"Yessirree" sounds like a relief at first, a description of the kind of neighborhood bar where everyone feels welcome to drown their sorrows. Then you hit the line "Each morning at eight it opens its gates for all of my buddies and me," and you realize Moorer is describing a more desolate reality, one without regular working hours -- regular hours for anything, really, except drinking.

But it was the last song on "Miss Fortune" that really did me in: All I could think of was what the great producer Jerry Wexler reportedly said when he first heard Big Star's gorgeous and stone-dark masterpiece "Big Star 3rd." "Baby," Wexler told Jim Dickinson, the studio musician extraordinaire who had sent him the demo, "that tape you sent me makes me very uncomfortable."

Loping and funereal (though in the New Orleans sense), "Dying Breed" is a thumbnail sketch of a human being in love with a death's head image of herself. "I take a red and blue one from my mama's purse/ I wash 'em down with homemade wine to see what kicks in first." Moorer sings the line -- the whole song, in fact -- with more than a dash of black humor, which makes it even more rattling. "I take after my family, my fate's the blood in me/ No one grows old in this household, we are a dying breed."

The lines ring with the romance of family pride that stretches back for generations. They're an assertion of the self-love that binds both the healthiest and the most twisted families together. Blood is thicker than water, but not nearly so binding as bourbon.

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So how is "Miss Fortune" or "Easy" or even a record as instantly huge as "Home" going to save country music?

And why is it women's job to save country at all? It's not as if male country artists don't have either the talent or the means: Alan Jackson and George Strait raised a ruckus a few years back with their anti-country-radio anthem "Murder on Music Row." Although not much has changed in the interim, you can't say they didn't open at least some country fans' eyes a little wider.

But women have several advantages over men, and let's get the shallowest one out of the way first: Good looks never hurt. Willis has porcelain skin and a shy, earnest smile; Moorer has a voluptuous pout and a direct, challenging, enticing gaze. And the Dixie Chicks? Face it -- they're total babes in their asymmetrical miniskirts and high-heeled boots. (As Dolly Parton would be the first to tell you, country music always needs a high glamour quotient.)

Beyond that, we all know that women can get away with certain acts of mischief that men can't -- they have the stealth factor in their favor. Neither "Miss Fortune" nor "Easy" will sell anywhere near as briskly as "Home." But both records offer something that's in short supply on any chart these days, country, pop or otherwise: a sense of surprise.

Willis' records are consistently terrific, but every time I hear her I'm reminded anew how perfectly she walks that stretch of muscle between toughness and tenderness -- and I think, This is what I want out of country music. Moorer's record threw me off my bearings, plain and simple: I can't think of an album in recent memory that I liked so much and that I was less eager to listen to again. That's not a faint compliment, but rather one that butts honestly against the ultimate failure of all music criticism: In thinking about "Miss Fortune," I repeatedly rustled my bag of adjectives until I couldn't hear anything but dry bones.

And the Dixie Chicks? Their great strength lies in precisely how commercial they are: Their commercialism is inseparably entwined with integrity, know-how, talent, sex appeal and gutsiness. Country fans often claim to like their music unvarnished. But some of the greatest country sides ever cut have been, if you'll pardon the expression, slicker than a cat's ass. (George Jones' classic heartbreaker "He Stopped Loving Her Today," anyone?) In country music, a certain amount of polish is OK; slipperiness is not. The Dixie Chicks need never apologize for their polish.

And then, of course, if Britney Spears taught us anything, it was that stars are made just as often as they're born. Britney's success has record companies scrambling to find the next Britney, and that's a bad thing. But if the Dixie Chicks' success has record companies scrambling to find the next trio of young women who can sing beautifully, who have a finely tuned relationship with their material, and who know how to play their instruments -- well, what's so bad about that? Greater crimes have been committed in the name of record sales.

The future of country music, just like its past, is both on the radio and off, somewhere between the green glow of the dial and the white halo of the moon. One represents commerce, the other purity -- but the most beautiful music you've ever heard can exist anywhere in between.

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