Country music from a fan's point of view since 2008
Tammy’s second release of 1972 produced two chart topping singles – three, if you count ‘Good Lovin’ (Makes It Right)’, which was a #1 single the previous year, but was originally released to promote Tammy’s Greatest Hits Volume II rather than this album.
The title track, ‘My Man (Understands)’ is not one of my favorite Tammy Wynette songs, a mid tempo love song which is just not terribly interesting and is given a brassy production. The second song has held up much better over time. ‘Til I Get It Right’ is a beautiful ballad written by Red Lane and Larry Henley with an inspiring message about facing a disastrous love life with optimism.
‘Walk Softly On The Bridges’ is an excellent song written by the legendary Dallas Frazier and A L “Doodle” Owens. It was a hit single for Mel Street the following year, and has been covered a number of times, but Tammy’s subtly emotional version was the first and arguably the best, as she offers advice to a friend tempted to cheat:
Don’t be careless with your darling
If you love him, don’t let him down
If you’re faithful he won’t leave you
Lost and wasted the way I amWalk softly on the bridges that you’re crossing
Don’t break his heart then cry cause it won’t mend
Be careful not to slam the door behind you
You may need to knock upon his door again
She covered a recent hit for her husband George Jones, ‘Loving You Could Never Be Better’, a nice love song which works well for Tammy who gives it a hushed sensual reading. Maybe they should have cut the song as a duet. Donna Fargo’s breakthrough hit ‘The Happiest Girl In The Whole USA’ has aged distinctly less well, although Tammy sings it with enthusiasm.
Tammy wrote the subdued ballad ‘Things I Love To Do’ with Earl Montgomery, about a happy housewife . She sings it beautifully, but the song does not go anywhere. She also co-wrote the brassier ‘Hold On (To The Love I Got)’, another piece of filler.
She is more assertive telling her man ‘You Can’t Hang On’ if he isn’t going to give her enough loving; or that if he cheats on her she’ll be ‘Gone With Another Man’.
‘The Bridge Of Love’ (written by Jae J Kay) has a folky nursery rhyme quality, and combines a progressive message about a multiracial America with a sense of impending failure, which is a bit of a departure for Tammy:
Watch the happy children go round and round
Some are black, some are brown
The bridge is strong but when things go wrong
It’s down, down, down
Hear the little children singin’ their song
Everything’s right and they belong
All the little children are gonna be sad
When the bridge falls down, no mom, no dad
When the bridge of love starts fallin’ down
Fallin’ down, fallin’ down
The bridge is strong but when things go wrong
It’s down, down, down
One hand a-reachin’ out to another
Makes a bridge of love – will you be my brother?…
Look at our country, what do you see
The bridge of all colors standing free
The bridge is strong but when hearts go wrong
It’s down, down, down
There may be a few too many upbeat filler tunes, but there is some excellent material as well, and this is worth seeking out. It is available on a 2-4-1 deal with Bedtime Stories.
Grade: B
In the summer of 1987, my wife Kay and I were vacationing in Germany and Austria. As is always the case, I would check out the local record stores in the various towns that we visited, and in doing so I was surprised to see the large number of Dave Dudley cassettes and CDs that were available for sale – ten or twelve albums, all with songs performed in English and mostly songs about truck drivers.
I have always loved the music of Dave Dudley, a mid-level American country music star of the 1960s and early 1970s, best known for his huge 1961 hit “Six Days On The Road.” Dudley had a unique, deep rumbling voice, once described as the sound of “too much coffee and too many cigarettes at truck stops at three in the morning.” In other words, perfect for the songs he sang.
I found it interesting that so much of his material was available in Germany and, to a lesser extent, Austria, particularly since all of his classic Mercury recordings were long off the American market, leaving only a few albums of inferior re-makes available for purchase. My inquiries revealed that a German country music band, Truck Stop, had scored a major hit in 1978 with a song titled “Ich möcht’ so gern Dave Dudley hör’n” that had sparked interest in Dave Dudley, an artist of whom no one in Germany had any knowledge. In fact, it launched a career revival for Dudley who performed occasionally in Germany and other parts of Europe for the next decade or so.
Born David Darwin Pedruska on May 3, 1928, in Spencer, WI, Dave Dudley was raised in Stevens Point, WI, and like many country artists of earlier generations (Charley Pride, Jim Reeves, Roy Acuff), aspired to a career in major league baseball. He played semi-pro baseball until an arm injury forced an end to his baseball career in 1950. After picking up his guitar, Dudley performed and became a country music disc jockey working at stations in Idaho and the upper midwest. Dudley also formed the Dave Dudley Trio in 1953, and worked dates in the vicinity of his current employment. The band eventually broke up after achieving little success.
