Glenn Barber:
Motor Mouth Harry/I Don't Want No More Of The Cheese (Hickory)

This late-60s offering from longtime third-string country star Barber sports one of the best intros I've heard in many many moons. Starts out with a C chord quietly strummed on an acoustic guitar and Glenn's deep-but-kinda-thin voice intoning "it happened in a place called Wimpy's Tavern..." at which point the band kicks in on the A minor and we're off & running with a chilling tale of a loudmouth jerk's brutal yet well-deserved demise. The lyrics are the star of the show, full of gritty detail about Wimpy's seediness and Harry's obnoxious behavior, permeated with the narrator's palpable disgust for his surroundings, Harry, and himself. Harry keeps working his nerves, until he heads to bathroom just to get away from him and chances upon his gal's name scribbled on the dirty wall in an obscene manner. I'll let you guess what happens to Harry after that. "...Cheese" is entertaining too, one of those "I'll be a bachelor til I die" sorts of things in a basic bluesy 16-bar format. Dates from about 1969 and the production values reflect that, but at its core it's such a Hank Senior-ish tune that it easily could've been written fifteen or twenty years earlier. The combo of the then-contemporary flavor with the 50s honky-tonk classicism puts this in the same ballpark as Bob Gallion, and if you know how I feel about Bob G. then you know that's quite a compliment.

Danny Dedmon:
That Blonde Headed Gal Of Mine/Lonesome Old Moon (Imperial)

Another of my "who's this guy?" purchases, this one from a junk store in Lone Pine in the beautiful eastern Sierras of California. There were about a dozen of these Imperial 8000-series "hillbilly vocal" records, all by total no-names. Cool label, some of the titles were interesting, so I just bought 'em all. Here we have one of the more spirited standouts from the pile, a "granted this is never gonna win any awards" record by one of Bill Nettles' sidemen that's still has its own brand of rustic charm. My theory is that they wrote "That Blonde..." moments before they recorded it, or maybe even as the tape was rolling, as Danny brings new meaning to the term "mush mouth." The rhyme scheme in particular is half-baked and utterly haphazard as Danny mumbles his way through random assertions of his gal's fine points. Plus he breaks meter a few times, which causes the chord changes to sound as though they too were only vaguely agreed-upon as to some approximate moment where they may or may not occur. Yes, it's a bucket of slop, but hey, it stomps & jumps & swings its ass off, and the vibe has enough drunken dance-hall fun in it that the excessive looseness is forgivable, nay, even laudable. "Moon" is more of an actual composition, a stream of like-minded verses with no bridge, set apart with instrumental breaks & solos. Like the flip, no songwriting awards were or will be forthcoming any time soon, but I'm a sucker for the sad-tale-of-woe-to-a-stompalong-beat formula. A heapin' helpin' of sharp swinging lap steel is another big bonus, and standout fiddling throughout too. Judging from this evidential 78, Danny Dedmon is to Bob Wills what some of those Nuggets acts are to the Beatles: less-talented peers who lacked the vision to sustain a substantial body of work, but had enough smarts, chops, bursts of inspiration, and/or enthusiasm to crank out a pretty cool slab or two before they vanished into the void of obscurity.

Bob Gallion

Bob Gallion:
Loving You (Was Worth This Broken Heart)/Start All Over (Hickory)

