Free Country

Free Country is an album by the American jazz guitarist and arranger Joel Harrison released in June 2003. It consists of jazz interpretations of country and folk songs. The album contains musical contributions from David Binney, Uri Caine and, as a guest vocalist, Norah Jones. Free Country has received praise from music critics for its success in fusing the jazz and country genres. Inspiration and recording Harrison recorded Free Country at the Peter Karl Recording Studio in Brooklyn, New York between January 2002 and January 2003. He describes the album as "a collection of old Country and Appalachian tunes arranged in unusual, even radical, ways". The selections included well-known country songs by Johnny Cash ("I Walk the Line", "Folsom Prison Blues"), Merle Haggard ("Sing Me Back Home"), George Jones ("Tender Years") and Pee Wee King (Tennessee Waltz). Among the folk pieces were Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" and the traditional "Lonesome Road Blues" and "Hell Broke Loose in Georgia". Harrison summed up the recordings as "my sonic view of the experiment known as America – not the billboard, but the underbelly". His main accompanists included jazz saxophonist David Binney and violinist Rob Thomas. Singer Norah Jones and jazz pianist Uri Caine were among the featured guests. In a 2014 interview for Guitar Player, Harrison said that part of the attraction of making Free Country, as with his 2005 album of George Harrison compositions, Harrison on Harrison, was that the material was not usually played by jazz artists, and so these projects allowed him the freedom to "[create] my own jazz repertoire". Release and reception