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This is Charlie and Ira Louvin at their musical best, offering up a prime example of their quietly influential bluegrass-inflected country sound. The brothers' high harmonies and deft guitar and mandolin picking (Charlie and Ira, respectively) carry the tunes, which stay true to the melancholy mood suggested by the record's title. While the Louvins perform their own songs (namely the lovelorn narrative "A Tiny Broken Heart" and the somber "Alabama"), they mainly focus on traditional numbers (the shuffling "Let Her Go, God Bless Her" and the murder ballad "Knoxville Girl") and other classics (the homesick "Kentucky" and the haunting "In the Pines"). Although the Louvins' penchant for gospel themes isn't very apparent here, their passionate delivery and tales of lives gone wrong hint at the more blatantly religious material they would tackle on later releases such as THE FAMILY WHO PRAYS and SATAN IS REAL.