Songs: Playboy, Which One Is To Blame, Close Up The Honky Tonks, Brand New Heartache, Congrat-ulations Anyway, It's Not Love (But It's Not Bad), He Doesn't Deserve You Anymore, There Goes My Love, My Baby's Gone, The Lost Highway, Time Goes So Slow, Just Tell Me Darlin', Bakersfield Bound

Personnel: Chris Hillman--lead vocals, mandolin; Herb Pedersen--harmony vocals, acoustic guitars; Larry Park--electric guitar; Jim Monahan--electric guitar; Jay Dee Maness--steel guitar; Gabe Witcher--fiddle; Lee Sklar--bass; Willie Ornelas--drums

Okay, bluegrass fans, listen up! This is not a bluegrass album but it does have mandolin, fiddle, and acoustic guitars --along with a few other non-bluegrass instruments-- and unfortunately Herb Pedersen does not play the banjo on it. But it does have Herb Pedersen singing, and Chris Hillman cut his mandolin teeth back in the 60s playing bluegrass in a band coincidentally called The Hillmen. It's not quite bluegrass, but these guys are card-carrying members of the Bluegrass Musicians Union, so that's close enough to country for me.

For the uninitiated, these two guys had a country band for many years called The Desert Rose Band, in which they scored numerous top ten hits and two Grammy nominations. But the rose wilted about two years ago, and Pedersen has gone back to his bluegrass roots playing banjo in the Laurel Canyon Ramblers. Hillman was a founding member of The Byrds and the influential country-rock band The Flying Burrito Brothers. Pedersen also played with Jackson Browne, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt along with the short-lived bluegrass band from the early 80's called Here Today, with David Grisman and Vince Gill. On Bakersfield Bound they've gone back and recaptured the authentic Bakersfield sound of the late 50s and early 60s, a sound made renowned by Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

There are 14 tunes on Bakersfield Bound, with everyone except the title cut, which was written by Hillman, being about heartbreak, the reason for which country music exists. All but the final two songs are old time classics, and in the tradition of that era, only two of the songs are longer than three minutes in length. Hillman and Pedersen's harmonies are tight as a glove, being very reminiscent of the Everly Brothers, The Burritos, and Desert Rose. Hillman does all the lead singing, and Pedersen adds the harmonies, with tears being jerked at a non-stop pace. If the lyrics and harmonies don't have you blubbering like a fool by record's end, the steel guitar playing by Desert Rose alumnus Jay Dee Maness will.

Included on Bakersfield Bound are gems such as He Doesn't Deserve You Anymore and There Goes My Love, written by Buck Owens; the Jim and Jesse classic Congratulations Anyway, about a guy who goes to his lost love's marriage to someone else; Hillman pays homage to the late Gram Parsons, his singing partner in the Burritos, in the songs Close Up The Honky Tonks and Brand New Heartache, songs that Parsons recorded. You'll be reaching for your hanky when you hear My Baby's Gone and perhaps its sequel, Time Goes So Slow. And you'll lose it completely by the time they do one of the saddest songs of all time about lost love, The Lost Highway.

Chris and Herb are anything but lost on that highway to Bakersfield. They don't sound like they are Bakersfield bound, they sound like they've lived there forever. And if you're a fan of either of these two talented singers/players/writers, or of that great authentic old-time country sound, then take a virtual reality trip out to the Central Valley without even leaving home by being Bakersfield Bound, too.