Tag Archives: Country

Dickey Lee: The Classic Songs of Dickey Lee

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Remakes of Dickey Lee’s hit singles and songs

It’s hard to imagine that in 2011, a time in which everything ever recorded seems to be available in digital form, there are still hit recordings yet to be reissued. But such is the case for singer/songwriter Dickey Lee, whose hit singles on the pop and country charts have yet to be reissued in proper form. You can find his biggest pop hit, “Patches,” if you look hard enough (try here), but his chart-topping country hit “Rocky” (along with twenty-six other rarities) can only be found on the provenance-free Greatest Hits Collection. Given his success as both a recording artist (who began his career recording for no less than Sun) and songwriter, one can only assume his recordings are tied up in a maze of lost contracts and competing intellectual property claims.

Varese’s collection doesn’t solve the problem of Lee’s original recordings, as these tracks are re-recordings made within the past decade. The arrangements are kept simple, but the clean production and modern keyboards and drums distract from the period songwriting style. Lee’s voice retains the boyishness of his younger years, and without the original singles easily available, this is at least a good reminder of what’s in the vault. “Patches” retains the morose triple-shot of classism, prejudice and teen tragedy, and the follow-up “Laurie (Strange Things Happen),” is still one of the spookier stories to crack the Top 40. Lee was so adept at singing bitter-sweet songs that he topped the country chart with Jay Stevens’ “Rocky” the same year Austin Roberts took it up the pop chart.

It’s interesting to hear Lee sing the hits he wrote for others, including George Jones’ “She Thinks I Still Care,” Reba McEntire’s “You’re the First Time I’ve Thought About Leaving,” George Strait’s “Let’s Fall to Pieces Together,” John Schneider’s “I’ve Been Around Long Enough to Know,” Charley Pride’s “I’ll Be Leaving Alone” and the the oft-covered “Never Ending Song of Love.” But like many albums of remakes, the arrangements compress decades of performing and songwriting into a singular sound that likewise compresses the artist’s story. It’s great to hear Lee in good voice, but what fans really need is for Bear Family to wake up from its hibernation and clear the original recordings for reissue! [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

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Johnny Cash: Bootleg III – Live Around the World

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A wealth of previously unreleased live material from the Man in Black

Volume 1 of the bootleg series, Personal File, documented solo home recordings from the ‘70s and ‘80s in which Johnny Cash explored a wide variety of American song. Volume 2, From Memphis to Hollywood, essayed the background of Cash’s transition to country stardom via a collection of 1950s radio appearances, Sun-era demos and a deep cache of 1960s studio recordings. Volume 3 looks at Cash’s role as a live performer from 1956 through 1979, including stops at the Big “D” Jamboree, the Newport Folk Festival, a USO tour of Vietnam, the White House and the Wheeling Jamboree. Among these fifty tracks, thirty-nine are previously unreleased, giving ardent Cash collectors a wealth of new material to enjoy.

The earliest tracks, from a 1956 show in Dallas, find Cash opening with a powerful version of the 1955 B-side “So Doggone Lonesome” and introducing his then-current single on Sun, “I Walk the Line.” At the end of the three-song Dallas set you hear an audience member call out for “Get Rhythm” and the band launches into it. Cash was always a generous stage performer, early on sharing the limelight with Luther Perkins and Marshall Grant, introducing and praising them, and giving Perkins a solo spot for the instrumental “Perkins Boogie.” By 1962 the Tennessee Two had expanded to a tight trio with the addition of W.S. Holland on drums, but even with Cash’s move to Columbia, the group’s appearance at a Maryland hoe-down is still rootsy and raw. They rush “I Walk the Line” as if they’d had one too many pep pills, but Cash is charming as he addresses the audience and hams it up with impressions and jokes.

