WFMU's Beware of the Blog

Country Tangos and Hillbilly Rhumbas (mp3s)

Not too long ago, we examined the bizarre but enjoyable world of the country mambo.  Today we shift gears only slightly and check out two other microscopically small sub-genres of the Nashville recording industry: the country tango and rhumba scenes. 

Well, mostly these were Nashville efforts.  The Lucky Stars represent an exception as their version of Tennesee Tango was recorded in California, if I'm not mistaken.  If you think the intersection of country music and Latin dance crazes represents an unlikely collision of cultures, you may wish to brace yourself for the knuckle-headed collection of country twist records we've got stashed away for a future post.

Pee Wee King  -  Tennessee Tango  (2:00)

York Brothers  -  Tennessee Tango  (2:41)

Sheb Wooley  -  Texas Tango  (2:11)

Pee Wee King  -  I Can't Tell A Waltz From A Tango  (2:11)

Sunshine Ruby  -  Too Young To Tango  (2:29)

Ernest Tubb & Red Foley  -  Too Old To Tango  (2:16)

Lucky Stars  -  Tennessee Tango  (3:00)

Hank Snow  -  The Rhumba Boogie  (2:48)

Mallie Ann & Slim  -  Hillbilly Rhumba  (1:50)

Rusty Draper  -  The Train With The Rhumba Beat  (2:19)

Jimmie Rodgers  -  The Rhumba Boogie  (2:20)

The Death Of Little Kathy Fiscus (and Walter Patrick Ireland) - MP3

Retired Pasadena firefighter Walter Patrick Ireland, aged 94, died earlier this week after a short illness.  In 1949, Ireland was involved in the two-day effort to rescue 3-year-old Kathy Fiscus from an abandoned well in San Marino, California.  Kathy had been playing in an open field with friends when she disappeared underground after falling into the 14" opening of the uncapped well.  Kathy was already dead by the time she was pulled up from a depth of nearly 100-feet.  Accounts differ as to who pulled her up.  The Pasadena Star-News article linked above credits Ireland, while the TIME magazine article (also linked above) indicates that it was firefighter Bill Yancey.  In any case, Ireland joined the Pasadena Fire Department in 1940 and retired as a captain after 34 years of service.

For 27 hours, Los Angeles TV station KTLA pre-empted its regularly-scheduled programming to broadcast live news coverage of the event to its viewers, instantaneously bringing them each new wrinkle in the horrifying story.  Media historians generally agree that KTLA's coverage of the event set the standard for the kind of live on-the-scene reporting that we still see today.

Within weeks, Kentucky singer Jimmie Osborne had recorded The Death Of Little Kathy Fiscus for the King label, which became a top ten hit.  In 1964, Starday released the Howard Vokes version of the song, which can be heard below.

Howard Vokes  -  The Death Of Little Kathy Fiscus  (2:26)

They Were Doin' The Mambo - Hillbilly Style (MP3s)

The first time I heard a hillbilly mambo song, I knew I'd stumbled onto something worth further investigation.  The combination of fiddles and steel guitars with mambo-centric lyrics and spirited grunts made for goofy and irrepressible fun.  For better or worse, I started seeking out such records and buying them whenever I was lucky enough to stumble upon one.  Turns out there was a small wave of such discs released in the 1954 and 1955 time frame, when the mambo was dominating dance floors across America.  Who knows, if these records came to life 3 or 4 decades later they probably would've been hailed as World Music masterpieces.

Tex Williams  -  They Were Doin' The Mambo  (2:54)  Western swinger and B-movie cowboy Tex Williams, the former vocalist for Spade Cooley's band, is most famous for recording Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette), the colossal 1947 smash that provided Capitol Records with its first million-seller.  He was recording for Decca when he struck gold (artistically, though not commercially) with this 1954 track.

Wesley & Marilyn Tuttle  -  Tennessee Mambo  (2:44)  Wesley Tuttle was another western B-movie actor and country singer who tried his hand at swinging mambo-style with this excellent 1954 effort recorded with his wife Marilyn.  For some reason, when Bear Family released a 4-disc set of Tuttle's old records, including many cut with his wife, they left this track out, though they did include the flip side, Higher And Higher And Higher.  Neither side was a hit.

