the meanest, foulest, hardest-drinking cracker in the history of country music (which is really saying something), Ira Louvin finally met his match in his third wife Faye, who hit him over the head with an iron skillet and then shot him five times (Ira, for his part, had been strangling her with a telephone cord).

Though the bullets were too deep in his body to be removed, they didn't kill him. Instead, Ira died four years later, in 1965, in a head-on collision with a drunk driver (Ira, ironically, was sober at the time, although he was wanted by the Nashville police for a previous DWI).

Radio Favorites 51-57, put out last month by the Country Music Foundation, features 14 previously unreleased Louvin Brothers' tunes, seven of them gospel (i.e. "God Bless Her Cause She Is My Mother" "Love Thy Neighbour as Thyself") and seven of them secular ("Childish Love," "You're Running Wild"). It's a good companion CD to The Louvin Brothers, the definitive collection on Capitol.

In the same holiday package, you could also give (or receive) In the Country of Country (Vintage/Random House), an excellent book by Nicholas Dawidoff that recounts the lives and hard times of the Louvin Brothers and other country greats like Bill Monroe, Kitty Wells, George Jones, Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash.

Speaking of the man in black, there's a story in the book about Charlie Louvin meeting a shirtless, dirt-poor boy outside a Louvin Brothers concert in 1950. Charlie was munching on crackers, and the boy asked why. "To keep from starving to death," said Charlie, who let the hapless kid into the concert for free. The kid, of course, grew up to be Johnny Cash, who for years paid tribute by eating crackers before every show.