year's concept-controlled Milk Cow Blues. Named after and leading with a Kermit the Frog favorite, it tosses off many other gems this great lover of American song never got around to telling us about before, as it works its way to Mickey Newbury's funereal "The Thirty-third of August." But for all the charms of "I'm My Own Grandpa" and "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)," each delivered with a canny guilelessness that cuts through the silly and the pretentious with equal ease, the summation is one Willie wrote himself last year: "If we're backin' up, it's just to get a runnin' start/'Cause everything we do we do with all our hearts/And it don't really matter what they say/We wouldn't have it any other way."

ROBERT CHRISTGAU
(RS 874 - August 2, 2001)