Two years later at the Newport Folk Festival Cash was introduced by proto-folkie Pete Seeger. Cash is thoroughly commanding as he sings his hits and expands his palette with Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright,” Pete LaFarge’s “Ballad of Ira Hayes” and the Carter Family’s “Keep on the Sunny Side.” His 1969 trip to Vietnam was bookended by more famous live recordings at Folsom and San Quentin prisons, but the soldiers at the Annex 14 NCO Club in Long Binh were treated to a prime performance that included June Carter on “Jackson,” “Long-Legged Guitar Pickin’ Man” and “Daddy Sang Bass.” Cash continued to mix his hits (including a request for “Little Flat Top Box”) with folk and country classics, mixing “Remember the Alamo” and “Cocaine Blues” into his set.

Cash’s performance at the Nixon Whitehouse in 1970 is this set’s most legendary, and also its longest at twelve songs. Richard Nixon provides the introduction, including a few remarks on the safe return of Apollo 13. Cash’s set includes a then-familiar mix of hits and gospel songs, but is mostly remembered for his choice not to play Nixon’s requests for “Okie From Muskogee” and “Welfare Cadillac,” and instead sing “What is Truth,” “Man in Black” and “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” the first of which is included here. Nixon is self deprecating in explaining Cash’s rebuff, and Cash is deferential in addressing Nixon as “Mr. President,” leaving the political implications to seem more legend than truth. Still, Nixon couldn’t have been comfortable having his antipathy towards the younger generation questioned by “What is Truth.”

The remaining tracks collect an eclectic array of songs recorded at a number of different locations throughout the 1970s. The titles include Kris Kristofferson’s “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” the 1920s standard “The Prisoner’s Song,” Gene Autry’s “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine,” Steve Goodman’s “City of New Orleans,” the Western classic “Riders in the Sky,” Billy Joe Shaver’s “I’m Just an Old Chunk of Coal,” and several of Cash’s Sun-era tunes. It’s interesting to hear Cash’s breadth, though not as fulfilling as the set lists elsewhere in the collection. The recording quality is good to excellent throughout, with the Newport tracks in especially crisp stereo. If you’re new to Cash’s catalog, start your appreciation of his performing talents with At San Quentin, but this is a terrific expansion (at nearly 2-1/2 hours) of the well-known, previously issued live materials. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

Various Artists: The Wilburn Brothers Show

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Terrific soundtrack from the Wilburn Brothers mid-60s TV show

Little by little, the catalog of 1960s country hit-makers Teddy and Doyle Wilburn is coming back into print. Varese issued a terrific greatest hits anthology in 2006, and followed up with an album of inspirational songs earlier this year. An import anthology and original album reissues [1 2] are now joined by Varese’s first ever CD issue of the official soundtrack album from the Wilburn’s popular television show. Originally released in 1966, the album recreates the format of the duo’s half-hour show (complete with light audience applause), collecting terrific performances from the Wilburns, comedy and song by Harold Morrison, spotlights from the show’s “girl singer” Loretta Lynn, and guest appearances by Ernest Tubb. Owen Bradley produced the disc in crisp mono at the famed Bradley’s Barn, capturing live versions of several hits, including the Wilburns’ “Trouble’s Back in Town,” “It’s Another World” and “Knoxville Girl,” Lynn’s 1965 single “The Home You’re Tearing Down” and the Wilburns-Tubb collaboration “Hey, Mr. Bluebird.” The disc is filled out with singles (including the moving prison song “The Legend of the Big River Train”), old favorites, terrific harmonies, good humor and the inviting, easy-going manner of the Wilburn Brothers. You can catch reruns of the original program on on RFD-TV, but this soundtrack album is a great souvenir. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

Buck Owens: Bound for Bakersfield

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Buck Owens’ pre-Capitol sounds

Before signing with Capitol Records and pioneering new sounds in country music, Buck Owens recorded in the 1950s for Pep, and waxed a number of original demos. His earliest sides showed little of the invention and none of the electric sting he’d develop in his Bakersfield days; instead, the pedal steel, fiddle and piano are pushed to the fore, and Owens’ voice, though easily recognized, is drawn more directly from the lachrymose honky-tonk tradition than the unique, upbeat style he’d develop in the ‘60s. The lack of drums and harmony vocal also distinguish these sides from those he’s lay down with Don Rich and the Buckaroos a few years later.

