Varese’s 25-track set collects Charlie Rich’s biggest hits from his decade on the Epic label, including all nine of his 1970s chart-toppers, and nearly all of his Top 40s. It also threads into the track list the mid-60s recordings for RCA that the label issued as singles in the 1970s in a successful effort to ride the coattails of Epic’s success. These sides represent Rich’s biggest hits, including the landmark “Behind Closed Doors†and the across-the-board smash “The Most Beautiful Girl in the World.†Missing is 1975’s “It’s All Over Now†(#23 Country), some lesser charting sides and singles released in the 1970s by Mercury, Elektra and United Artists.
The Laurel Canyon-styled music heard earlier this year on Matthew Szlachetka’s Waits for a Storm to Find gets a running mate with “City Girls,†the opening track of Jeff Crosby’s third full-length album. Though his voice is more rustic, the production – particularly the bass playing of his brother Andy – is highly reminiscent of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, and particularly the song “Dreams.†It’s not the only sound swimming around Crosby’s head, as the album’s split between Los Angeles and Nashville studios adds twang to the West Coast vibe, and the solo acoustic passages, such as the intro to “Red, White and Blue,†play as singer-songwriter country.
Few British Invasion acts rode the Beatles coattails better than Billy J. Kramer with the Dakotas. Not only were they managed by Brian Epstein and signed to the Parlophone label under the direction of George Martin, but more than half of their chart hits and several of their album tracks were penned by Lennon & McCartney themselves. And among the many L&M compositions, which included “I’ll Be on My Way,†“Bad to Me,†“I’ll Keep You Satisfied,†“From a Window,†“I Call Your Name†and “Do You Want to Know a Secret,†only the latter two were released by the Beatles. But even with this British dynamo in their corner, the group reached out to America for several hits, including the Brill Building’s Mort Schuman (and his eccentric co-writer J. Leslie “Pumpkin Juice†McFarland) for “Little Children.â€
The singles that led to Dr. John’s brief mainstream fame
As an artist primarily known for albums and live performance, it’s hard to imagine anyone but the most ardent Dr. John record collectors being able to name more than two or three of his singles. “Right Place Wrong Time†comes easily to the mind of anyone who was around for its original run up the chart to #9. But other than that, what? Well, it turns out that several of Dr. John’s iconic album tracks – “Iko Iko†from 1972’s Gumbo and “Such a Night†from 1973’s In the Right Place – were also released as singles, though neither had the chart success of “Right Place Wrong Time.†So that’s three. And yet, during Dr. John’s stay on Atco and Atlantic, he actually released a half-dozen more singles, all of which are collected here – A’s, B’s and alternate flips, along with several UK- and promo-only sides.
One has to wonder who Atlantic thought was going to play these singles; particularly since they didn’t often differ greatly from the album cuts prefered by FM. “Iko Iko†was trimmed by a minute, “I Walk on Gilded Splinters†was trimmed and split into two parts, and “Wang Dang Doodle†was excised from the Mar Y Sol concert album, but the rest seem closely aligned with the albums. Of interest to collectors will be a few rarities offered here, highlighted by “The Patriotic Flag Waver.†On this 1968 single, presented in the long mono promo cut, Dr. John manages to combine a children’s chorus, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,†“America the Beautiful,†social commentary and New Orleans funk. Even more rare is Dr. John’s guest appearance, alongside Eric Clapton, on the original 1972 single version of labelmate Buddy Guy’s “A Man of Many Words.
A stellar second chapter of the Buck Owens catalog
With the wealth of terrific material included on the first volume of Buck ‘Em!, a second volume had a high mark to reach. But by splitting the sets by era – 1955-67 for the first set, 1967-75 for this set – this second collection is no second helping. Volume one established Owens’ Bakersfield legacy, while this second chapter shows how he extended his reach, responded artistically to changing times, and used his commercial success to free himself of commercial restrictions. As on the first set, these two discs include hit singles, well-selected album cuts, and a sprinkling of tracks previously unreleased in the US. And also as with the first set, the liner notes are cannily drawn and craftily assembled from Owens’ like-titled autobiography, giving the artist an opportunity to expound on his own work.