Bear Family recently did a package of this fellow's MGM sides, due largely to the fact that some of them hold some rockabilly interest. In reading about that CD, I came across mention of his "sturdy 60s honky-tonk" sides for the Hickory label, terminology which piqued my interest. I often find my boat floated by artists & material that others consider merely "sturdy." So I start keeping my eye out for B.G. Hickory 45s and lo & behold they're not too awful hard to come by, and a lot of them are awful damn good. Take this one, f'rinstance: a stock-in-trade chugging Ray Price beat, high-pitched whiny steel pushed way too far up in the mix (yeah!), a straining-neck-muscles high harmony on the chorus, a catchily-scribed heart song with an abrupt octave-length drop in the verse melody line; I was instantly sold. One of those hard country records that was very current for it's time, formulaic in its way, but the specific formula in question sported none of Nashville's sugar-coating tendencies, and that's a good, good thing. It doesn't hurt that this record is mastered unusually hot & loud too. Bob's vocal presence is great. Seemingly incapable of virtuosity, he chooses instead to belt it out in the unpretentious baritone God gave him. Sure there are a million guys out there with "better" voices, but his carries really well on record, cutting through the mix with character, resonating with a clear-as-a-bell tonality that's perfectly suited to this kind of music. I'm not sure about this, but I believe this now all-but-forgotten tune hit the country top ten in '60 or '61, and I for one can see why. Hell, I would have bought a copy. Hell, I already did. A little late perhaps, but it's not my fault I wasn't born yet when it came out. "Start All Over" is just as good in a different way, featuring a chugging R&B groove halfway between a Texas blues shuffle and a Chuck Willis stroll, driven home with a baritone guitar or a Danelectro bass six or some such instrument digging way, way down on a bluesy riff through the whole song, dominating the arrangement with a gutty twang. It's really loud in the mix too, no pussyfootin' around. "Hey, that thing sounds great! Push it way up." But 'tain't no R&B record, it's hillbilly, as the weird break in the meter at the end of every verse demonstrates. Bob appears to hold one or two of the words/notes in the descending lick a little too long each time around, and as I'm listening I'm trying to figure out just how/when/where they're gonna get back on the one. It creates tension as your ear expects it to end in one spot, but when they get to that spot they obviously still have a little way to go and you hang in there with them while they take it the rest of the way down. Even a pal of mine who doesn't have much technical knowledge about music noticed it when I played it for him and said "hey that's cool." Has good nasty "who you gonna torture next" lyrics too, with themes of self-recrimination, revenge, and futility, constituting a tantilizing handful of my favorite (lyrical) things.

Claude Gray:
Family Bible/Crying In The Night (D)

I believe this to be the first waxing of this venerable Willie Nelson-penned gospel chestnut. Yeah, I know, Willie's name isn't on it but that doesn't mean anything. You might not peg it as a Willie composition at first, but then you get to the bridge, at which point it goes to the IV chord, then subtly changes key as it modulates to the IV of the first IV, a trick Willie could just about get a patent on. It's the musical equivalent of DNA evidence as to the true authorship of this song. He must have sold it to Gray, Breeland, & Buskirk to buy baby shoes. So anyway, this take blends healthy doses of slapback echo and chimy steel with that 50s Texas mid-to-low-budget production sound that makes so many Starday and D releases special. Noticably absent is a piano; in its stead is a fiddle playing simple, on-the-beat single note melodic lines quoting "Rock of Ages," which gives the arrangement an uncluttered openness and reinforces the song's most melodic elements. Claude's deep-voiced singing has a restrained quality to it, a formality that needs a suitable match in material that he didn't always get; but the respectful tone of an old-fashioned Mother & God tune like this is a perfect fit. The storyline of a battered Good Book as the centerpiece of a humble home probably resonated with many of the folks who first bought & listened to this record; I must admit that it doesn't particularly apply to me or the way I grew up, yet I spin this thing up and it moves me. The chords & melody resolve with such simple, satisfying consonance and wholeness, and the vocal & lyrical tone achieves such a delicate balance of joy with melancholy and respect, that the whole thing really feels spiritual. So let us be thankful on this day for this sweet platter. Leave it to Willie to get it so right, and hats off to Claude for knowing a good thing when he heard it and having the sense to buy a piece of it.

