Willingness displays an emotional depth and appreciation of history that you can't learn in books.  It comes from family, landscape, and time.  This album is East Tennessee in all its glory: the hills, the nuke power, the TVA dams, a foundation of faith, and defiant hope during tragedy.  Women drown in floods on this record.  People feel safe when they gaze upon death.  God is always there.  Love is always there.  Reactor towers clutter up a perfectly good hillside.  

Hill strips music back down to its roots.  This isn't blues.  It's not country.  It's folk music before folk music was hijacked by the hippies.  This is Charley Patton folk.  Dock Boggs folk.  Tampa Red folk.  Bascom Lunsford folk.  Creepy, lock-up-your-daughters because the bogeyman's-gonna-getcha folk.  For good measure, he throws in a Westerbergian rocker for the first tune, lest you forget by the end of the record that this album wasn't recorded 60 years ago.  This is the nuclear age.  We've got electric guitars and amplifiers.  Hill's not afraid to use them. 

If the new anti-folk crowd ain't your speed, if you're wondering what you're going to do when Tom Waits voice completely craps out on him, if you realize that Steve Earle jumped the shark a long time ago, if you wish Gillian Welch could find someone to open up for her on tour that doesn't suck, if you like Will Oldham but need something more tuneful, if you miss microphone hiss in a digital recording world- pick up Willingness.
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