Hank Snow  -  That Crazy Mambo Thing  (2:04)  Hank Snow hit #10 in late 1954 with this hilarious account of farmers watching vacationing city dwellers having a mambo party out in the barn.

Rockin "Rudy" Hansen  -  The Mambo Queen  (1:57)  I've always gotten a kick out of the way Rudy's identified on the label of this 1955 record.  If anything was going to go in the "nickname" quotes, you'd think it would be "Rockin" and not "Rudy," but you'd be wrong.  Check out the label shot on your right.  Rudy was born on a farm in upstate New York, but later relocated to New Jersey.  In 1959, when Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn was honored at a White House dinner, Hansen supplied the entertainment and a TIME magazine article identified him as the "cowboy guitarist from New Jersey."  Here's an 8x10 of Rudy looking impossibly cool.

Follow the jump for more country mambo workouts.

Great 45rpm marketing gimmick

A recent post about Record Store Day was certainly a useful reminder that good record stores are well worth supporting.  These days most "record" selling is done via the compact disc, but as an incurable 45rpm addict I maintain that the golden age of the record store was during the reign of the 7" single.  One of my all-time favorite gimmicks used to move 45's off the record store shelves and into the homes of consumers was the one employed by the Debbie label, which set aside a little bit of label space on each disc for the owner to personalize the platter with a picture of himself or herself.

The "paste your photo here" ploy must not have been too successful, though, or it probably would have been far more widespread.  Here's a graphic illustration of how it worked.

Country Guitar Blowout Extravaganza (MP3s)

If you don't recognize the term "country guitar blowout," don't worry about it. I just made it up.  I use it to describe a fairly limited group of records in which the song lyrics mention famed country guitar players and each time a particular guitarist is mentioned we hear an imitation of his style.

These things are great fun and highly educational to boot.  If you've never been able to tell Billy Byrd from Jerry Byrd, a careful study of the tunes below should remedy that situation.  But why take my word for it when you can give 'em a listen and see for yourself?

Ted Brooks - The Hot Guitar  Too bad the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation wasn't in the business of giving out their so-called "genius grants" in 1951 because Ted Brooks surely would've been awarded one for giving life to the country guitar blowout concept.  Brooks, a Birmingham guitarist, wrote this extraordinarily clever song and released it on the Bama label.  Though the guitar imitations were not as flawlessly executed as those in Eddie Hill's 1952 version, he more than made up for it with the inspired lyrics.

Eddie Hill - The Hot Guitar  The genre got a nice kick in the pants in July 1952 when Eddie Hill recorded his version of Brooks' song for the Mercury label.  The updated version benefited greatly both from Hill's more exuberant vocal style and especially from the Nashville ringers on hand for the session:  Chet Atkins and Hank Garland.  In addition to reeling off imitations of their legendary contemporaries like Merle Travis and Les Paul, they also aped their own styles!   

Thumbs Carllile (with the Bill Wimberly Band) - Springfield Guitar Social  Thumbs Carllile was a supremely skilled guitarist whose fame never equaled his talent.  Springfield Guitar Social was released on the Starday label in 1958.  After a few decades in Nashville and on the road, Thumbs retired to Decatur, Georgia and made frequent local appearances, including a series of performances on Sagebrush Boogie, a country & western radio show on WRFG, where host David Chamberlain has been holding down the DJ chair for an astonishing 24 years!  David informs me that Thumbs told him that the steel player on this song is Gene Crownover, onetime steel guitarist for Bob Wills' Texas Playboys.  Thumbs died in 1987 and is buried in Decatur Cemetery, about a mile or two from where I reside.  On the right is a photo of his tombstone.  For some priceless footage of Thumbs in action in 1966, see Debbie's February 23 post.

More country guitar blowouts after the jump.