By 1967 Buck Owens was one of country music’s biggest stars, having landed eight albums and twelve singles at the top of the charts in only four years. He kicked off 1967 by expanding his fame internationally with a concert in Japan and its subsequent chart-topping album. This set picks up later in the year with sessions that produced “Sweet Rosie Jones,†the like-named album, and the title track of what would become 1970’s You Mother’s Prayer. For the first time since Owens began his streak of hitmaking, the drummer’s throne was occupied by Jerry Wiggins, in place of the departed Willie Cantu. “Rosie,†“Let the World Keep On a Turnin’†(sung with Owens son, Buddy) and “Iâ€ve Got You on My Mind Again†all charted Top 10, but it took “Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass†to get Owens back to the top spot.
Throughout 1968, Owens expanded his reach, recording the Latin and polka-styled instrumental album The Guitar Player (represented here by “Things I Saw Happening at the Fountain on the Plaza When I Was Visiting Rome or Amoreâ€), adding Don Rich’s fuzztone guitar to “Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass,†and teaming up with Susan Raye for “We’re Gonna Get Together.†The latter, recorded in 1968 wasn’t released for two years, which hints at Owens’ incredible productivity. 1968 found Owens playing a command performance for President Johnson at the White House, represented here by “Tiger By the Tail,†and also marked the departure of steel player Tom Brumley, who was replaced early the next year by JayDee Maness. Maness would leave by year end, leaving Owens without a steel player in the band.
1969 started similarly to 1967, with an international tour that yielded the live album Buck Owens in London and the chart-topping single “Johnny B. Goode.†Live recording continued to be a regular feature of Owens’ catalog, with “Big in Vegas†(a rewrite of Terry Stafford’s “Big in Dallasâ€) and “Las Vegas Lament†recorded live in Las Vegas, and “Tall Dark Stranger†recorded in Scandinavia. 1969-70 saw many more changes for Owens, including a move from Capitol’s famed Los Angeles studio to his own place in Bakersfield, the arrival of keyboard player Jim Shaw (who’s terrific live piano playing can be heard on “I’ll Still Be Waiting for Youâ€), and perhaps most importantly, Hee Haw. The latter, initially a CBS network show, provided the sort of financial compensation that records rarely did, and it freed Owens to chase his musical muse without lashing it to commercial considerations.
1970-71 saw Owens in the Top 10 with “I Wouldn’t Live in New York City (If They Gave Me the Whole Dang Town),†a cover of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water,†and the title track from the bluegrass album Ruby, but it wasn’t until 1972 that he returned to the top of the charts with “Made in Japan.†Musically, Owens had moved well beyond his Bakersfield Sound, but his writing and voice, particularly the latter, provide a surprisingly straight line through his entire catalog. The twang of steel guitar rejoined the band in 1972 with the arrival of Jerry Brightman, but before he came on board, Ralph Mooney added his stellar playing to “Arms Full of Empty†and “Ain’t It Amazing, Gracie.â€
Owens’ records through the mid-70s never regained the chart performance of his earlier releases, but there were still plenty of excellent albums and singles, including Gene Price’s “Something’s Wrong†and Owens’ “In the Palm of Your Hand,†the latter highlighted by Don Rich’s fiddle. Even more important was an album track that would be remade into a huge hit fifteen-years later, Homer Joy’s “Streets of Bakersfield.†The original is more sedate than the chart-topping remake Owens recorded with Dwight Yoakam, but it provided the template for the hit. Owens returned to the Top 10 in 1973-74 with a string of upbeat novelty songs, “Big Game Hunter,†“On the Cover of the Music City News†and “Monster’s Holiday,†but his mirthful side was about to go into hibernation.
