Country – Page 11 – Rock Salted

The Byrds – Sweetheart of the Rodeo

The Byrds – Sweetheart of the Rodeo Columbia CS 9670 (1968)

Here’s a very well crafted album, free from any identifiable faults, that most listeners will probably like. I tend to agree with Lester Bangs, providing context in a two-part review of The Stooges‘ Fun House for CREEM Magazine, that The Byrds and their ilk were really an obvious and direct electrified extension of acoustic folk of the early 1960s, and their attempts at genre crossover, like this album of country/rock, really presented a straightforward combination of the styles that would have inevitably been attempted by somebody at some point. They take proven elements from country and rock and set them side-by-side. The vocal harmonies sound like typical smooth, airy and Anglo-centric Byrds stuff, and the country material is all authentic twang. But even if the Byrds rarely take any real chances, you can’t really argue with the craftsmanship here. Tons of great old tunes and covers of contemporary country, folk and R&B too. If you are going to do the obvious, you can’t make any mistakes, and on that score The Byrds really deliver.

Willie Nelson – To Lefty From Willie

Willie Nelson – To Lefty From Willie Columbia KC 34695 (1977)

For those who don’t know the story, Willie Nelson got his first big break in Nashville in the early 1960s as a songwriter, penning big hits for Patsy Cline, Faron Young, etc. He also maintained a career as a solo performer, but with less commercial success. Labels like RCA signed him more to gain access to his songwriting than for his performing abilities. After some period of years, he developed associations with New York based record labels, relocated to the Austin, Texas area, and brought together the conservative, redneck country music crowd with the liberal, hippie rock crowd. He struck gold with The Red Headed Stranger, his first album for Columbia records, in 1975. The rest, as they say, is history.

Willie’s idea for a follow-up to the smash success of The Red Headed Stranger was to record a tribute album to honky-tonk legend of the early 1950s Lefty Frizzell, To Lefty From Willie. The record executives in New York City didn’t agree with the choice, and shelved the album. Willie went back to the studio and recorded the excellent — if under-appreciated — The Sound in Your Mind, which was released in 1976 as the proper follow-up to The Red Headed Stranger. Columbia also released a gospel album in late 1976 recorded way back in 1973 for Atlantic Records, The Troublemaker. After editing out a squeaky drum pedal from the recordings, Columbia eventually released To Lefty From Willie in 1977. Willie sings alright, if not at his best, and his sister Bobbie provides some excellent honky-tonk piano, but it’s hard not to see that the New York executives had a point in balking at the album. It’s a fairly low energy outing, held back by unambitious performances by the backing band, especially the persistently cartoonish bass of Bee Spears. This was recorded with Willie’s touring band, who sometimes lacked both musical muscle and finesse. It’s a fine enough album, in the end, but hardly the best Willie could do at this point in his career. Choice track: “Railroad Lady.”

Willie Nelson – Red Headed Stranger

Willie Nelson – Red Headed Stranger Columbia KC 33482 (1975)

After garnering his first taste of real success as a recording artist by switching to Atlantic Records in the early 1970s, Atlantic promptly closed up its fledgling country division. This left Willie to find a new label. He landed at none other than Columbia, home of Johnny Cash. As Columbia pondered what to do with Nelson, he showed up with a complete album he recorded off on his own, Red Headed Stranger. His third wife Connie had suggested he record a song he sung to his children and that he had often performed when he worked as a radio DJ prior to any success in the music business. From that beginning, he crafted a loose concept album around the story of an Old West preacher who kills his wife and a romantic rival. Willie had garnered his recent success by fusing elements of rock and soul music, and elaborate suites of music. Red Headed Stranger was something else entirely. Stripped down to just the barest accompaniment, this was music that reached back more than looked forward. Most of the music dwells in the same rural, time-worn songwriting of The Carter Family, that has the feel of being written, sung, rewritten, sung again, and lived in for years. These are songs about dealing with the vagarities of life and its inevitable tribulations. There are touches of western swing added at times. Sometimes this reaches even further back, as with “O’er the Waves” (“Sobre las Olas”) the famous Mexican composition from the 19th Century. There are some slower, romanticized passages too, that give this a modern sheen. For the most part, though, this album could well have been recorded in the early 1930s. This is hard country. But it’s also the best kind of country music: plain and from the heart. This is the album that made Willie a superstar and a household name.

