Country – Page 5 – Rock Salted

Willie Nelson – Me & Paul

Willie Nelson – Me & Paul Columbia FC 40008 (1985)

Me & Paul is largely a collection of old songs, many of which Willie had recorded before. If the late 1980s were a low point of his long career, then this album is at least the best of his worst period. There are hints here of a rambling man who once took country and rock music in both hands and cut them together, traits that were largely erased from his recordings that increasingly gravitated toward easy listening and pop sensibilities. Granted, the flat, sterile 80s production values harm the songs more than they help — every re-recording here is inferior to the older one(s). Anyone already a Nelson fan will find this mildly enjoyable, even if it won’t be the Nelson album they reach for most often, though the “presentable” slickness of these recordings won’t win many new converts to Nelson who shone brightest when he went just a little more against the grain.

Willie Nelson – The Promiseland

Willie Nelson – The Promiseland Columbia FC 40327 (1986)

The Promiseland is mostly easy listening pop with a country touch, and side two is easy listening western swing. Nothing is bad, exactly, it just sort of passes by without making any sort of impression, good or bad. The late 1980s were in some ways the nadir of Willie Nelson’s recording career. His vocals were lazy and the instrumental accompaniment was formulaic. The Promiseland exemplifies those tedious qualities of this part of Willie’s career, as he was caught up in fame and not particularly focused on his music — soon enough troubles with the taxman would compound the distractions he faced. Compare this album to The Sound in Your Mind, from a decade prior, which features some of Willie’s very best vocals. Earlier he sung in a way that used the songs to express something deeper. On The Promiseland, he is just singing what is written down, technically hitting all the notes but delivering them all in the same way (often using the same consistently off-key approach to singing), like he hasn’t stopped to consider at all what each song is meant to convey. He sings like he’s on a factory assembly line. Charlie Chaplin made the monotony of assembly line work the epitome of hilarity in Modern Times, capturing the degrading, back-breaking toll it takes, but Willie seems to be using such an approach here merely because it is the path of least resistance. It adds nothing to the music, and actually probably prevents the music from ever being really compelling.

Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard – Django and Jimmie

Willie Nelson & Merle Haggard – Django and Jimmie Legacy 8875093782 (2015)

Whenever the olympics are happening, a friend of mine — with clockwork reliability — laments all the “judged” sports. He likes events that are timed, or that assess who crosses the finish line first, and so forth. He despises the way gymnastics and figure skating rely on the whims of judges to rate performances. And he especially hates judged events that multiply a subjective vote against a “degree of difficulty” factor. To him, this results in a lot of botched performances of difficult routines beating out the flawless execution of purportedly less challenging ones. If you are like my friend, you might want to stop reading right now.

Django and Jimmie takes the very commercial sound Willie has been pursuing on his last few Columbia albums, as his touring band has started to die off (literally), and injects a sense of “classic” country tone, rather than being something that tries to go off the map and be “indie” or just a side-project or something, and also does not just adopt boring fads (Band of Brothers, Heroes) without a fight. There are far fewer parallels to Haggard’s recent career. This not the best thing either Nelson or Haggard has done, not by a long shot, but it seems like it deserves marks for having a high “degree of difficulty”. As Slavoj Žižek wrote about Greek acceptance of a brutal financial austerity program in the summer of 2015, “To persist in such a difficult situation and not to leave the field is true courage.” For Willie and Hag, at a late stage in both their careers, to persist in trying to make interesting music in the face of their capitulation to the demands of commercial country music is a stroke of magic, and, if nothing else, courageous. In a way, this is “middlebrow” music that manages, against the odds, to maintain some appeal to the now highbrow (!) “classic country” sensibility.

Although these two veteran performers’ voices may not be what they once were — Haggard’s voice has a much diminished range and is now indeed “haggard” — they benefit from state-of-the-art recording and a crack studio band. Actually, Willie has hardly sounded better on record since the year 2000.

The album’s title refers to two of their musical heroes of yesteryear: Django Reinhardt and Jimmie Rodgers. Yet the sound of these recordings is very contemporary. Jamey Johnson provides a guest vocal, and his own solo recordings mark a decent reference point for the sonic predilections of Django and Jimmie.

This is perhaps the duo’s strongest collaboration yet. From a strong reading of Bob Dylan‘s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” to a sturdy new recording of Haggard’s “Swinging Doors” to the intriguing new song co-written by Nelson and Buddy Cannon, “Driving the Herd,” to a Johnny Cash tribute, this album covers a lot of territory. The effortlessness in which it looks back and forges ahead with a contemporary sheen is a big part of what makes this music so courageous. Not for a second is there a doubt that the contemporary and the bygone can exist together seamlessly.

