12/28/2010
I listened to this disc twice through today (all 30 songs) while making Beef Daub Provencal. It’s a good disc to cut five pounds of raw meat to. I’ve just finished the Graeme Thomson bio and have just started Willie’s autobiography, so it is safe to say I am stewing in Willie Nelson music and lore. While my stew simmers for its final hour, I’ll see what strikes me on this third listen through the third disc of this Bear Family compilation of Willie’s earliest recordings. I have reviewed all of these songs previously when I reviewed The Complete Liberty recordings, and I seem to remember preferring the recordings from his second Liberty album. The songs on this disc come from sessions in 1963, and they have a smaller cast of musicians and a sparer setting.
“Right or Wrong” sounds like Randy Travis or George Strait from the late 1980s. I’m almost certain Randy Travis recorded this song on one of his early albums. Bobby Bruce’s up-tempo fiddle sets this song apart from other recordings. The yodeling at the end seems forced. It isn’t Willie. “Roly Poly” also opens with the speedy fiddle. There’s a jarring transition from two up-tempo Bob Wills-style Western Swing dance numbers to the moody, brooding ballads “Let Me Talk to You,” “The Things I Might Have Been,” and “The Way You See Me.” This captures perfectly the yin and yang of Willie’s musical repertoire. He can go as fast or as slow as you want him to. And he can switch speeds on a dime. On track six he picks up the tempo again with “Columbus Stockade Blues (version 1)” with Shirley Collie. It’s actually a slowed down version of this normally blistering crowd pleaser. Willie manages to enunciate words that other singers would slur. He seems to have a special ability to manipulate time. He is able to custom fit notes into bars. He measures out beats the way my wife’s Mississippi grandmother measured spices: one shake of this, two shakes of that. Willie sings to taste. His own taste. The raw banjo, the jazzy piano, and the Johnny Gimble-esque fiddle shine on these tracks. I like how the Bear Family puts Willie’s duets with Shirley together on this disc (as they did with Disc 2). Willie confirms in his autobiography that Shirley is the only person who could ever sing harmony with him. He says that she would anticipate where he was going. Sort of like shooting skeet. You have to lead the clay pigeon and shoot where it’s going to be, not where it is. She is the only one who could ever lead his phrasing and anticipate where he was going and end up in the same place. Jimmy Day’s steel guitar tries to save “You Took My Happy Away” from the strings and back-up singers, to no avail. Same with Roger Miller’s “Second Fiddle.” There are a half dozen violins listed for this track, but whoever has the solo redeems the rest of the string section, especially with the delicate flourish at the end. Willie pushes the limits of the meter with his phrasing even in an over-produced recording like this one. This isn’t one of my favorite versions of “Opportunity to Cry,” but it may be my favorite Willie song, so I covet every version I can find. Gene Garf’s piano stands out on this track and on “Lonely Little Mansion.” Hargus M. “Pig” Robbins takes over the piano for the April 25th session and the second version of “You Took My Happy Away.” The line “My sorry gets bigger each day” is vintage Willie. In Hank Cochran’s “Feed it a Memory” Willie sings, “I just feed it a memory to keep it alive.” Vintage Proust, vintage Fitzgerald. The next four tracks are from a November 20th session in which Willie sings other people’s songs: “I Hope So” (Shirley Collie), “This Cold War with You” (Floyd Tillman), “Blue Must Be the Color of the Blues (Jones-Williams), and “Seasons of My Heart” (George Jones). The back-up vocals and strings are toned down a bit, which gives Willie’s voice and Bill Purcell’s piano a bit more room to operate. Trumpets seem out of place on the last two of these recordings. “There’s a blue note in each song,” though, and Willie somehow finds the blue, the bruise, the pain, the hurt in even the most syrupy setting. “There are no seasons in my heart” and “my love for you will bloom eternally” are another way of saying “Funny How Time Slips Away.” “My tears like withered leaves will fall.” On November 21st Willie adds a flute to the mix. That may be “At the Bottom” of the list of instruments Willie should record with, but I’m sure it wasn’t his choice. I wish I could isolate Willie’s voice and Bill Purcell’s piano. I wonder if Garage Band or some other software would allow home users to do what Mickey Raphael did with “Naked Willie.” We could reverse engineer the songs and isolate Willie’s voice. “I’ll Walk Alone” may be the sparest song so far on this disk. Just Willie, piano, and flute with a bass behind them. This version of Fred Carter’s “River Boy” is equally spare. I started the day in bed listening to Neville Jason reading Proust’s Swann’s Way on tape. And then to hear Willie sing “nothin’ but a river boy.” The same social class issues Proust wrestles with through all six volumes of In Search of Lost Time. Memories and longing and always feeling outside of something. The next four tracks come from the same date in 1963, but a different session. Willie’s vocals are as good as they get on “Am I Blue,” but the do-wop singers are back. “Take Me As I Am (Or Let Me Go)” could be a Willie anthem, a honky tonk version of “Just as I Am.” “You’re trying to reshape me in a mold, love, in an image of someone you used to know.” But you can’t shape a shape-shifter like Willie. Willie channels Hank Williams on Hank’s “There’ll Be No Teardrops Tonight.” “If you think that you’re above me,” you got another thing coming. You can’t make me cry. I won’t let you hurt me. Then Willie does Hank Thompson’s “Tomorrow Night.” “You said tomorrow night that you might be able to keep this rendezvous with me at eight,” but tomorrow never comes. I’m beginning to appreciate Willie’s elocution, which his grandparents hammered into him. It adds seriousness and sincerity to every lyric. Not sure why Bear Family put these two alternate versions of “Columbus Stockade Blues” at the end of this set when they were recorded at the same time as the version on track 6. All of the versions are keepers. Maybe they thought listeners would not enjoy hearing the same song three times in a row. I wish Willie had recorded more with Shirley (and with Bobby Bruce and Gene Garf). The snappy snare drummer motors all three versions along as well. The disc ends with four tracks that were overdubbed in 1969. Not sure why they overdubbed these. “You Wouldn’t Even Cross the Street” is another “Funny How Time Slips Away” song. I think I prefer the version of “River Boy” on track 20. Willie’s vocals are more front and center in the version on track 20. The overdubbed version puts Willie’s voice in the background and brings the strings up front. The overdubbed version of “At the Bottom” nixes the flute that was on track 18, which is a plus. Willie’s always better at the bottom. “Better at the Bottom” could be his motto. You have nothing to fear when you’ve already gone to the dogs. Where else can you go? The overdubbed version of “I Hope So” tones the back-up singers way down to a faint whisper. “Happiness is sometimes hard for hearts to cling to” indeed. “You say your heart will never break.” Famous last words. Imagine an unbreakable heart. Would we want one if we could have one?
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