In 1960, Dudley, by now working in Minneapolis, formed another group, the Country Gentlemen. The group built up a solid local following. In December, 1960 a bad break ultimately turned into good luck when Dudley was struck by a car while loading equipment following a performance in Minneapolis. In 1963, he used the insurance proceeds to start his own record label, Golden Wing. Prior to that, beginning in 1955, he had recorded singles for King, Starday, NRC, Vee and Jubilee, and scored some regional successes.
Lightning finally struck for Dudley in 1963, when his friend Jimmy C. Newman gave him a song written by Earl Greene and Earl ‘Peanut’ Montgomery (Melba Montgomery’s brother). The song was titled “Six Days On The Road.” While initially skeptical about the song, Dudley issued it on Golden Wing and watched it soar to #2 for two weeks on Billboard’s Country Charts (it also charted on the pop charts). The success of “Six Days on the Road” helped him land a recording contract with Mercury Records, where he released his first single for the label, “Last Day in the Mines,” before the end of 1963.
Emmylou Harris’s debut for Reprise was an artistic masterpiece which stands up well today. Recorded in LA with Canadian producer Brian Ahern, who Emmylou was to marry a few years later, it brought in the influences of the California country-rock scene in which Emmylou had been immersed during her time with Gram Parsons, fusing them with some very traditional music. The musicians included Herb Pedersen (later a member of the Desert Rose Band) as the principal harmony singer, the Eagles’ Bernie Leadon playing a variety of instruments, soon-to-be Hot Band members James Burton and Glen D Hardin, and Fayssoux Starling, wife of John Starling of the bluegrass group The Seldom Scene as the main female harmony voice. Emmylou herself played acoustic guitar on a number of tracks.
Her first country single was the beautiful lost love ballad ‘Too Far Gone’. Written by Billy Sherrill and given a delicate string arrangement reminiscent of his work with Tammy Wynette (who had also recorded the song), it failed to make any inroads for Emmylou despite an intense yet understated performance imbued with anguish. It was re-released in 1978 to promote the compilation Profile, and then reached #13.
Gram Parsons had introduced Emmylou to the music and perfect harmonies of the Louvin Brothers, and a sparkling reading of their ‘If I Could Only Win Your Love’ was her first big hit, peaking at #4 on Billboard. Pedersen plays banjo here as well as supplying perfect harmonies, making this a true classic recording which stands up to the original.
Emmylou herself wrote just one song, the exquisitely beautiful ‘Boulder To Birmingham’, reflecting on her grief for the death of Gram Parsons. With echoes of gospel in the lyrics and folk in the melody (supplied by co-writer Bill Danoff) and arrangement, Emmylou provides a worthy tribute to her mentor which exudes sorrow. Perhaps in another tribute to their work together, she also covered the Everly Brothers’ ‘Sleepless Nights’ (a Felice and Boudleaux Bryant song most recently revived by Patty Loveless), which she had previously cut with Gram for their second album together, Grievous Angel, but which had been omitted from the final version.
It was still common practice in the 1970s for artists to cover recent hits. Emmylou picked Dolly Parton’s autobiographical ‘Coat Of Many Colors’ (a hit for her in 1971), and this tenderly sung version with its mainly acoustic backing and the angelic harmonies of Fayssoux Starling, is convincing even though her own background was far from the rural poverty which inspired the song. She also sounds beautiful if mournful on the Beatles’ ‘For No One’.
It wasn’t all delicate ballads. The good-tempered mid-tempo wailed drinking song ‘Bluebird Wine’ which opens the album is actually my least favorite track vocally, but gets things off to a sparkling start instrumentally. It is notable as the first ever cut for the then-unknown Rodney Crowell, who Emmylou was soon to ask to join the Hot Band. There are committed honky tonk numbers in a spunky cover of Merle Haggard’s broken hearted ‘Bottle Let Me Down’ with Leadon and Pedersen singing backing, although this doesn’t quite match up to the original. Emmylou also sang the definitive version of Shel Silverstein’s sympathetic (even triumphant) portrait of a faded honky tonk angel he calls the ‘Queen Of The Silver Dollar’ (previously recorded by Dr Hook and a hit for Dave & Sugar in 1976). Linda Ronstadt and Herb Pedersen sang harmony on Emmylou’s version.