Johnny Cash – Everybody Loves a Nut

Johnny Cash – Everybody Loves a Nut Columbia CS 9292 (1966)

Johnny Cash had a sense of humor. One of his best characteristics was the breadth of his interests, his ability to strike a lot of different emotional notes, with humor being in that mix alongside his penchant for grim tales of murder, gut-wrenching stories of love and loss, and sincere professions of religious feeling. Everybody Loves a Nut is a collection of novelty songs. By this point in Cash’s career, he was looking for new twists on his old formulas. So this seems like just another gimmick. And it is a gimmick. But Cash brings a kind of unselfconscious earnestness to these songs that makes them a lot of fun. The best-known cut is the satire of the urban folk revival movement, “The One on the Right Is on the Left,” but the title track is pretty good too, and “Please Don’t Play Red River Valley” is a great performance. Almost a decade later Cash would make his Children’s Album, which took a similar approach without hardly any of the same enthusiasm or flair. This is a solid second-tier Cash album.

Johnny Cash – John R. Cash

Johnny Cash – John R. Cash Columbia KC-33370 (1975)

When Johnny Cash’s popularity sagged in the mid-1970s, his label Columbia stepped in to guide the recording process. Someone from the label picked out some popular songs, ran them by Cash to see which ones he would record, then went out and recorded all the instrumentals and simply had Cash sing over the top of the finished package. It was a very conscious effort to make Cash seem “relevant”, from the picture on the album cover of Cash with longer hair and a denim jacket to a warm, muted sound that fairly drips with the ambiance of huge American-made cars, faux-leather chairs, shag carpeting, dim yellow lighting, and other accoutrements of a time when the glory days of the American working man were starting to crumble. Cash practically disowned this album as a sell-out on his part. Yet, dated or not, this is a fair and listenable effort. It helps that there are lots of good songs, and the mellowness makes it a decent period piece. This may not be representative of anything else in Cash’s large catalog, but it isn’t nearly as bad as some would have it.

Johnny Cash – Look at Them Beans

Johnny Cash – Look at Them Beans Columbia KC 33814 (1975)

A ho-hum affair. There aren’t any real duds, but nothing to particularly impress either. The best is probably the rollicking “I Hardly Ever Sing Beer Drinking Songs,” which comes across something like a warm-up for his minor comeback novelty hit “One Piece at a Time” of the following year. By 1975, Cash was fairly consistently recording in a more contemporary style rather than the folky and frequently acoustic style established with Hello, I’m Johnny Cash. This new sound often had a kind of Texas barrelhouse or Bakersfield Sound flavor that seemed like a reaction to the Outlaw Country movement and the likes of Jerry Reed. Elsewhere string arrangements are common. A few tracks have a horn section, which seems to neither add a lot nor take anything away, it just sort of changes things up in a Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass sort of way. This is not the Cash album anyone is likely to reach for first, though fans will probably enjoy it well enough once its playing. He would go on to make quite a few more albums similar to this in varying degrees.

Johnny Cash – One Piece at a Time

Johnny Cash and The Tennessee Three – One Piece at a Time Columbia KC 34193 (1976)

After a few years without any significant chart success, Cash had a mild comeback with One Piece at a Time and its title track single. The album features a mixture of ballads and bouncy, novelty-inflected, up-tempo numbers. Easily the best thing here is the title track, a rollicking tale of an auto worker pilfering parts to assemble his dream automobile, only to have things go comically awry. It’s the best known Cash single of the 1970s, and for good reason. The piano riff was lifted from somewhere else, though the source eludes me at the moment. Overall, this one is decent if a little bland. Sort of a top of the third tier Cash album.

Johnny Cash – A Believer Sings the Truth

Johnny Cash – A Believer Sings the Truth Cachet Records CL 3-9001 (1979)

A relatively unknown album in some ways. It is perhaps the most eclectic one Johnny Cash ever recorded. Stylistically it’s all over the place. Jo-El Sonnier is on the sessions and his vaguely New Orleans second-line/Dixieland styled “I’ve Got Jesus in My Soul,” complete with a clarinet solo and brass band chorus, is something unusual for Cash. There is a version of Sister Rosetta Tharpe‘s “There Are Strange Things Happening Everyday” that’s decent too. In his first autobiography, Man in Black, Cash told about going to a Tharpe concert in the early Sixties, as his amphetamine addiction grew. “Oh Come, Angel Band” is the song most frequently included on compilations. The horns, boogie-woogie piano, and contemporary backing vocals make this album unlike most others from Cash. In a way, it seems a little like he was taking cues from what Elvis had been up to earlier in the decade (Aloha From Hawaii Via Satellite, etc.), or maybe even what Bob Dylan was trying to do around this same time (Street-Legal, At Budokan). Anyway, A Believer Sings the Truth isn’t gonna convince anyone of Cash’s talents if you haven’t heard him in better form elsewhere. But this one finds him stretching and finding some success with many different approaches. It holds up fairly well. It’s too bad he didn’t record any secular albums the same way around this time, because it does seem like producers killed a lot of his albums back then. Oh, and here’s a spoiler. “The Greatest Cowboy of Them All” is god. God is the greatest cowboy of them all.