Johnny Cash – At Folsom Prison (Legacy Edition)

Johnny Cash – At Folsom Prison (Legacy Edition) Legacy 88697 32742 2 (2008)

The “Legacy Edition” of Johnny Cash’s iconic At Folsom Prison (1968) presents the two (!) complete concerts used as the basis for the original album together with a documentary on DVD and expanded liner notes.

Michael Streissguth, author of Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison: The Making of a Masterpiece, provided the liner notes and coordinated the documentary. He does a great job digging up valuable information about Cash, his music, the recording of this album, and the people who made it happen–including the inmates. Bonus DVDs have become a familiar way for record labels to inflate the cost of an album, but often provide only grainy home-video quality concert footage or what seems like the security tape footage from studio recording sessions. They are so often not worth it! But this DVD is an exception. Not only is there live footage from the shows that were recorded for the album, but there are interviews with former Cash associates, audience members, and surviving family members reflecting on contributions of the deceased. One inmate interviewed, Millard Dedmon, offers some pretty amazing insights on what it meant to be locked up in prison in 1960s America, and how the inmates welcomed Cash or anybody who took enough interest in them to make an appearance.

Many perhaps assume that the original At Folsom Prison album is the complete concert Johnny Cash played January 13, 1968. That’s wrong for many reasons. There were two morning shows that day. Two were thought needed to ensure that enough suitable takes would be captured. The recording was a project Cash had wanted to do for a while. He had played prison concerts a number of times previous, and knew the setting would make for a great recording. Knowing that a recording was being made, there were rehearsals of course. During rehearsals, he learned a song by then-current Folsom inmate Glen Sherley, “Greystone Chapel,” passed along on a demo tape. In the second show, they play that song multiple times. But surprisingly, almost all of the original album was culled from the first show, with the exception of “I Got Stripes,” “Give My Love to Rose,” and some between-song prison environmental ambiance. Cash of course plays one of his most famous songs: “Folsom Prison Blues,” which actually lifted the melody and lyrical structure of Gordon Jenkins‘ “Crescent City Blues,” with the famous line “I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die” adapted from Jimmie Rodgers‘ “Blue Yodel (T for Texas),” “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma/just to see her jump and fall.”

Some of the little “flubs” in the concert recording are actually planned gags, like when June Carter (she married Cash less than two months later) jokes, “I’m talkin’ with my mouth!” She says the same thing in both shows, and it seems a lot less charming the second time you hear it. Cash’s question, “Is this water?” and quip about drinking some that had “run off” something is also the same joke he delivered in July of 1964 at the Newport Folk Festival. He also manages to forget the words to songs at times and generally miss the mark on his vocals. But that’s more noticeable in the second show. It’s possible now to wonder, though, whether he planned to do it.

The way the original album came together seems all the more impressive after hearing the “Legacy Edition.” The original trimmed out the weaker performances and kept a remarkably good flow, more so than either of the original shows. This expanded edition actually takes away some of the mystique. Still, “The Legend of John Henry’s Hammer” is nice to have (though it was previously added as a bonus track to reissue editions starting with 1999’s At Folsom Prison).