From the start, Owens’ guitar playing and songwriting caught on; he developed a relationship with Capitol for session work, and his Pep rendition of “Down on the Corner of Love” was covered by Red Sovine and Bobby Bare. By the mid-50s his session work and his live dates at Bakersfield’s Blackboard club were expanding his musical vistas to contemporary pop, rock and R&B. In Elvis’ breakthrough year of 1956, Owens recorded the original rockabilly tune “Hot Dog,” but using the name Corky Jones to avoid offending the country faithful. Future Merle Haggard guitarist Roy Nichols added the twang, and the B-side, “Rhythm and Booze” sounds as if it were written for the Cramps to cover. Owens’ last single for Pep (“There Goes My Love”) continued his failure in the market, but its B-side, “Sweethearts in Heaven” was picked up by fellow Bakersfield resident Wynn Stewart.

Dropped from his label, Owens recorded a number of demos that were issued on the La Brea label in the wake of his later fame. You can still hear an old-timey honky-tonk sound in the piano, but the drums are starting to pick up steam, the bass is more full-bodied and the guitars borrow notes from the contemporary pop to which Owens had been exposed. Comparing the 1956 waxing of “You’re for Me” (originally titled “You’re fer Me”) with the 1962 Capitol hit single, you can still hear the song’s honky-tonk roots, but Owens’ vocal is more confident and the balance of piano, steel and guitars has a great deal more finesse on the remake. Some of these changes are no doubt due to Capitol’s studio and Ken Nelson’s deft hand as producer, but there was an overall shift in style that was all Owens.

Many of these tracks have been released before, including Audium’s nearly complete Young Buck: The Complete Pre-Capitol Recordings, and as part of Bear Family’s box set Act Naturally: The Buck Owens Recordings 1953-1964. But Rockbeat’s done a great job of consolidating the known pre-Capitol recordings, including alternate takes and demos, onto one affordable disc. This isn’t the place to start your Buck Owens collection (Rhino’s 21 #1 Hits: The Ultimate Collection or Time-Life’s All-Time Greatest Hits are good entry points, as well as reissues of classic albums such as Together Again & My Heart Skips a Beat, I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail and Carnegie Hall Concert), but once you’ve become a fan, this is a fine place to hear the firmament from which his Bakersfield invention sprang. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

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George Strait: Here For a Good Time

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The iron man of country music

George Strait’s numbers are eye-popping: 30 years, 24 chart-topping albums, 57 chart-topping singles, 69 million records sold. 84 of his 89 radio singles have cracked the Top 10 – second only to Eddy Arnold (who notched 92!). It’s a streak worthy of Lou Gehrig and Cal Ripkin Jr. One could wonder whether his fame has simply become self-sustaining, but the music industry is littered with acts who maintained their success for a few years or a decade, but few have sustained Strait’s level of commercial success for thirty years. During those three decades, the artistic reach of Strait’s albums has waxed and waned, but he’s never seemed less than sincere or involved by the songs, and he’s never strayed far from his country roots.

The past few years have seen some high points, including the neon honky-tonk glow of 2003’s Honkytonkville and his return to songwriting on last year’s Twang. This year’s model is notable more for its consistency, including his continued songwriting with his son, than for anything particularly new. Strait sings with his usual ease as he extols the healing power of love and is equally convincing as he voices an alcoholic’s weakness. He lays some deep experience into Jesse Winchester’s oft-covered “A Showman’s Life,” and delights in covering Delbert McLinton’s “Lonestar Blues.” The standard Nashville mix of good times and romantic discord fills out a solidly traditional, if not particularly revelatory album. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

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Kenny Vaughan: V

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Nashville super-picker dazzles on his solo debut