In July, 1974, Don Rich, was killed in a motorcycle accident, and Owens fell into a deep depression. He’d continue to record and release records, but the latter-half of the ‘70s found his singles failing to make much of an impact on the charts. His last Top 10 single for Capitol, “Great Expectations,†was also the last to feature Don Rich. By 1981, Owens had turned his attention to his many successful business ventures, and he began a hiatus from the charts that lasted until “Streets of Bakersfield†and Dwight Yoakam reinvigorated his interest in recording and performing. In the mid-90s he built the Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, where he’d regularly perform to enthusiastic crowds and broadcast live over his own KUZZ radio.
The Soulful Strings are surprisingly little known, given the relative success of their first few albums. Their origin lay somewhere between Chess label owner Leonard Chess, producer Esmond Edwards, and arranger Richard Evans, but the project’s voice and artistic success lay squarely with the latter. Working with Cadet studio players, including Charles Stepney, Lenard Druss, Bunky Green, Phil Upchurch, and Ronald Steele, Evans fashioned superb, soulful music that wove together a string section and jazz players without artifice or novelty. The strings lent an orchestral weight to the solid funk of the band, broadening the tonal palette without losing the music’s essential swing.
Although the group released six studio albums and a live set, only their second album, Groovin’ with the Soulful Strings (#59 Top LPs, #6 R&B, #2 Jazz) has seen previously licensed for digital reissue, and then only in Japan. The Evans-composed single “Burning Spear†(#64 Hot 100, #36 R&B) has turned up on compilation albums and been widely sampled, but the bulk of the group’s catalog remained locked in the vault, tied up in vagaries of commercial potential, much to Evans’ frustration. Evans would continue on to arrange and produce for many other artists, and he spent twenty-five years as a much-loved professor at Berklee, but the red tape tying up Soulful Strings’ reissues vexed him to his passing in 2014; no doubt this reissue of the group’s fourth album would have made the best possible Christmas present.
The album’s song selection mixes traditional Christmas songs, classical pieces and a few jazz and R&B titles. Along with the studio regulars, Evans added vibraphonist Bobby Christian (a talented percussionist who’d been a mainstay of Dick Shory’s ensembles) and harpist Dorothy Ashby, the latter of whom Evans had signed and produced for three albums with Cadet. Ashby solos alongside flutist Lenny Druss on an arrangement of “The Little Drummer Boy†whose beat is equally stoke by the bass, drums and cellos. Ashby and Druss provide the swirling flakes for Claude Thornhill’s “Snowfall,†and Ashby’s harp takes the lead on a bluesy rendition of Charles Brown’s “Merry Christmas Baby.†The vibraphone provides mood throughout the album, but it’s turned loose for a pair of high-energy solos on Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugarplum Fairy.â€
In addition to strings, woodwinds, percussion, horns, bass and drums, Evans employed congas and even Ron Steele’s electric sitar. His arrangements span the minor key string fantasy of “Deck the Halls†to a funky take on “Santa Claus is Coming to Town†highlighted by the outstanding cello work of Cleveland Eaton. The funk continues to reign on “Jingle Bells,†with drummer Morris Jennings and guitarist Phil Upchurch joined by what’s credited as a French horn, but what sounds like an oboe (either way, most likely played by Lenny Druss, who could apparently play anything with a mouthpiece or reed). Christian’s vibes provide a suitably warm lead for Mel Torme’s “The Christmas Song,†and the album closes with flute and vibes leading the “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers.â€
Richard Fariña’s songs reimagined for the new millennium
Richard Fariña’s untimely 1966 death silenced one of the folk movement’s rapidly blossoming voices. The albums he recorded with his spouse Mimi have survived in reissue [123] and anthology, but for many listeners, Fariña’s voice doesn’t come to mind until their ears are rung by the dulcimer of “Pack Up Your Sorrows†or stung by the protest of “House Un-American Blues Activities Dream.†His songs continue to find their way into the setlists and records of other artists, but for the most faithful, they’ve served as on-going guideposts. Two of those loyalists, Iain Matthews and Andy Roberts, co-founders of Plainsong, have been performing Fariña’s works on stage and in studio for more than forty years, and now come back together to pay a more consolidated tribute.