As an aside, it’s worth noting that prison populations were quite different in the late 1960s than at this writing over four decades later. Since then, prison populations have soared 600%, and there was a distinctly racist element to the so-called “war on drugs” started by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s that put mostly (poor) black men in prison for reasons other than criminality (read sociologist Loïc Wacquant for more detail). In other words, the crowd in Folsom that January day in 1968 was mostly more serious criminals, like bank robbers (Glen Sherley), armed robbers, kidnappers and rapists (Millard Dedmon), and probably worse. Cash still empathized with the audience. He made efforts to advocate for prison reform. He had lobbied along with Reagan and Billy Graham to get Glen Sherley paroled, and then took on Sherley into his troupe for a while. Although strangely some people write Cash off as a typical country redneck, or maybe a typical rural populist, he actually wasn’t much like any of those things. Although there was somewhat of a sneer whenever mixing art and politics came up, Cash did do so repeatedly. Most of Cash’s brand of “activism” was just about the notion that everyone deserves a fair shake and should be treated with dignity–even convicts. That of course put him at odds with the American political establishment built upon a very different foundation, notwithstanding some pretensions to the contrary. So he couldn’t help but be “political” in bristling with the way things were. But he also wasn’t just another rural populist, with views that chafed against the situation for ordinary folks in urban centers. Cash often sang about the industrialized North, and someone writing in the Village Voice years ago hypothesized that Cash was a little more “liberal” than your average country star because he grew up on a New Deal farm in Dyess, Arkansas. Cash called the town “a socialistic setup” in his first autobiography. It also may have been relevant to this album’s popular success that it came out in 1968, a pivotal year in history, when progressive and liberal social norms made breakthroughs into wider acceptance. None of that matters a whole lot to Cash’s own attitudes — though he was, in a sense, positioning himself as the exception to rural ambivalence and hostility to the New Deal. What did matter was that despite how big a star he became, Cash could always pull off a country-simple charm that stuck with him just about his whole life. For At Folsom Prison, that charm was paired with a raw energy and palpable sense of connection with the audience that makes this a one-of-a-kind document.

Johnny Cash – The Rambler

Johnny Cash – The Rambler Columbia KC 34833 (1977)

Johnny Cash was a pioneer in making “concept” albums. These included some with between-song narrations or skits. The very last one he ever made was 1977’s The Rambler. In some ways, it’s the most interesting of them all, though it is a little rough around the edges. The basic premise is that Cash plays The Rambler, a sort of “wise old man” character driving across the country. Along the way he picks up The Fisherman, who is something of a reluctant hitchhiker (the Rambler has to persuade him to come along), and The Cowgirl, who claims to have killed her “old man” and talks about cheating a pinball machine — which only cost a nickel — to play for over two hours. The dialogue/skits are woven together with songs that pick up on themes and events mentioned in the skits. What is different about The Rambler from earlier concept albums like Ride This Train and America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song is that this one is explicitly theatrical, with Cash acting out a role, not merely speaking as a narrator. This is also the only concept album Cash made that had a contemporary focus. All his other concept albums looked back on historical topics or had nostalgic themes. It is also worth noting that The Rambler is one of the only albums Cash wrote entirely by himself (From Sea to Shining Sea seems to be the only other he wrote all by himself).

The story carried through the album deals with the possibilities of open-ended road trips, passing scenery, romantic interests back home, people’s use for religion, factory work. For instance, “Wednesday Car” is in the tradition of songs Cash had recorded earlier in the decade like “Oney” and “One Piece at a Time.” It’s about an auto factory where the only day of the week that workers were in the right frame of mind to do good work was Wednesday, so you hope you have a car made on a Wednesday. The Rambler says he has one. It’s a commentary that was somewhat specific to its time. Anyone who owned or rode in a big 1970s American-made car knew that quality control was notoriously bad and many cars were “lemons” that didn’t work well even when brand new. A few decades on some listeners might not appreciate the context for the song, though.

The late 1970s were one of the very worst periods of Johnny Cash’s recording career. Thanks to his TV show that ended in 1971, he was still riding the tail end of his biggest wave of popularity. He was in demand as a live performer, and his grueling touring schedule didn’t exactly leave a lot of room to spend time on recording. As a result, the album occasionally feels rushed, and certain songs and dialogues feel like they would have benefited from maybe a few extra takes. Also, a few dated production effects hold back some songs. It’s that way with “No Earthly Good,” which would have been better replaced with the superior acoustic demo version posthumously released on Personal File.