Kenny Vaughan’s an A-list guitar-picker, and though he’s made a living playing on some of Nashville’s mainstream product, his bona fides come from backing the cream of Americana acts, including Lucinda Williams, Jim Lauderdale, Rodney Crowell and Marty Stuart. He’s been a member of Stuart’s Fabulous Superlatives for a decade, playing Don to Stuart’s Buck, and the group backs him on this first solo album. The Buckaroos comparison comes to the fore in the tight harmony singing of “Stay Outta My Dreams,” and though Vaughan sings “Country Music Got a Hold on Me,” country music isn’t the whole show. Vaughan’s guitar twangs low and mysterious for the instrumental spy soul of “Mysterium” and closes the album with the rockabilly gospel on “Don’t Leave Home Without Jesus.” His playing is impeccable throughout, kicking up echoes of Roy Nichols and picking lines that suggest Clarence White, but maintaining his own style and tone all the while. His vocals aren’t as polished as his strings, but he’s an enthusiastic singer and a canny songwriter who lays down convivial songs grounded in killer guitar and country-rock hooks worthy of NRBQ. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

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Brigitte DeMeyer: Rose of Jericho

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A rootsy, soulful singer-songwriter’s fifth

On her fifth album, singer-songwriter Brigette DeMeyer shows off an impressive range of styles. There’s the rootsy gospel “One Wish,” the road warrior’s country-rock lament “This Fix I’m In,” the trad-jazz “Alright A-Coming,” and the irresistible New Orleans-styled “Say Big Poppa.” Each provides a different angle on DeMeyer’s on a soulful voice whose edges resound with the character of Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow and (if you listened past her megahit singles), Deana Carter. DeMeyer blends just as easily with fingerpicked acoustic guitars as with twangy pedal steel and the fat tone of a muted trombone. She’s supported by Sam Bush (founder of one of DeMeyer’s earliest musical influences, New Grass Revival), Will Kimbrough, Mike Farris and co-produced by drummer Brady Blade. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

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Slaid Cleaves: Sorrow & Smoke – Live at the Horseshoe Lounge

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Compelling live set from a master Texas songwriter

Over the course of twenty years and more than a half-dozen albums, transplanted New Englander Slaid Cleaves has established himself in a league with peers like Bruce Robison, and following closely in the footsteps of Robert Earl Keen, Guy Clark and the rest of the Texas songwriting deans. His studio recordings have been engaging and, starting with 2000’s Broke Down, commercially noticed, but his words gain dimension when shared on stage. Cleaves’ songs are not often happy affairs, and his last studio album, Everything You Love Will Be Taken Away, wears its downcast tenor in its title. But even as he sings of romantic vulnerability and social polarization, he manages to warm the weariness and fatalism. Much like Springsteen’s socially critical anthems, Cleaves’ hummable melodies and chorus hooks often disguise darker truths within.

This two-disc live set opens with “Hard to Believe,” a gut-punch portrait of an industrial town in decline, amid a country much of whose moral compass is in free spin. Cleaves sings despondent lyrics with a voice choked with disbelief, threading personal loss among the emotional wreckage he sees all about. Even if you were busy ordering your first drink of the evening, the half-smile in Cleaves’ voice couldn’t hide the acidity of America’s widening class war: hookers on a Christmas stroll, rootless blue collar workers, senior citizens slinging hash, and young boys sent off to defend corporate riches. The applause that follows suggests an audience not quite sure how to laud the songwriter’s craft while still mulling the dire images he’s painted. The quandary is dispelled as Cleaves launches into “Horseshoe Lounge,” holding an affectionate mirror up to the bar’s patrons.

The twenty-one tracks are collected from two stripped-down performances in which Cleaves accompanied himself on guitar, with acoustic leads and harmony vocals by Michael O’Connor, and accordion, harmonica and trumpet from Oliver Steck. Cleaves sings strongly and clearly, inviting audience members to join him here and there, and leaving much to mull over on the drive home. There’s a former drinker whose problems are deeper than a whiskey glass, a town drowned beneath a man-made lake, the jagged remains of a shattered marriage, tough times with no easy exit, and deaths at work and war. There are lighter moments, including the Loudon Wainwright-styled folk-waltz “Tumbleweed Stew” a yodeling tribute to Don Wasler, and the new title, “Go for the Gold,” but it’s the tour through the darker parts of Cleaves’ catalog that pays the richest dividends. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

MP3 | Hard to Believe
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Hank Williams: The Legend Begins

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Remastered Health & Happiness Shows + Earlier Bonuses