Claude Gray:
Daddy Stopped By/Three Times (Mercury)

Two songs clearly modelled on other songs, but still a decent example of Claude's signature Mercury sound. They'd give him hardcore honky tonk material to sing, songs that'd fit well with unregenarate hillbillies like George Jones or Porter Wagoner; then they'd produce & arrange it with a lush, polished, "sophisticated" pop-country sound: jangly rhythm guitars, lead guit with loads of tremolo, layered backup vocals, no fiddle, deemphasized steel. This was around the time when Shelby Singleton was leading their country division and producing some amazing-sounding records. He even went so far as to add audiophile details about what tape machines & mics were used on the session on the LP sleeves, like Atlantic was doing on all their jazz LPs. "Three Times" is about as down & dirty as smooth-voiced Claude ever got, a sleazy cheatin' song with pungent details about the methodology used in arranging an illicit rendevous. Obviously created in the wake of labelmate Leroy Van Dyke's massive "Walk On By," but doomed to fail compared to that wildly successful record because the lush gussied-up-ness of the recording does little to enhance the palatibility of the sweaty, furtive lyric. Consequently this has become one of my favorite tunes Claude ever cut. "Daddy Stopped By" is his attempt to follow up his own career-making record, "I'll Have Another Cup of Coffee," with a similarly-themed "I love the kids, please feel sorry for me" guilt-trip. It's alright, but its clunky forthrightness can't match the resonant regret of its more successful predecessor. Like they say in fiction writing, "show, don't tell". The blunt statements of emotional fact that make up the lyric pack less punch than the more subtle turns of "...Coffee", which probably goes a ways toward explaining why this'n falls sorta flat.

George McCormick:
Flutter Bug/Sundown Train (MGM)

It's no secret that Hank Sr. inspired an awful lot of imitators back in the day. Seems every third hillbilly singer in the field between 1950 - 1956 took a stab at it one time or another. The best of 'em, like Frankie Miller, Faron Young, Marvin Rainwater, Ray Price, Tibby Edwards, etc. showed an obvious debt but had their own thing going on to the point where you wouldn't really mistake them for Hank hisself. Less true of this George McCormick fellow, I'm telling you what. "Sundown Train" is a weary & teary waltzing blues cut from the same cloth as "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and it's uncanny, I say I say uncanny, how much he sounds like ol' Hank. The range, the timbre, the accent, the inflections, it's all there to the point where a casual listener (lord, even a careful one) could easily be forgiven for thinking this was a Hank outtake. There's no label credit for the band, but it wouldn't surprise me if the the original Drifting Cowboys were supplying the accompaniement here, like they did for the aforementioned Edwards & Price on many a session, as the keening steel, single fiddle, and crack guitar are indistinguishable from what you'd hear on Hank's later sessions. "Flutter Bug" is the (slightly) less derivitave cut here, a jaunty carefree midtempo honky-tonker like Hank wrote a zillion of, about a guy out to paint the town & live it up. Pretty good, too. In fact both sides are really pretty damn good, they'd sit real well next to Jimmy Swan or Jimmy Work or Jimmy Logsden or any of them other Jimmies/Johnnies/Georges etc. that sounded a whole lot like Hank. There are worse things you could sound like, you know. If you've gotta imitate someone, it might as well be the best.

George McCormick:
Room Of The Unknown Shoulder/? (Stop)

Well looky here. This McCormick fellow musta had himself quite a long career in country music obscurity. I have no idea what he was doing between his early-50s MGM sessions (see above) and this late-60s or early-70s waxing for Stop, but the confidence and strength in his voice are undiminished and he'd shed his more obvious Hank-isms for the straightforward manly sobbing style on display here. What made me stop on this record as I was flipping through a random stack was the label, Pete Drake's fine operation that recorded lots of aging and/or neglected hillbilly talent for the hardcore country market; what made me buy it was the godawful unforgivable pun of the title. Who would have the nerve to turn that into a song? I had to know where they were gonna go with it, and was pleased as punch when I got it home and found it to be darker & stranger than I ever could have guessed. Our heartbroke hero is in need of physical comfort of the female kind, and falls into repeated desperate, anonymous sexual liasons with a gal who insists on remaining nameless. The settings are dim, dingy, and shabby, the vibe sour, lonely and creepy, then George wallops you with that wretched pun on the chorus in dramatic overdubbed harmony, wringing it for pathos with a completely straight face. It's awesome. The other side is one of those bizarre Nashville attempts at folkie protest music. In order to avoid offending anyone by actually taking a stand on a given issue of the day, they garbled up The Message with meaningless blather that sounds vaguely meaningul, until you can't tell what the hell they're supposededly protesting, sorta like George Jones' "Unwanted Babies." It's shameless, trite, embarassing, and dated as hell, so sucky it doesn't even elicit a laugh.