While not Cash’s finest moment by any means, The Rambler is one of his best of the late 70s and certainly the most interesting offering of the era. It fits somewhere in the continuum of uniquely American travelogues, like Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Woody Guthrie’s Bound for Glory, Jack Keruac’s On the Road, Monte Hellman’s Two-Lane Blacktop, and a host of others. Cash does okay with his foray into the genre. Even though the album is theatrical and fictional, the format allows him to really run with a lot of themes that have coursed through his work. The topics seem meaningful to him and his treatments pretty genuine. The very idea of traveling around the country aimlessly is pretty radical. It seems to be premised on the idea that people aren’t entirely independent, and are unable to completely control their own destiny, because of ties to “the system”. But, maybe, traveling long and far enough, some chance will arise to kind of break free and remake your life. Though it is worth mentioning that the Rambler character also hints at the “tramp” archetype of an unemployed worker in an industrial economy, wandering aimlessly in search of work. This was something with some historical relevance at the time the album was released, with “outsourcing” trends beginning and well-paid employment in factories coming under sharply increasing assault.

If you come to The Rambler just looking for tunes, you’ll be disappointed. To be precise, only about 57% of the album is actually made up of songs, proper. Frankly, none of these songs are that memorable, individually. Taken as a whole, though, this album is a nice experience. There aren’t many albums — if any — quite like it.

Johnny Cash – The Gospel Road

Johnny Cash – The Gospel Road Columbia KG 32253 (1973)

And He spoke, and the multitude assembled contemplated, “Why dost thou release such a substandard recording?” In an era in which double LPs seemed de rigueur, Johnny Cash managed to one-up the proposition by making a film about Jesus and releasing this double LP soundtrack to it. It has all the hallmarks of a big-budget vanity record. It plays like Cash’s thank you note to Jesus for helping him deal with his drug addictions. It has about the same entertainment value and artistic merit as a nondescript thank you note to someone else found out on the street. Only (a) bonzo Cash completists (like me) and (b) religious zealots are really ever going to listen to this, and for those poor saps it will probably be a one-time thing because this has zero replay value — if you make it all the way through the first time that is. Facts aside, it feels like this record is one long speech by Cash. The music is almost something fit in around the narrations, rather than the other way around. If you want just the music, you are denied even that because the narrations are not just interludes between songs but are woven through the songs themselves.

Inasmuch as this album and the movie that spawned it were among Cash’s proudest achievements of his career, it’s worth giving this a more thorough reading. The film, The Gospel Road, wasn’t exactly typical Hollywood fare. It was filmed in Israel, on location where Jesus supposedly lived and preached. Cash was in it, as himself, Robert Elfstrom was Jesus, and June Carter Cash played Mary Magdalene. Something of an independent production, made with a lot of people who aren’t professional actors or filmmakers, this didn’t exactly get major distribution. But Cash worked with Billy Graham to show it to churches and religious audiences.

There is an odd tone to the album. Cash fluctuates. At times he seems to see Jesus as a historical figure and archetype of a “good person” who lived life “right” and to have done so had to be essentially an outsider and revolutionary within his society. It’s a kind of knowing view that although these are religious beliefs there is something more rational behind the stories that make them significant. But then, at other times he seems to take something excessively literal, and there is a deadpan acceptance of the “Jesus was magic” sort of miracle making. Could it be that maybe Cash just took seriously the things that most in society look at as accepted belief rituals and symbols that privately everyone acknowledges are just myths that are regularly told and politely tolerated and not questioned openly? In those moments — there are plenty here — Cash seems naive. It’s a sort of regression. His earliest recordings in the 1950s came from a stylistic place in which rural life was widely recounted and even celebrated with a wise and thoughtful touch. Here he seems like the oblivious fool who doesn’t seem to get that he is proclaiming something quite unsophisticated. “Jesus” just becomes a symbol of something beyond, a life unattainable. At times Jesus is presented as something of a role model — do away with hypocrites, be good to others especially the needy and downtrodden, contribute to your community. But this routinely crosses over into the realm of setting up unattainable, fantasy images, sort of a carrot on a stick. If these moments ended with a wink, an acknowledgement that this is just allegory and not meant to be taken literally, the whole effort might be more palatable. But those moments never come. Cash doesn’t really reveal the wizard behind the curtain as some ordinary joe.