Martin Luther King Jr. (January 15, 1929 - April 4, 1968) MP3

Forty years ago today, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was tragically shot and killed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.  King was in Memphis  to lead that city's 1300 sanitation workers in a strike, eventually settled in favor of the workers,  over the right to unionize.  In the aftermath of the assassination, riots erupted in over 100 cities though somehow not in King's hometown of Atlanta.  This page features a sampling of how the streets of Chicago looked after two days of tumult.

In 1991, the former Lorraine Motel was converted to the National Civil Rights Museum.

Here is Norm Burns' tribute to Dr. King.

Norm Burns & The Five Stars - Rev. Martin Luther King (4:24) MP3

The Alaska Earthquake of 1964 (MP3)

Blue Ervin - Alaska Earthquake  (MP3) 

Today marks the 44th anniversary of the devastating Alaska earthquake, the largest ever recorded in North America.  On March 27, 1964 the quake, sometimes known as the Good Friday Earthquake,  pulverized Prince William Sound and the surrounding areas.  The event lasted approximately 4 minutes and had a moment magnitude of 9.2 Mw, which translates to 8.4 on the Richter scale.  Life magazine reported that the earthquake unleashed "more than 2,000 times the power of the mightiest nuclear bomb ever detonated."

Though the most heavily damaged Alaska city was probably Anchorage, located about 75 miles north of the earthquake's epicenter, a number of other cities and towns were badly damaged.  In addition, the earthquake triggered a massive tsunami that struck the shores of Canada, Washington, Oregon and California.  In fact, the tsunami caused deaths as far away as Crescent City, California where 11 people were killed after a 21 foot wave swept into the town's harbor.

The US Geological Survey has an extensive online collection of photographs of the damage done in Alaska. The Alaska Digital Archives also features an extensive array of photos and short film clips of the earthquake's aftermath.

If you have any interest in songs based on real life tragedies, a couple more can be found here.

Keep America Beautiful, Get A Haircut! Part Two

Just in case you dozed off and you missed it, Rex and Debbie recently threw down the gauntlet and posted a series of scathing country 45's that were notable for their extremely rancorous rantings about hippies.  OK, they did not actually throw down a gauntlet, but I figured as long as they were spreading good old-fashioned hippie hatred, it would be ungracious of me if I neglected to help out the cause.

In any case, the post was an eye-opening reminder not only of how fast things were changing in American society in the late 1960's, but also of the fact that it's difficult, if not impossible, to imagine two groups more radically opposed to each other than socially conservative small town southerners and the dope smoking flower children of the Now Generation.

It's probably worth noting that quite a few country artists cut hippie-themed 45's that took an approach that was more bemused than confrontational.  Maybe I'll do a follow-up post with some of those.  Today's effort, though, is all about condescension and contempt.

Guy Drake - The Marching Hippies (2:15)

Guy Drake was not one to mince words.  Check it out as he goes straight for the jugular:

"Now I asked this one big hippie what that sign was on his back
He said "Peace" but the darn thing looked to me like just like some American chicken track."

Drake is probably best known for recording Welfare Cadillac, a #6 hit in 1970.  He can be seen here, via youtube, doing Welfare Cadillac live on the Porter Wagoner Show.

Smokey Harless -  A Place For Them Called Hell (2:29)  (here's the label shot)

Smokey sings about returning to the states after an Army hitch overseas and finding himself more than a little disenchanted with what he finds back home.  Sample lyric:

"They can carry their signs go marching in the streets, all that's good and well -  But to my way of thinking if they don't like our country, there's a place for them called hell."

Smokey's actually a pretty nice guy, though.  Despite all the hostility in the air he generously offers the hippies and yippies free baths and haircuts.

More hippie-hatin' fun after the jump:

Music By, For, And About DJ's - Country Division (MP3s)

It's never been easy for a recording artist to break through the always crowded marketplace and reach those with the power to decide whether or not to play their records.  Given the difficulty of making it onto a radio station's playlist, perhaps it's no surprise that artists would occasionally decide to make their case with a naked appeal to the collective vanity of disc jockeys.

I'm not accusing DJ's of being any more self-centered than anyone else, but on a certain go-for-broke level one can see how artists might be seduced into believing that singing about a DJ might be helpful in their attempts to worm their way into the hearts of the gatekeepers.