The trio, including Mark Griffiths, offers fifteen of Fariña’s songs, including the previously unrecorded “Sombre Winds.†They focus on the songs, rather than the Fariñas’ original performances, imagining how they might sound if written and recorded today. Well, that’s not entirely true, given the bluesy doo-wop treatment of “One Way Ticket.†Perhaps it’s fairer to say that this is the sound of artists who have so deeply absorbed these songs, they can turn them back out to the world in any number of interesting forms, converting the “Sell-Out Agitated Waltz†into soulful straight time, taming the agitated ask of “Pack Up Your Sorrows†into a placid invitation and turning “Hard Loving Loser†into a summery country tune. These broader interpretations show off both the material’s innate strengths and the the interpreter’s imagination.
Though well known during the Greenwich Village folk revival of the 1960s, Karen Dalton’s slim catalog of studio albums (1969’s It’s Hard to Tell Who’s Going to Love You Best and 1970’s In My Own Time) failed to create wider, long-lasting renown, even in reissue. Her weary, lived-in vocals are often likened to Billie Holiday, but her talents as a folk-blues singer, guitarist and banjo player were in many ways eclipsed by her talent as a musical folklorist. Dalton was a rabid collector of songs, a hobby (or habit) that dated back to her childhood, and her albums mixed songs drawn from the public domain, the blues and a wide range of contemporaneous material from Fred Neil, Tim Hardin, Richard Manuel, Eddie Floyd, Booker T. Jones and Motown’s Dozier-Holland-Dozier.
What few knew at the time is that Dalton was also a songwriter; one who eschewed her own material at a time that singer-songwriters were ascendant. With her 1993 death, a collection of notebooks passed to her longtime friend and her estate’s administrator, guitarist Peter Walker. Contained within these journals were writings, poems, drawings (some of which are reproduced in this set’s booklet) and, most importantly, song lyrics. Walker first pieced together the legacy of Dalton’s writing in the book Karen Dalton: Songs, Poems, and Writings. He now expands her legacy as a songwriter with musical versions of eleven titles, given melody and voice by a few of Dalton’s many artist-fans. Though not sung in Dalton’s voice, her words cast a spell on the melodies and performances. Her immortal presence turns out to be as strong as was her mortal being.
Sharon Van Etten opens the set with a somber, piano-based composition of the title song. She adds a Dalton-like waver to a few held notes, but it’s the harmony singing with Hamilton Leithauser that creates the performance’s most indelible moments. Patty Griffin leans more fully into the sort of blues wail that Dalton herself employed, with David Boyle’s organ swells accentuating a lyrical meditation on truth and beauty. Dalton often wrote about emotional illusion, seeking to peel away obscuring surfaces, and though she was a collector of songs, she was also a collector of experiences that fed the autobiographical tone of her songs, such as the Lucinda Williams-sung “Met an Old Friend†and Larkin Grimm’s “For the Love I’m In.â€
This fourteen-song collection pulls together material Crenshaw originally recorded and released across three years of 10†vinyl EPs [123456] and a Kickstarter campaign. Each EP included an original A-side and a B-side that featured a cover song and a reworking of an earlier Crenshaw tune. Developed as an antidote to the grinding cycle of album-tour-album-tour, Crenshaw used the project as an opportunity to record with a variety of musical friends, as well as alone in his studio, and to revisit favorite songs from his and other writers’ catalogs. This set omits the reworkings of his own material, but adds a bonus live cover of the Everly Brothers’ “Man With Money,†recorded with the Bottle Rockets, and a previously unreleased demo of the original “Front Page News.â€
Charlie Rich’s biggest country hits