So, the music? There are some good bits. The most intriguing stuff appears on side four, where orchestrated passages with a prominent horn meant to sound “eerie” and unsettling start to approach the sound of modern jazz, and in that are interesting for unintended reasons. Some of the guitar and piano is good in places too. They aren’t featured that much, so that’s a disappointment. Early on there are some overbearing strings placed over the music that get quite tiresome. June carter does a solo song, and Kris Kristofferson and others appears too, with good results. The biggest disappointment, though, is Johnny Cash. His singing is often quite noticeably poor. He sounds downright unrehearsed. He voice is frequently off-key and hoarse almost. The best moments just kind of pass by quickly and the most tedious ones drone on for minutes. Some of these songs might have been interesting standing alone, but with the narrations and fragmentary nature of these versions they don’t add up to much. Take “He Turned the Water Into Wine (Part 1),” for instance. Cash had been performing the song live and on his TV show for years. The version he performed February 11, 1970 at the conclusion of “The Johnny Cash Show” or the similar version included on The Gospel Music of Johnny Cash makes a useful comparison. Live, Cash made the song a multifaceted thing of beauty, with mellow parts just with Cash’s voice and acoustic guitar, then building up with backing vocal choruses and a full band, with Cash’s voice reaching a soaring crescendo and finding opportunities for infectious syncopation. At his best, Cash made the song a marvel of coordination and cooperation between all the many performers. The full song is not just about the wedding at Cana (John 2:1-11), but also about the feeding of the multitude of 5,000 with five loaves of bread and two fish (Matthew 14:13-21, Mark 6:31-44, Luke 9:10-17 and John 6:5-15). The intricate performance by Cash’s band lends the possibility of interpreting these parables as an act of convincing a crowd to share and contribute and being good and generous. But the performance on The Gospel Road is just Cash with guitar and a little plunking and cloying piano, delivering a few lines and then turning to a narration emphasizing the “miracle” of supposedly turning water into wine at the Cana wedding (without reference to the feeding of the multitude). This leaves no room for an allegorical interpretation, only that literally there was an act of “magic” transforming matter against the law of physics. The most wonderful aspects of the other performances are totally absent, leaving a hollow, worthless shell.

In the end, Cash approached The Gospel Road as an effort in proselytizing and religious praise, not as a work of purely musical value. This sounds like a rube gushing about intimate personal details that don’t have a place in public. Lots of gospel music provides a framework to let deep passions, emotions and feelings out in ways they might not otherwise. But, dear reader, this is not one of those opportunities! Musical treatments get short shrift and the audience is almost taken for granted, in the worst possible way. We need to look at The Gospel Road as a token indulgence earned after a long career of good efforts, but not as something to really take seriously. Then it can be safely ignored, like a bootleg copy of home recordings that weren’t ever supposed to be released.

Elvis – Moody Blue

Elvis – Moody Blue RCA AFL1 2428 (1977)