Skeets McDonald

Skeets Donald (sic):
Please Daddy Don't Go To War/So I Cried Myself To Sleep (London)

Check out that label credit. London Records must've been paying lots & lots of attention to the vibrant new singing star in their hillbilly division, eh? I think Skeets only lasted there for one or two releases and they're not easy to come by. My copy is one of those nice radio station promo 78s that were pressed on vinyl instead of masonite & shellac, presenting less risk of breakage, and the sound is terrific. So anyway, the apparent a-side is about as dire as you would expect from the title and how anyone expected it to sell big is beyond me. Granted it was the Korea era but to be honest I don't have the patience to listen to it all the way through, it's too slow & treacly even for my strong sentimental stomach. But redemption awaits on the flip, a brisk midtempo heart song with a vibrant rhythm arrangement. The piano (mixed all the way to the front of the band) is pure tonk, with the left hand hitting heavy, meaty clomps on the one & three while the right hand does the ol' rinky-tinky-tinky all the way through; but the rest of the band is in swingland, with quarter-note bass walks and quarter-note downstrokes on the rhythm guit, and the steel jazzing it up. Two great tastes that taste great together, they congeal into a surprisingly propulsive hybrid groove that's very cool. Skeets turns in a great unpretentious drinking man's vocal, as was his wont, and the tune itself is good enough. This may not be the highest highpoint of his large & lovely catalog, but seeing as how I've dug up about 95% of his stuff by now and am left to scramble for the hard-to-find ones that didn't sell so well back in the day, it'll do just fine for me thank you very much.

Skeets McDonald:
Curtain Of Tears/Please Come Back (Capitol)

Another one for the Skeets completist rather than the casual listener. The theater metaphor appears to have been a popular one for a little while there in the early 50s, and "Curtain of Tears" is an average example. It's a fast waltz well-belted by Skeets, but I dunno, it's not great, it's not bad, it's just sorta boring. The flip sticks with me a lot more. Skeets at times chose unusual chord changes for a honky tonk songwriter of the time. Most who chose to venture beyond the old I, IV, V, and major II went in a jazzy direction like Floyd Tillman, with augmented & diminished chords, a major VI or maybe a minor IV, and 9ths & 6ths. But Skeets hit a folky vibe with songs like this, which features a heavy emphasis on the relative minor and a major III thrown in in one spot; common enough chords, but the way he puts them together makes for changes that rock/pop/folk bands like the Beatles, Byrds, and Beau Brummels would turn into their bread & butter years hence. Who knows where Skeets was pulling them from? I wouldn't hazard a guess. The melody is particularly strong on the chorus as it starts it out with a balls-out high note held for a few beats, then follows the aforementioned surprising chords into catchiness. The ending is also particularly nice, wrapping up on a minor-key note with a piercing yodel. An atypical tune, well delivered in Skeets bluesy whine: the jury is in folks and our man McDonald has been aquitted of all charges of suckiness.