This three-disc set returns to domestic print the two discs of live radio performances previously anthologized on the 1993 Heath & Happiness Shows. These programs were remastered from transcription discs cut in October 1949 at the Castle studio in Nashville, and though there are a few minor audio artifacts, the sound quality – particularly the instrumental balance of the Drifting Cowboys and the presence of Williams’ voice – is exceptional. Each of the eight shows stretched to 15 minutes, when augmented by ad copy read by a local announcer; here they clock in a few minutes shorter. Williams opens each program with the Sons of the Pioneers’ “Happy Rovin’ Cowboy” and fiddler Jerry Rivers closes each episode with the instrumental “Sally Goodin”.

In between the opening and closing numbers, Williams sings some of his best-loved early hits, original songs, and gospel numbers, and much like the later performances gathered on The Complete Mothers’ Best Recordings… Plus! (or its musical-excerpt version, The Unreleased Recordings), the spontaneity and freshness of the live takes often outshine the better-known studio recordings. Williams’ wife Audrey accompanies him on a few duets and sings a couple of challenging solo slots; Jerry Rivers shines both as an accompanist and in short solo highlights. As with the Mothers’ Best shows, Williams is revealed to be not only a revered singer and songwriter, but a master host and entertainer.

The set’s third disc includes a dozen rare Williams recordings. From 1938, a fifteen-year-old Williams is heard singing the novelty number “Fan It” and the then-current movie theme “Alexander’s Ragtime Band.” These are rough recordings, but a priceless opportunity to hear just how precocious Williams was as a teenager. Two years later Williams recorded a number of home demos, including the four standards covered here. The recording quality is tinny and the discs are far from pristine, but they’re clear enough to reveal the adult Hank Williams voice beginning to emerge. The final six tracks jump ahead eleven years, past the Health & Happiness shows to a March of Dimes show from 1951.

The Health & Happiness recordings haven’t always had a healthy or happy history. MGM released overdubbed versions in 1961, and the 1993 reissue was plagued by physical problems with the transcriptions. But as with the Mothers’ Best release, Joe Palmaccio has deftly resuscitated ephemeral, sixty-year-old recordings with his restoration and remastering magic. Given that these discs were only meant to last through a radio broadcast or two, their picture of a twenty-six-year-old Williams just breaking into Nashville is astonishing. Those with an earlier reissue will value the sonic upgrade, historic bonus tracks, 4-panel digipack, 16-page booklet and detailed liner notes from Williams biographer Colin Escott. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

Lynda Kay: Dream My Darling

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Texas-to-Los Angeles transplant carries a torch for classic country

When we last heard from Lynda Kay, she was paired with Danny Harvey as the Lonesome Spurs, a minimalist duo whose self-titled release favored the sassy sounds of Wanda Jackson, Laurie Collins and Brenda Lee, and the melancholy country of Patsy Cline. Kay’s solo debut doubles-down on the countrypolitan heartbreak, torching its way through a dozen originals that combine the soaring ache of Cline and Roy Orbison with the deliberate tempos, hard twang and sad instrumental flourishes of ‘50s and ‘60s country. Kay’s producer (and husband) Jonny Edwards has built the arrangements into lavish sets filled with strummed guitars, pedal steel (courtesy of the immensely talented Marty Rifkin), blue piano, theatrical tom-toms, emotionally bowed strings, and chorused backing vocals. None of this distracts from the passion of Kay’s vocals as she powers through songs of broken hearts, tearful realizations, lonely hours, spiteful recriminations, emotional dead ends and, for just a moment, dreams of happiness. Don’t be misled by the campy clothes and wigs – Kay’s not wallowing in nostalgia, she’s just tipping her ten gallon hat (or her bouffant ‘do, really) in an honest homage to country music’s dressier days. Put this in the changer with Sara Evans’ Three Chords and the Truth, Mandy Barnett’s I’ve Got a Right to Cry, k.d. lang’s Shadowland and Patsy Cline’s Sweet Dreams; just make sure you have a big box of tissues near by. [©2011 hyperbolium dot com]

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