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07-11-2007, 10:56 AM | #1 |
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Join Date: May 2000
Location: Playa del Carmen, Mexico
Posts: 939
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Porter Wagoner- Wagonmaster
I'm seriously digging this new CD by Porter Wagoner. I've never been very familiar with his music before now but this is old school countrytonk at its best. Old gent can still bring it home! Here's the review from AMG.
Review by Jeff Tamarkin That Porter Wagoner released a new album during the year of his 80th birthday -- some 55 years after his first recording -- is an event worth celebrating in itself. That it is consistent with the best work of his career is remarkable. Wagoner has always played it straight -- his brand of mainstream country-tonk never was as fashionable as his spangled stage outfits, and he never pretended to be an outlaw -- and that's just what he continues to do here. Though his baritone is more weathered than during his prime, Wagoner sounds decades younger on Wagonmaster, and there remains a youthful exuberance to the music. The only obvious signs of his age surface during the spoken word sections, such as the intros to "Albert Erving," a song of abject loneliness, and "Committed to Parkview," which Johnny Cash wrote for Wagoner but never recorded himself. Like many songs in Wagoner's canon, it's eerie, creepy, and more than a little bit sad, a vivid account of life inside a Nashville asylum, listening to the "guests," one of whom "thinks he's Hank Williams." One of the highlights of Wagonmaster, the song was presented to Wagoner -- himself a former "guest" at the facility, as had been Cash -- by Marty Stuart, who took a no-frills, purist's approach to his production of Wagonmaster (pedal steel rules!). There are songs of hard loss ("The Late Love of Mine," "Be a Little Quieter") and hard work, songs of faith (the back-to-back "Brother Harold Dee" and "Satan's River"), and songs of good times too -- all of them are classic Wagoner, one of the last of the true giants of Nashville's golden era.
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