When searching for an allegory for Elvis’ later career, it’s tempting to think of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun with his wings of feathers and wax and then plummeted into the sea. Although that Greek myth is often seen as a tale of hubris, there was no hubris whatsoever in Elvis’ iconic early 1970s live revue. That was the Elvis who invented the big Vegas rock show, and who put on show after show to audiences of 2,000 or more, often twice a night. Some claim that when he was performing a full 50% of visitors to Las Vegas went to an Elvis show on their trip! It takes only a cursory perusal through Elvis’ early 1970s live albums to find that this was a man who could deliver huge songs with an amazing level of emotional commitment. This wasn’t someone who thought himself the king of rock, this man was the king of rock. So instead of Icarus, the better analogy is that of John Henry the legendary steel-driving man (a real person!) who outdid a railroad spike-driving machine, but at the cost of his life. It’s the story of the human toll of modern existence. The only way Elvis could do what he did as long as he did was with a steady supply of drugs. He couldn’t stay ahead of the drugs forever though. Inevitably, and invariably, those who surpass ordinary human limits fall. So it’s more a question of sacrifice. Elvis did too much. But Elvis was an American icon precisely because rash excess seems like a national vice, and also because he did these things for us — the audience.

It is on Elvis’ descent, actually just before his death, that Moody Blue arrived. It is a patchwork of live recordings from as far back as 1974 (the previously-released “Let Me Be There” from Recorded Live on Stage in Memphis) plus some “studio” recordings from the Jungle Room of his Graceland mansion (from some of the same sessions as From Elvis Presley Boulevard, Memphis, Tennessee). This album is flawed, surely. Seeing the inclusion of a track from a previous album reveals how little new material was available. And “Little Darlin'” is every bit the moldy oldie it appears. Elvis’ voice seems to lumber, moving in one direction and sticking with it. But by and large there is a weepy country vibe here that suits Elvis’ dark and tragic approach to what are mostly sad heartache tunes. This is a soundtrack to a lonely night crying into your beer. It’s far from Elvis’ best. Yet it might be the best he had to offer this late in his life.

Johnny Cash – America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song

Johnny Cash – America: A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song Columbia KC 31645 (1972)

The early 1970s were a turbulent time in America, with the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam war, the biggest economic crisis the Western world had faced in many decades, continued fights to implement integration, women’s liberation, and much more. Oh, and there was a lot of stuff happening to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of the nation’s independence from England in 1776. Along comes Johnny Cash, with this album, depicting him on the cover in a military-style jacket on a decrepit farmhouse porch behind a flag, and subtitled “A 200-Year Salute in Story and Song”. The theme is American history. It looks pretty heavy-handed on paper. The thing is, he does a pretty good job with this concept. He re-records a few tunes he had done before, and performs an assortment of other songs, mostly new ones written himself. There is a lot of between-song spoken dialog, and even a recitation of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Some of these tracks were recorded exclusively for the astronauts on the Apollo 14 space mission (the one where Alan Shepard hit golf balls on the Moon), but ended up here instead. Like much of Cash’s early 70s output, the songs have a minimalist, folky feel, and there are only a couple of cuts with his trademark boom-chicka-boom rhythm (“Paul Revere,” “These Are My People”). And while this looks a lot like a very rudimentary recitation of the standard “story of America” taught to little kids in grade school, it ends up being slightly more nuanced than that. “Big Foot,” about the Wounded Knee Massacre, wasn’t something frequently taught in school history classes — would Cash have dug Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States when it came out years later? This release predated the Pine Ridge Incident, erupting in response to the anniversary of Wounded Knee, by only a matter of months. Yet Cash elsewhere celebrates genocidal madmen like Christopher Columbus, so there are still contradictions. Listeners who want Johnny in good voice, recorded well with a crisp and talented backing band will probably find lots to like here. Those who focus on lyrics more than the instrumental contributions probably will care a lot less for this one. In any event, this was one of Cash’s last concepts albums.

Johnny Cash – Ragged Old Flag

Johnny Cash – Ragged Old Flag Columbia KC 32917 (1974)

Johnny Cash’s recordings of the 1970s aren’t usually regarded well. He seemed to struggle with issues that tend to face every big star eventually: what happens when you’ve been around the business for long enough that popular tastes have changed and new trends and fads have come along? Stay true to what you always did (even if that is less popular) or adapt to the times (can you pull it off)? Interestingly, Cash tries a little of both with Ragged Old Flag.