Bob Morris onstage with Don Rich & Buck Owens (photo courtesy the Bakersfield Sentinal)

Bob Morris:
That Old Letter From Home/All That's Missing Here Tonight Is You (Tower)

The a-side of my latest Bob Morris procurement proves to be something of a missing link between the hardcore Bakersfield sound of his Challenge & Tower sides and the folk/pop/country Glen Campbell-ness of his later Capitol singles. A bit of a cornball song, as you might guess from the title, it paints a Norman Rockwell-esque idyllic portrait of small-town America that's a little too sugar-coated for me to buy. But more interesting than the lyric is the song's arrangement. As I listened, suddenly it dawned on me that in the late 60s not only were LA's rockers listening to the country guys (the Byrds, Gram Parsons, Nesmith, etc) but that the country guys were listening to the rockers. Of course that shoulda been obvious to me before but duh. Bob was quite the session guy, so he may have even played on a few folk/rock/psych sessions, who knows. With a rock beat, jangly guitar arpeggios, and layered vocal chorus, I take this record as a sign that Bob was well aware of LA's rock/pop/folk scene, particularly the Byrds, and wanted to fold some of that flavor into his own solidly country sound. As to whether it actually works or not, the jury is still out. First impression was not so good, but I may come around to it after a few more listens. Be that as it may, let me take this opportunity to assure you that the b-side walloped me from the git-go. No stylistic experiments here, ladies & gentleman, but a stone solid 60s So-Cal nightclub honky tonk shuffle about a lonely guy in a smokey dive bar missing his girl. Features a ridiculous couplet in which the bartender "saved us a table/over there by crazy Mabel" but aside from that goofy bit it's quite a believable lament. Nice chord changes move to the major II in unexpected places; busy steel guitar licks play a running chattering comment on the vocal story line, like the laughter & conversation going on in the bar; a perfect high harmony enriches the chorus and the strong, memorable bridge; and Bob's vocal, while not as masterful or viruoso as a George Jones or a Wynn Stewart, is rich with longing and as soulful as anyone else in country music you'd care to name. Unflashy meat & potatoes country music from an uncompromising journeyman player? Give me another heaping helping please.

Gil Rogers:
Save The Baby/You Don't Have To Be A Baby To Cry (Stop)

Man, who are all these people who made records for Stop? I swear 99 out of 100 records I run across in this label are by artists I've never heard of, and a lot of times they're surprisingly solid. Add this one to the pile. "Save the Baby" is a goofy self-penned country-rocker in which our narrator's sweet young gal is corrupted before his very eyes by his no-good honky-tonk pals. They're buying her too many drinks, she's sucking it right down, that sort of thing. Baby must be saved from such a life of sin. Fiddle, steel, high harmony, no syrupy vocal chorus or other such pop trappings, how wrong can you go? A nice weird groove too, a rocking beat but with some hint of swing in there. If you wanna press me on it, I'd have to say no, it's not a masterpiece, it's really downright dumb-ass, but it's entertaining enough that someday it'll be just the right song for some spot on a mix tape. "You Don't Have to Be A Baby" is a real keeper though, a 60s/70s stab at a western swing beat & arrangement of this venerable Ernest Tubb standard that ends up sounding sorta like Hank Thompson's 60s smaller-combo efforts, with exciting fiddle throughout and a great steel break. Gil phrases it real nice too, departing from ET's on-the-beat style and dragging it lightly behind to give it that carefree feel so essential to western swing. Perhaps Gil's is based more on Moon Mullican's version, I'm not sure cuz I've never heard Moon's rendition. Whatever the story, Mr. Rogers has got me convinced here and I'd be curious to hear other stuff he may have done, so wish me luck next time I go 45-digging.

Chester Smith

Chester Smith:
You Gotta Move/The Hook (Decca)

