I looked for the longest time for "Big City" as it was one of my favorite songs from the jukebox at the Buckhorn Bar in Laramie Wyoming (where there is still a bullet hole in the mirror over the ancient bar). THis is Laramie for me!
I'm am very disappointed that the album has so many re-recordings the songs do not have the greatness they had when he first recorded them. I have always loved his music, but I will now have to find the original recordings. I will be cancelling my account with eMusic very soon!!!
I'm am very disappointed that the album has so many re-recordings the songs do not have the greatness they had when he first recorded them. I have always loved his music, but I will now have to find the original recordings. I will be cancelling my account with eMusic very soon!!!
This is a great album. I grew up with country music and just glad that there is a way to keep it around. I'm not worried about what they come up with now and we know why.
As the AMG review points out, these are NOT the original versions. These are re-recordings from 1994. The original versions, especially of the first 10 songs here, are some of the greatest country records ever made. You should seek those out, and leave these alone.
These songs are the music I grew up on in the late 1960's. I would have Rock and Roll on the radio when with a date or with freinds, I would switch to country music after when I dropped them off. As Barbara Mandrell said, "I was country when country wasn't cool".
There's never been a country music career anything like that of Merle Haggard. Launched soon after he was released from San Quentin, it presented him first as a reckless, paranoid, yet rather proud honky-tonk man, the electric guitar of Roy Nichols and the steel guitar of Norm Hamlin both reinforcing his workingman's grit. After discovering, through his prison songs, the value of autobiographical material, Haggard's writing grew even more personal, and more questioning. This led… more »
Whither country music - or will it wither? Most of the c&w on strut at the recent CMA awards had more to do with 80's power-rock and 00's teen-pop than the morning farm report. In recent years, an alt-country movement in such Willy-billy suburbs as Brooklyn's Williamsburg has waved a country flag, along with a taste for trucker's caps and Pabst Blue Ribbon. This isn't a sudden outcropping on the range; ever since Gram Parsons… more »