The title track finds Cash displaying his most chauvinistic, nationalist populism, which is presented as mere patriotism during the midst of the Watergate scandal. It’s always hard to pin down Cash on politics, but it is common for people who lived through the Watergate era and fully understood Nixon’s crimes to insist that the president shouldn’t have gone to prison or been removed from office, just out of some vague sense of “patriotism”. Cash seems to take a similar view, at least by implication. It’s maybe also worth noting that Cash had met Nixon personally by this time, and had performed for him at the White House.

The album often recalls the “old” sound of Cash’s 50s recordings. But Charlie Bragg is the co-producer, and he seems responsible for providing a more contemporary country flair to some of the material here, most notably “Southern Comfort.” Cash has good support from Earl Scruggs on banjo and The Oak Ridge Boys on backing vocals throughout. Some of the folkier moments build on what was achieved on Hello, I’m Johnny Cash and Man in Black too, with a little more slick and polished sound.

Cash wrote (or co-wrote) everything here. Some of those efforts are worthy of note. “Don’t Go Near the Water” is an environmentalist paean. It’s something unusual for a country star. Then there is “King of the Hill,” a song that prefigures a lot of what Bruce Springsteen would become known for a few years down the line. It’s a song about “manly” men who want to succeed in life and go to the coal mines rather than the cotton mill to do it. But by the end, the song conveys that eventually all the coal will be gone, and if you’re not dead already you can call yourself king of the hill. But it’s a kind of sad prize, and Cash very subtly makes it an ironic one, implying (without clearly stating it, except through a little chuckle) that maybe it was all a waste.

This album is among the better of Cash’s efforts of the decade. Much of side two runs a little thinner after the good “Lonesome to the Bone,” but side one in particular delivers some good performances and songwriting with energy and conviction. This isn’t the place to start with Cash. Still, admirers may want to take a listen at some point as it would be a full twenty years before he made another album this good.

Willie Nelson – The Words Don’t Fit the Picture

Willie Nelson – The Words Don’t Fit the Picture RCA Victor LSP-4653 (1972)

Willie Nelson languished in near obscurity as a solo artist through the 1960s and early 1970s, despite recognition penning a number of hits for others. In his early days he conformed to the whims of his producers, with a typical “Nashville” sound. As time went on, he — like a lot of Motown stars like Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder — sought to assert himself more in the recording process. His vocals changed. Rather than holding notes for a long time and adding a lot of vibrato like a pop crooner, he sang ahead of the beat more forcefully and sang with more clipped, staccato phrasing. The backing vocals, string backing, and other Nashville trappings fell by the wayside too, and Willie’s accomplished guitar playing featured more prominently — characterized by his trademark pauses interrupted by staccato runs on his iconic converted classical acoustic guitar.

The Words Don’t Fit the Picture is something of a forgotten item in the Nelson catalog — AMG gives it only a one-sentence review, RYM has no reviews and only a few ratings and it’s not even mentioned in Graeme Thomson’s biography Willie Nelson: The Outlaw. It was released around the time Nelson moved to the Austin, Texas area and hired a new cutthroat manager from the rock world, before his big break with Shotgun Willie. It has elements of the Nashville sound, but also plenty of moments that foreshadow the ways Nelson would breakthrough to superstardom in a few years. He wrote or co-wrote everything here. Though it would be hard to call any of these standouts, there’s not a bad tune to be found. And this set is nothing if not eclectic. Nelson’s wide interests in jazz, western swing, traditional pop, soul, etc. subtly make their presence felt. In essence, Willie takes the Nashville sound as far out as it can go, right to its furthest boundaries. Take “London,” for instance, which sounds like a countrified version of a beatnik monologue off a Tom Waits album.

This may be a transitional effort, but it wonderfully captures a lot of strengths of the different elements at play. It also shows that Nelson was certainly a professional, delivering crisp songs in an assured manner, even when they have “typical Nashville” written all over them. Listeners who can forget about where this stands in relation to other things Nelson has done may find that this is simply a damn fine country album.