After parting ways with Capitol, Chester had a very brief tenure with Decca that yielded just this one single. I'd been aware of it for a while, and finally dug up a copy. With much anticipation, I threw on the b-side first and could barely keep my chin from the floor when the music started to play. By 1958 Chester had traded in his signature gospel sound, featuring high harmonies, mandolin, clunky piano, and plinky vanilla guitar licks, for...a saxophone? Dwayne Eddy guitar? A Chuck Willis stroll beat? Yup, it's a greasy rock & roll instrumental folks. Not what I was expecting from a seemingly diehard hillbilly, but I reckon just about all of 'em took a stab at that crazy teenage music around this time. This one's a little generic, but not bad, a nifty snapshot of where Chester's guitar playing was at at this point in time. So I was really curious to hear the other side and immediately flipped it to the vocal cut. For a moment I wondered if maybe this was a different Chester Smith from the guy who belted out "Wait A Little Longer Please Jesus" just a couple years earlier. And yet, after a few lines of lyric, I clearly recognized his voice, no mistaking it. "You've Gotta Move" is a fast snappy rocker w/ prominent R&B sax, with our man Chester giving a young lady a dance lesson in sing-speak bits clearly based on those of Jerry Lee Lewis' "Whole Lot of Shakin Going On." Trouble is, Chester's narrations sound stiff & innocent compared to Lewis' lascivious exhortations, too fatherly to really rock. He sounds like an Arthur Murray instructor instead of a lapdance patron. The record is lively enough, but in the larger context of Smith's body of work it's more of a curious side-note than the main event. He should have stuck to country gospel, where his heart truly was. If you ask me it takes a dedicated sinner like The Killer to make good rock & roll.

Warren Smith

Warren Smith:
That's Why I Sing In A Honky Tonk (Liberty)

And lord we're sure glad you did sing in a honky tonk, Warren, for it led you to leave wonderful artifacts like this amazing record behind. This succinct Ned Miller-penned masterpiece of the Ray Price shuffle form emerged from Smith's early-60s West Coast phase, the recorded legacy of which constitutes a meaty body of work if you ask me, with this being one of the high water marks. Kicking off with a descending twin fiddle line, a "ka-thunk-thunk" drum stop, and Ralph Mooney's steel, we get a slim & simple (just two chords, two verses, and a chorus) tale of woe, that places our hero's presence in said honky tonk squarely on the shoulders of his fractious love affair. Man what a fine chorus on this puppy: simple ryhmes with familiar phrases about honky tonks, broken hearts, etc, set to a sounds-like-a-hundred-other-songs catchy melody, and capped with a close high harmony. Original, no. Classic, yes. Coverable? Of course. Why isn't every C&W band worth its salt playing this meat & potatoes number? I suppose a few of 'em are and I just don't know about it, in which case hats off to those who know an oughta-be honkytonk standard when they hear one.

Jess Willard:
My Mail Order Mama/Truck Driver's Boogie (Capitol)

Uptempo hillbilly hokum with the flavor of meat & potatoes small-combo postwar western swing is the order of the day here, and it tastes pretty darn good to me. "Truck Drivers Boogie" is a totally fine upbeat song but you know there were a zillion hillbilly boogies waxed around this time and this one doesn't rise to the top of the heap. Were it blessed with more clever lyrics, an unusually wild solo, or some other touch of uniqueness, it might have scaled higher heights, but even so it's easy on the ears and gets the toes tapping, which is most likely all it was meant to do anyway. The real keeper here is "My Mail Order Mama," a totally ridiculous, hilarious, insulting, rube novelty zinger. Seems our mountain boy was lonely and sent off for a mail-order bride, only to be bitterly disapointed when they set him up with a butt-ugly rich widder. Adding insult to injury, she don't even know how to call the dogs or slop the hogs! And he had to flee northward to escape all the pain & misery. This is probably just the kind of song Eddy Arnold was speaking out against when he talked of "giving our music dignity" but I for one get a big kick out of this sorta crassness. When poor Jess cries that "her nose looked like an ol' fence rail," it's a howl of pain for the ages. I love Jess' voice too, a rough-hewn friendly hog-call of a nasal bellow with a bit of Webb Pierce in it, as crusty & unpretentious as the guy in the greasy pocket-T working on his ATV out back in the quonset hut. Curious sociological note: interesting how Willard gets a lot of mileage out of a southeastern West Virginny or Ozarks-type hillbilly mountaineer image on this tune, when his own stomping grounds were the flat dusty ranching & oil field landscapes of California's central valley.