Judy Lynn - Hello Mr. DJ (United Artists, 2:11) -  Might as well start things off with a bang, literally.  Judy's steamed at her husband for cheating on her one too many times, so what does she do?  Why she phones the local DJ and requests a cheating song.  While she's still on the line with the DJ, the philanderer comes home and Judy wastes no time in unloading her gun into him.  Complete with sound effects of a ringing phone and a blasting gun!

Ernest Ashworth - The DJ Cried (Hickory, 2:42) - Great 1965 honky-tonker about a guy who cuts a song (about how his gal dumped him) and drops his freshly-pressed record off with the local DJ.  The song is so full of misery, depression and woe that the DJ is overcome by tears.  Since 1989, Ashworth has owned WSLV, an AM radio station in Ardmore, Tennessee. I wonder if people ever drop off records about crying DJ's.

Carl Smith - BJ the DJ (Columbia, 3:02) - Stonewall Jackson had a #1 hit with this tune in 1963, perhaps the only time the "sing about a DJ" gambit really paid off.  BJ wrecks his car while speeding to the radio station at 90 MPH and now  "spins the hits no more."  Carl Smith's version was released as an album track in 1965.

Gene Davis - An Open Letter To Country Music DJ's (Columbia, 3:01)  -  Davis works the corn pone humor angle and drops the names of about two dozen Nashville big shots.

Jack Campbell - Mr. DJ (Sims, 2:27) Label shot

Jack Campbell - DJ Play A Sad Song (Jubilee, 2:33) Label shot  Same singer, same co-author as on the previous 45.  I like their persistence.

Jerry Byrd - Theme For A DJ (Monument, 2:13)  Photo - Nice 1964 instrumental workout from the man who served as Ernest Tubb's steel guitarist in the late 1940's.

Who Is He And What Is He To You? Part 2 (mp3s)

A couple of weeks back, Debbie blogged on the topic of the "jody grind" phenomenon, wherein a military soldier (or sometimes a prisoner) is the victim of a cheating mate back home.  The term originated as informal shorthand for "Joe The Grinder," a mythical character in jazz and blues tunes who was known for making time with the wives or girlfriends of far away military men.  Though most jody songs may well have their roots in jazz, blues, and soul music, there are also quite a few country jody songs.  In my ceaseless efforts to heed the advice of the legendary Ernest Tubb ("keep it country"), here are a few examples.

MP3's:

Bonnie Owens (with Fuzzy Owen)  -  A Dear John Letter   

Dick Bruce  -  A Letter From Home

Dave Dudley  -  At Mail Call Today

Red Sovine  -  Go Hide John

Johnny Wright  -  I'm Doing This For Daddy

Charlie Walker  -  Daddy's Coming Home (Next Week)

HONORABLE MENTION
Johnny Darrell  -  Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town    

Let's Hear It For The South Jersey Stomp

New Jerseyites can justifiably be proud of Ann Faith's South Jersey Stomp, a respectable attempt to launch some kind of a Northeastern hillbilly dance craze.  I have no idea who Ann Faith is, but the tune was released on Nashville's K-Ark label.  One clue to the story behind the record is her reference to driving down Highway 47 and seeing a big "cedar wood log cabin" where the crowds were enthusiastically doing the South Jersey Stomp.  Consulting the map shows that Highway 47 begins in Westville (just across the Delaware River from Philadelphia) and runs south through towns like Glassboro, Clayton, Franklinville, Vineland, Millville, and Dennisville before winding up in Wildwood.  My hunch is that the home turf of the South Jersey Stomp was likely in Wildwood, a popular tourist destination, but that's just a guess.

I've lived in Georgia since 1981, but I moved here from New Jersey.  Not surprisingly, I can't recall anybody in my NJ circle of friends talking about the South Jersey Stomp, probably because the record came and quickly vanished many years before my arrival in the Garden State in 1980.  So how about it?  Anyone know the story behind this infectious curiosity?

