Album Review: George Jones – ‘Step Right Up 1970-1979: A Critical Anthology’

George had become disillusioned with Pappy Daily’s business practices. His marriage to Tammy Wynette in 1969 encouraged him to make the momentous decision to move to her label Epic, and to co-opt her producer Billy Sherrill. George was forced to buy himself out of his Musicor contract, but it was money well spent, even though his chart record remained somewhat inconsistent. George’s move to Epic saw him at the peak of his vocal prowess, married to Billy Sherrill’s smooth, Nashville Sound production.

This superb compilation contains six of George’s last tracks for Musicor, and over 20 of the finest tracks he recorded in his first eight years on Epic. These were the years of his troubled marriage to and divorce from Tammy Wynette, and the years his intensifying battles with drugs and alcohol earned him the inglorious nickname ‘No Show Jones’ and saw his health break down, but in the studio George Jones was creating magic and leading up to what many will call his finest moment on record. Step Right Up mixes classic hits with some well-chosen lesser known album cuts. The material is almost uniformly great here, concentrating on the sad songs at which George Jones has always excelled. Vocally George does not put a foot wrong, although some aspects of the production, mainly the backing vocals, now sound a little dated. The only reason to debate whether this album is worth buying is whether you might not try to get hold of the constituent albums, at least some of which are available on CD reissues.

George’s first single of the 70s, as he approached the end of his time with Musicor, was ‘Where Grass Won’t Grow’, a bleak, echoey tale of rural poverty in Tennessee,

Trying to grow corn and cotton on ground so poor that grass won’t grow

culminating in the death of the protagonist’s wife, buried in that same soil. The song, written by George’s old friend and drinking partner Earl Montgomery, was perhaps too downbeat to chart higher than the lower reaches of the top 30, but its quality led it to become regarded as a classic Jones record.

The exquisite expression of emotional devastation in ‘A Good Year For The Roses’ (written by Jerry Chestnut) is one of George’s most masterly vocal performances, reaching #2 on Billboard.

A handful of less well-known late Musicor cuts are also included. The tender steel-laced ballad of love for the protagonist’s motherless child, ‘She’s Mine’, co-written by George with Jack Ripley, was a top 10 hit. Slightly less successful, peaking at #13, was a great Dallas Frazier/Sanger D Shafer composition ‘Tell Me My Lying Eyes Are Wrong’, in which George manfully tries to pretend everything’s alright and his wife isn’t cheating on him, unusually featuring the Jones Boys’ backing. Another Dallas Frazier song (this time with A L Owens), ‘She’s As Close As I Can Get To Loving You’, has another great lead vocal, but is marred by excessive Nashville Sound backing vocals. Wayne Kemp’s ballad ‘Image Of Me’ has the protagonist confessing his shame that he has “dragged down” a simple old-fashioned country girl and made her into a honky-tonk angel, with another very fine vocal performance. Earl Montgomery’s ‘Right Won’t Touch A Hand’, a passionate confession of regret for jealousy which destroyed a relationship, was yet another top 10 hit in 1971.

Album Review: Reba McEntire – ‘My Kind of Country’

Reba McEntire’s rise to the top of the country music world was long and slow. Her first single for Mercury Records, 1976′s “I Don’t Want To Be A One Night Stand” peaked at #88 on the Billboard country singles chart, and the next few singles stalled in the 80s as well. She didn’t reach the Top 20 until 1979 and didn’t reach the Top 10 until the following year. She finally scored her first #1 in 1982 with “Can’t Even Get The Blues”, a song that had been intended for Jacky Ward, but which she fought hard to be allowed to record.

