Americana singer/writer Knight’s debut, Chris Knight, was still two years away on the hot August day in 1996 when producer Frank Liddell (who’d later win acclaim with Lee Ann Womack and Miranda Lambert) set up a tape machine in Knight’s rural Kentucky trailer to capture him solo acoustic before Nashville tried to reshape him — if it could. Raw, scary and finally available to the general public, 11-track The Trailer Tapes contains only three songs on his four subsequent CDs.

A college grad from a coal-mining family, Knight (then age 36) was a mine reclamation inspector making forays to Nashville to pitch his songs, perhaps not fully aware that it’s his own twangy, no-nonsense baritone that best does his stubborn, ornery characters justice — not that there’s much justice in his plots.
Understanding the merits of suspense, he’ll leave listeners wondering if a story’s potential bloodshed ensues after the lyric ends. From a redneck bar with a shot-out jukebox, “Move On” seethes social-class conflict beneath competition for a babe. Destitute but still polite, a street robber calls his victim “Sir” in “If I Were You.” Knight’s sympathetic to his female characters pushed to desperate measures. “Rita’s Only Fault” (like A Pretty Good Guy’s “Blame Me”) has a devoted guy willing to take the rap for a woman he loves.

Comparisons to Steve Earle are inevitable, especially since they used to look a bit alike. Earle’s producer Ray Kennedy has remixed The Trailer Tapes — removing noise like the guitar hitting the mic stand — for a clean sound that feels like Knight’s in a room with you. Being alone in a room with a Knight CD seems safer than being alone with some of his gothic characters. --- Bruce Sylvester