Ann Faith - South Jersey Stomp (2:02) MP3

A Wreck On The Highway (MP3s)

If you like songs about car crashes and their horrific aftermaths, then you probably already know that country music tends to be a bit more extreme than any other genre.  Hell, probably more than all the others combined for that matter. 

In many ways, the songs below can be considered a fine aural complement to the gruesome blood-soaked drivers' ed films to which so many high school students were subjected in the past.  As seen in the riveting documentary Hell's Highway, these films were full of horrifying and grotesque footage shot on site at grisly car crashes.  Like those films, the songs below do not flinch when it comes to depicting the devastating results of vehicular mayhem.

Listen up and learn the grim consequences of riding the bus, walking alongside the highway, parking on train tracks, hot rodding, drunk driving, and dope smoking.  Even speeding to the hospital to see your daughter in the emergency room can result in catastrophic tragedy!

You've been warned.

MP3s:

• Roy Acuff - A Wreck On The Highway (2:25).  Originally recorded in 1942, this is Roy's1962 remake.
• Howard Vokes - A Death On The Highway (2:02)   
• Howard Vokes - The Yellow Tomb (3:24) - LP cover  This one tells the true story of a school bus that plunged into the freezing waters of the Levisas Fork of the Big Sandy River, just outside of Prestonsburg, Kentucky. For some reason, this song reports the number of dead at 20, rather than the actual 27.
• Ralph Bowman - The Tragedy Of School Bus 27 (2:39)  Label shot  Another telling of the same horrific accident, which happened on February 28, 1958.  Both this and the song below were borrowed from over here.
• The Stanley Brothers - No School Bus In Heaven (2:43)  Another mournful ballad concerning the Prestonsburg tragedy.
• Jim McGinnis - 11 W. Bloody Highway (3:13)  Label shot  One more bus accident record, though this time it's a Greyhound in Tennessee, and not a school bus in Kentucky
  
• Porter Wagoner - The Carroll County Accident (2:51)
• Johnny & The J.C.L. Rangers - The Tragedy (We Were There) (2:49)  Label shot  Suicide by train.
  
• Cal Veale - Paralyzed (3:16)  Label shot   This one first came to my attention via the truly warped country compilation known as God Less America.  A total misery overdose.
  
• Ferlin Husky - The Drunken Driver (1:59)  "Get out of the road, you little fools!"
• Stonewall Jackson - Drinking and Driving (2:46)  Label shot
• Trooper Jim Foster - Four Chrome Wheels (2:30)  LP cover  Trooper Jim Foster (pictured above) was an actual highway patrolman for the state of Florida.   
• Trooper Jim Foster - Four On The Floor (And A Fifth Under The Seat) (2:33)   Worth noting: Foster was the co-author of Chesley Carroll's Hippie From Mississippi, which can be heard here.
• Trooper Jim Foster - Four On The Floor (And A Fifth Under The Seat) (2:38)  Label shot  Believe it or not, Foster actually cut this one twice.  This version, with spiffed up major label production, was recorded for United Artists.
• Red Sovine - I'm Only Seventeen (4:19)  Label shot   This graphically repulsive recitation was taken from the pages of Dear Abby's advice column.  It's a dead teen's sorrow-wracked recounting of the car accident that took his life and the terrible grief his family and friends suffered upon learning of the death of their loved one.  The words were originally penned in 1967 by John Berrio, a father of five from Rochester, New Hampshire, who wrote the piece after one of his son's friends died in an auto accident.

I'm In Love With My Sister

Last week an exceptionally alarming "adoption gone wrong" story made headlines.  In England, a brother-sister pair of twins was split up at birth and wound up being adopted and raised by different families.  Years later, they met, fell in love and married all without knowing they were related.  The marriage has now been annulled.  Lord Alton of Liverpool reported this incident to the House Of Lords in the midst of a discussion involving donor conception issues.  Oddly enough, he remarked that the pair felt a certain "inevitable attraction" when they met.

Is it really that inevitable that a pair of twins, separated at birth and raised by different families, would feel a romantic attraction to each other upon meeting?  Also worth wondering: how the hell did they finally figure out the horrifying fact that they were brother and sister?  The news accounts I read were maddeningly vague on this question. 