Another future Hot Band Member, Ricky Skaggs, guests on fiddle on ‘Queen Of the Silver Dollar’, and fiddle and viola on ‘Before Believing’, a pretty acoustic ballad with a folky feel, written by Danny Flowers. Emmylou’s boyfriend at the time, Tom Guidera, plays bass on these two tracks. The latter provides the album title:
How would you feel if the world was falling apart all around you
Pieces of the sky falling on your neighbor’s yard but not on you
The album sold well, reaching #7 on the country albums chart, and was eventually certified hold. It has been rereleased on CD, both with the original track listing and in 2004 with two additional songs, ‘Hank And Lefty (Raised My Country Soul)’, which had been a minor hit for the African-American country singer Stoney Edwards a few years earlier, and ‘California Cottonfields’ (a Haggard album cut written by Dallas Frazier and Earl Montgomery)). Both are fine songs well performed by Emmylou, and it is well worth seeking out this version for those songs (or downloading them individually if you already have the album).
Grade: A
Buy it at amazon.
Long before Tim McGraw and Faith Hill became country music’s power couple, George Jones and Tammy Wynette fulfilled that role as Mr. & Mrs. Country Music. Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn and Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton may have sung about the ups and downs of life and love during the 1970s, but George and Tammy actually lived it.
Their earliest recordings date back to November 1968 when Tammy sang harmony vocals on “The Race Is On”, “I’ll Share My World With You”, and “The Hardest Part of All”, all remakes of earlier hits that George had re-cut for use as album filler. Tammy’s performances were uncredited, since she was under contract to Epic Records and George was still signed to Musicor. Cross-label collaborations were virtually unheard of in those days; only artists that were signed to the same label could record with each other. Tammy did appear on the cover of George’s 1969 LP I’ll Share My World With You; her Epic contract apparently did not prohibit her from doing so. She can be heard quite prominently on the 1969 recording “Never Grow Cold”, which she and George wrote together. This song is virtually a duet; it was buried on an album, since releasing it as a single would almost certainly have invited a lawsuit from CBS (Epic’s parent company at the time). The pair later re-recorded the song for Epic.
The pair wanted to record together regularly and more openly, so George negotiated a release from his Musicor contract — costing him $300,000 out of his own pocket — and signed with Epic in 1971. The first official Jones and Wynette duet, “Take Me”, under Billy Sherrill’s guidance, appeared later that year. It was a remake of George’s 1965 solo hit. The original version had reached #8. The duet version did almost as well, climbing to #9. It was followed up by “The Ceremony”, a #3 hit in which the pair exchanged sung wedding vows, in response to lines spoken by a minister. The next two singles, the gospel tune “Old Fashioned Singing” and “Let’s Build A World Together” fared less well, just cracking the Top 40.
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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.
Released in 1973, “What’s Your Mama’s Name” was the title track and lead single from Tanya Tucker’s second album for Columbia Records. Written by Earl Montgomery and the legendary Dallas Frazier and produced by Billy Sherrill, this is a typical country music story song in three verses.
In the first verse we are introduced to a young man named Buford Wilson who has recently arrived in Memphis, and we are told that he is looking for his lost love. By the end of the verse, it is revealed that he has been approaching little green-eyed girls and asking them, “What’s your mama’s name, child?” Even in those days when pedophelia and crimes against children weren’t in the daily headlines, folks were clearly uncomfortable with this behavior.
In the second verse, ten years have passed, and Wilson has descended into alcoholism, but is still approaching young green-eyed girls. He is arrested and sentenced to 30 days of hard labor in the county jail for bribing a young girl with a nickel’s worth of candy if she reveals her mother’s name. There is to be no happy ending to this sad story as the third verse reveals. Wilson, now an old man, has died a pauper, and among his possessions a letter is found that explains his behavior:
It said, ‘You have a daughter, and her eyes are Wilson green.’
Saw it coming, didn’t you? Tucker’s vocal delivery is strong and gives no hint that the singer was only 15 years old. “What’s Your Mama’s Name” became Tanya’s first #1 hit and the LP from which it was taken became her first gold album. It remains one of the best known songs in her catalog.
Grade: A+
Written by: Dallas Frazier & Earl Montgomery
Listen to “What’s Your Mama’s Name” at Last FM or purchase the track from iTunes or Amazon MP3.
My Kind of Country 