When asked what real country music was, Harlan Howard replied “country music is nothing but three chords and the truth.” In this song, “Rest in You,” part of their most recent album, Poets and Saints, released in September 2016, All Sons and Daughters — the Tennessee-based Christian Folk duo Leslie Anne Jordan and David Alan Leonard — take Howard’s dictum seriously.
The instrumentation is simple: a deep piano marking medium octave chords and deep basses, followed by delicate string arrangements, a continuous bass accentuated by a simple cello line and soft guitar chords in the back. All Sons and Daughters might include more than just three chords, yet their music comes out with a definitely sincere, truthful sound that is able to put together violin pizzicati and classic Tennessee slides, still leaving room for silence and sweetly harmonized vocal interventions in just five minutes.
“Rest in You,” obviously inspired by St. Augustine’s Confessions (“You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you”), might have been written in an hour (according to what the artists said on their website), but its chorus will surely stay with you way longer than that.
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And today we celebrate...