Johnny Cash – The Sound of Johnny Cash

Johnny Cash – The Sound of Johnny Cash Columbia CS 8602 (1962)

After a few albums that tried to test the limits of Johnny Cash’s stylistic range and abilities — from the concept album Ride This Train to the retro country album Now There Was a Song! Memories From the Past to a second, drier gospel album Hymns From the Heart — he returns to the established folk-country sound of The Fabulous Johnny Cash and Songs of Our Soil with The Sound of Johnny Cash. While he is not trying to break any new ground, and there is not any standout single included, this remains one of his better early/middle period albums. It is a pleasantly mellow and likeable album that aligns the material and performances with Cash’s disposition as a singer raised on a farm but with some years of national touring behind him. He sort of honors his roots, yet also aims for something that has a touch of urban sophistication that stretches beyond those roots. By 1962 Cash’s voice had changed a bit, deepening and coarsening as a result of a steady touring performance schedule that left him with problems of chronic hoarseness. Those troubles with his vocal chords don’t surface on this album, but rather add a layer of complexity — turmoil even — just under the surface.

“In them Old Cottonfields Back Home” is a traditional folk song, and it just happens to ring true to Cash’s own upbringing on an Arkansas cotton farm. “Mr. Lonesome” with its vibraphone accompaniment and Cash singing at a lethargic pace, going into his lower vocal register, with light backing vocals, is pitch perfect for the album. Halfway between a smooth pop romance song and country heartbreak weeper it fits the hybridized city/country style that Cash had mastered. Then there is his first recording of the grim first-person tale “Delia’s Gone” (revived decades later with great success on American Recordings):

“First time I shot her
Shot her in the side
Hard to watch her suffer
But with the second shot she died”

With that song Cash was sticking to his fascination with murder and the dark side of life. A star of his stature might have been tempted to cast those interests aside and go exclusively with lighter fare — like Elvis around this time. Johnny Cash never did what might be expected, though.

Guitarist Luther Perkins is a crucial presence. As the music pushes toward urban sophistication, Perkins’ iconic boom-chicka-boom guitar picking is this primitive ballast that refuses to dissolve into the airy, consonant vocal harmonies. Yet that guitar sound is also an ideal foil for Cash’s vocal phrasing, allowing Cash’s singing to occupy a middle ground that moves confidently into the era of post-WWII prosperity without forgetting the grit, hard work and determination of a rural childhood. Cash’s background is honored while still being compartmentalized as a stepping stone to a role as an musical ambassador of sorts — most of Cash’s political views fit into the left-ish end of New Deal programs that accompanied the post-war boom.

Johnny Cash – I Would Like to See You Again

Johnny Cash – I Would Like to See You Again Columbia KC 35313 (1978)

In a relative sense at least, I Would Like to See You Again is one choice for Johnny Cash’s best album from the period that ran from the late 1970s through entire 1980s — only the unusual and slightly rough-hewn concept album The Rambler comes close, but that one puts theatrical elements in place of proper songs in a way that makes it less suited to regular listening. From the odd album cover, to the generally lackluster quality of his albums of this time period, this album doesn’t seem like it would have much to offer. Add to that the fact that Cash compilations tend to include the least interesting songs on it, and maybe it is not too surprising that this is often overlooked entirely. By no means is this a top tier Cash album. It still plays well all the way through — helped, perhaps, by being a meager 32 odd minutes in length. There is an amiable, mellow tone to most of the songs, with a hint of weariness and nostalgia. Cash’s voice is unburdened by overbearing fads and the band plays supportively. Pianist Earl Poole Ball, a veteran who played with Buck Owens and plenty of other country legends, was a huge asset to Cash’s band. He (with the other session pianists) plays just enough to change the pace without overdoing it. The guitarists add some politely sly licks on an electric guitar to further inject some virility.

The songs are nice. They suit Cash in middle age. One of the best is “Abner Brown.” Cash wrote the song himself. As a character portrait, it was a familiar format for him (e.g., “Cisco Clifton’s Fillin’ Station”). It is a tale of a small town drunk known from childhood, admired and celebrated by the narrator for his good nature. Others only tolerated Abner Brown, but Cash’s song celebrates him as a friend and a salt of earth type (in the full biblical meaning of the phrase drawn from the Sermon on the Mount). The one song that does seem out of character, with its heavy (right-wing) rural populism, is “After Taxes” (not written by Cash). But the album opens strong with the title track, “Lately,” and “I Wish I Was Crazy Again.” “I Don’t Think I Could Take You Back Again” might be the most effective performance.

Few will name this as a career favorite from Cash, but it is a good one to play to accompany a reunion of unselfconscious friends or any other gathering of effortlessly familiar, kindred spirits. It has a slight “bro” quality perhaps; it isn’t intrusive though.