‘A Trip in the Country’ Proved Roger Miller Was More Than a Novelty
Editor's Note: Erin Osmon has been awarded one of two No Depression Criticism Fellowships to write in-depth album reviews on roots music's most important albums. Her first contribution to this Criticism Fellowships kicks off with a review of a classic roots record,
Black News 
Editor's Note: Erin Osmon has been awarded one of two No Depression Criticism Fellowships to write in-depth album reviews on roots music's most important albums. Her first contribution to this Criticism Fellowships kicks off with a review of a classic roots record, Roger Miller’s A Trip in the Country.
It would be easy to mistake Roger Miller’s A Trip in the Country for a greatest hits collection. More than half of its songs were Top 10 charting country singles for other artists. Many more are regarded as canonical, and are beloved by generations of country music’s performers, players, writers, and fans. The mistake is understandable, due to the album’s tender and perceptive assessments of love, longing, and the inescapable shortcomings of man. It’s forgivable, given the stirring and tightly knit arrangements over which Miller delivers his plainspoken poetry, such as these opening lines from “Half a Mind:”
I don’t love you like I used to do
But I’m afraid to tell you so
I’ve got half a mind to leave you
But only half the heart to go
Some of country music’s best players are listed in the album’s credits. Multi-instrumentalist Charlie McCoy, guitarists Ray Edenton and Harold Bradley, keyboardist Hargus “Pig” Robbins, drummer “Buddy” Harman, and bassist Bob Moore — all considered part of the Nashville A-Team, an epochal cast of first-call session musicians — play on A Trip in the Country. Other greats, including steel guitarist Buddy Emmons, fiddlers Tommy Jackson and Buddy Spicher, and guitarist Chip Young, also appear. It’s the kind of ensemble that recalls Nashville’s finest and most adventuresome days in the 1960s and ’70s, when country music was elevated beyond the assembly-line mentality of Music Row to an artform masterfully interpreted by the genre’s most skilled and artistic players.
A Trip in the Country comprises everything that makes a great country album. It features the singular emoting of steel glissandos, fiddle bursts that punctuate the arrangements in both earthbound and ethereal ways, and walking basslines that mirror a beating heart. It captures the barroom sorrow of honky-tonk and the distinctly rural, Great Depression-era grief of the genre’s founders, siphoned through Miller’s robust baritone voice and concise poetics.
