Album Review: Moe Bandy – ”I’m Sorry For You, My Friend’

1977 saw the release of another solidly traditional honky tonk album for Moe. The title track, the album’s sole single, was a faithful Hank Williams cover with a very authentic steel-laced arrangement, which was a top 10 hit for Moe. The song offers sympathy and fellow-feeling to a friend with marital woes.

A notable inclusion is what I believe is the first recorded version of ‘Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind’, later one of George Strait’s biggest hits. It was written by Sanger D Shafer, a regular writer for Moe, and his wife Darlene Shafer. Moe’s version is fine in its own terms – a great traditional honky tonk ballad, and one is left wondering if it might have been a major hit single for him, but Strait fans are likely to prefer that more familiar version.

Sanger Shafer also co-wrote one song with Moe, the closing ‘She’s Everybody’s Woman, I’m Nobody’s Man’, which could easily have been a hit. It is about a former cheater obsessing after the tables have been turned:

As I watch her at the bar with all those men around
I know before closing time one or two won’t be turned down

Once she thought I was the only man
But when I cheated every night
It made her understand
That she don’t have to live a life
Of staying home alone
…

I’m starving for her love
But she’s got more than she can stand
I’m watching my world melt like castles in the sand
She’s everybody’s woman and I’m nobody’s man

‘She’s An Angel’ is on much the same theme, with an added side of self-delusion, written by Harlan Howard and Lola Jean Dillon. Here Moe insists “she’s a good girl, overacting”.

‘A Four Letter Fool’ is another fine song, with some pretty Spanish guitar, and a regretful lyric about a man who has thrown away domestic happiness in favour of “a few forbidden pleasures”.

‘So Much For You, So Much For Me’, an anguished look at the division of spoils following a divorce, is a cover of a Liz Anderson single from the 60s. Bill Anderson and Mary Lou Turner write ‘All The Beer And All My Friends Are Gone’, in which the protagonist finally has to face the cold hard truth about his broken heart. ‘Someone That I Can Forget’ is a sad ballad previously recorded by Jim Ed Brown, loaded with steel guitar.

‘The Lady From The Country Of Eleven Hundred Springs’ is a bouncy up-tempo number about a woman who can outdrink the protagonist and his purse. Moe turns his attention to the rampant hyper-inflation which plagued the 70s in ‘High Inflation Blues’, in a Jimmie Rodgers style country blues, complete with yodel:

It could drive a man to drinkin’
But I can’t afford the booze
I got those heart breakin’, escalatin’, high inflation blues

The cost of livin’ keeps goin’ up
And taxes ain’t goin’ down
I’m just treadin’ water and trying not to drown
Mr Carter I know you’re up there
And I sure could use a hand
So won’t you please have mercy on
The common working man

This is an excellent album. It is not readily available as such, but the tracks can be found on iTunes (in the relatively poorer quality reproduction noted previously).

Grade: A+