Dissatisfied with the material Mercury was providing for her, Reba left the label when her contract expired in 1983, and signed with MCA Records. Unfortunately, her tenure at MCA got off to a rocky start when she found herself in another situation where she had little say in the material she recorded. Her 1984 debut album for the label turned out to be another slick, overproduced, pop-oriented record, that was almost indistinguishable from the albums she’d released for Mercury. A frustrated McEntire made an appointment to see Jimmy Bowen, who had just taken over the helm as president of MCA’s Nashville division, unaware that he had already decided to drop her from the label. Bowen quickly rethought his decision after meeting Reba in person. He not only allowed her to make another album, he let her choose another producer and gave her complete control over song selection. The result was 1984′s My Kind of Country, a pivotal album for Reba McEntire and for country music. Produced by Harold Shedd, it helped kick off the New Traditionalist movement and began a new phase of Reba’s career. Gone were the lush string arrangements and electric guitar solos, and back in front and center were the fiddle and pedal steel.

Two singles were released from the album — “How Blue” and the Harlan Howard and Chick Raines-penned “Somebody Should Leave” — both, of which became #1 hits. Five of the remaining songs were covers of older songs, since it was difficult to find new traditional-sounding songs in early 1980s Nashville. Reba spent hours going through the back catalogs of the publishing companies, to find the kind of songs she wanted. She ended up choosing songs that had been made famous by the likes of Faron Young (“He’s Only Everything), Carl Smith (“Before I Met You”), Ray Price (“I Want To Hear It From You”) , Nat Stuckey (“Don’t You Believe Him”), and Connie Smith (“You’ve Got Me Right Where You Want Me”). She sings each of them with an enthusiasm and zeal that had been lacking on most of her previous releases. It was obvious that she was finally singing the kind of music she really loved, and having the time of her life in the process.

Heart, soul and talent: Connie Smith’s recipe for great country music

A few days ago, I had the great honor and privilege of sitting down for a conversation with the legendary Connie Smith:

RX: Your entry into the country music world seems to be something that just sort of happened, instead of something that you spent a lot of time pursuing. Prior to meeting Bill Anderson, had you given any serious thought to going to Nashville to pursue a career in country music?

CS: No. It was always a dream I had to sing on the Grand Ole Opry. I remember when I was about 5 saying that, but I never thought I really would. If I hadn’t met Bill I probably wouldn’t have pursued it because I already had a young son. The way I met him was I went up to that park because I’d heard that George Jones would be there. But they’d given my husband and me the wrong date, so when we got there Bill was there. I hadn’t gone to sing, I just wanted to hear George because he was my favorite male singer. When we got there we found out that they had a talent contest every week, and my husband and friends talked me into entering. The biggest holdback was that you had to do your own accompaniment, and I can only play the guitar in the key of C, so I had to pick a song that I could do in C. And I think the reason I won was because the winner for the prior seven weeks was a seven-year-old banjo player and I guess they just wanted something different. I’d like to think it was my talent that won but I’m really not so sure. I know it wasn’t my guitar playing (laughs).

RX: But it was definitely your talent that caught the attention of Bill Anderson. You went to Nashville at his invitation, and “Once a Day”, your debut record, was a megahit – the kind that every new artist dreams of having right out of the box. Was it difficult to adjust to that kind of overnight success?

CS: I was just very lucky to have come along at the right time and to have gotten such a great, great song. But it was difficult being thrust into the spotlight so quickly. I just wanted to hear my record on the radio but I was never really career-driven.

RX: Most artists from that era, particularly women, seem to have been almost completely controlled by their labels and producers.  Did you have any say in what you got to record or how your records sounded?

CS (emphatically):  Absolutely. I never recorded anything I didn’t want to. I was very fortunate to get to work with Bob Ferguson as my producer for the first 9 years. Any attempts to force me to record something I didn’t want to wouldn’t have gone down well with me. If he really, really wanted me to do something, I did it but I was never forced. RCA did say to me, “You can do things besides just country,” and I said, “I’m not sure that I want to.”  That wasn’t Bob or Chet forcing me – that was coming more from New York. They really wanted me to do some middle-of-the-road stuff. So we did the whole Downtown Country album. But those really weren’t the best songs for me.