Kate McCannon

Colter Wall was twenty-two years old when he released his debut album, and “Kate McCannon” was the track that announced his arrival as something genuinely unusual in contemporary country music: a young man from Saskatchewan with a baritone that sounds like it was excavated from the nineteenth century, singing a murder ballad in the darkest Appalachian tradition with a conviction that doesn’t feel learned.

The voice is the first thing. Everything else in “Kate McCannon” could have been written by a competent songwriter with good taste and deep knowledge of traditional country music. The voice is irreproducible — that low, resonant, slightly rough instrument that sits in the same register as Townes Van Zandt and Johnny Cash but is immediately identifiable as Colter Wall, nobody else. It sounds like it has no business being in a twenty-two-year-old’s body.

The song is a murder ballad in the tradition that extends from Appalachian folk music through Carter Family recordings and into the southern gothic strand of country. A man kills his unfaithful lover — the moral complexity is not resolved, the narrator’s unreliability is part of the point. The guitar is spare. The arrangement is minimal. The performance is everything.

“Well I drew my pistol from its place / And I shot that girl in her pretty face / And I told her, ‘Darlin’, what have you done to me?’”

What makes this a deep cut rather than a conventional murder ballad is the pacing — the song takes its time, the build is emotional rather than dynamic, and by the final verse the listener has been inside the narrator’s terrible logic long enough to understand, if not forgive, what he’s done.

Colter Wall will make more albums. He’ll get better. This debut is where the voice announced itself, and that announcement still reverberates.