A grouchy Texan with a fathoms-deep voice, Lee Hazlewood was one of American pop music’s great outsiders. He’s best known for masterminding Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walkin’” in 1966, then cutting a couple of brilliant, if risquéé duet albums with Old Blue Eyes’ daughter.

Before that, he was best described as a hustler, who’d enjoyed success producing fellow Texan Duane Eddy’s twangy guitar instrumentals, but had failed in his quest to make it as a radio DJ, and a solo artist. This first installment in a reissue campaign from Light In The Attic, the illustrious label responsible for Rodriguez, The Monks and many more, tells of his early steps in the latter direction.

Trouble Is A Lonesome Town was released by Mercury in ’63, which majored in country music at the time, but it didn’t trouble the scorers. Each of its 10 tracks features a spoken introduction from Hazlewood, in which, with typically mordant wit, he lays out a background narrative about Trouble, a fictional sleepy railroad town in the old Wild West, and the cowboy characters who inhabit it — all by way of preparation for their exploits in the songs that follow.

“The people that live in Trouble… read more »