In any case, the disturbing story prompted me to dig out a few old country 45's that seemed pertinent.

MP3's:

• Robert Owens - I'm In Love With My Sister  (Rose) (3:07)
• Red Sovine - Six Broken Hearts (Chart) (2:46)
• Lonzo & Oscar - I'm My Own Grandpa (Starday) (2:49)  IMAGE

History Repeats Itself (mp3s)

History buffs who spend too much time reading and not enough time hunting for weird audio artifacts might not realize this, but the fabled coincidences between the lives and deaths of Presidents Kennedy and Lincoln have been documented for the ages on vinyl records.

Though it's unclear, at least to me, exactly who started spreading the word about some of the odd parallels connecting Lincoln and Kennedy, one thing is certain.  Buddy Starcher, a journeyman country singer from West Virginia whose only previous charting record dated all the way back to 1949, cooked up the idea of reciting a long series of these coincidences and setting it to the tune of the Battle Hymn Of The Republic.  The name of his song was History Repeats Itself and it went all the way to #2 on Billboard's Country chart in the spring of 1966 and #39 on the Pop chart.  Originally released as a 45 on the Boone label, the record's success prompted a phone call from Decca and soon Starcher was back in the studio cutting enough additional material to fill up an LP.  Lucky for us, one of those tunes was History Repeats Itself Pt. 2.  According to Starcher's obituary, Red Sovine counted Buddy  as a big influence.

In a move that still has people scratching their heads and wondering what the hell's going on, Cab Calloway recorded a cover version for the Boom label.  The fact that Calloway and Starcher were on the same page is further established by the b-side of Calloway's record, a tune called After Taxes which closely mirrored A Taxpayer's Letter from Starcher's Decca LP.  Both tunes cataloged the frustration of paying a seemingly  endless parade of taxes.

The last word goes to Homer & Jethro, who recorded a brilliant Batman-inspired parody.

MP3s:

Buddy Starcher - History Repeats Itself (2:33)

Buddy Starcher - History Repeats Itself Part 2 (2:22)

Cab Calloway - History Repeats Itself  (2:31)

Homer & Jethro - Great Men Repeat Themselves (2:55)

If you're thinking that perhaps all this sounds a bit familiar maybe it's because Station Manager Ken blogged a couple of these tunes a few years back, proving that history really does repeat itself.

Silver Bridge Disaster (mp3s)

Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of a horrific highway tragedy, the collapse of the Silver Bridge which spanned the Ohio River between Kanuaga, Ohio and Point Pleasant, West Virginia from 1928 until December 15, 1967 when it crumbled and fell into the icy waters below.  The catastrophe, which happened during the busy afternoon rush hour, cost 46 people their lives. Here's an aerial photo showing the two towns and where the bridge stood.  In a strange coincidence, the Silver Bridge fell into the water the same year that saw the completion of the I-35W bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.  Thirteen people died when that bridge collapsed on August 1, 2007.

Country music has a long and cherished tradition of topical songs dealing with real-life  tragedies like train wrecks, ship wrecks, and murders.  The best overview of this intriguing phenomenon is probably a recently released 3-disc set titled People Take Warning!  Murder Ballads And Disaster Songs 1913 - 1938 (Tompkins Square).  While the songs collected for this project were definitely culled from the golden age of the topical disaster song, the commemoration of local tragedies via records continued for quite some time.  Two such songs are included here for your perusal.

• Jim Stout -  Silver Bridge History (MP3)   
• The Three J's - Silver Bridge Disaster (MP3)   

Point Pleasant, West Virginia is roughly halfway between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.  If you're going to be in the area, you'll want to know that until February 29, 2008 the Point Pleasant River Museum will be featuring a commemoration of this sad event featuring never before displayed photographs, debris from one of the vehicles that was on the bridge at the time of the collapse, pieces of the bridge itself and a model of the bridge among other things.

Country Fuzz Spectacular (MP3s)

The racket made by a fuzztone guitar has been described as the sound of two bees fighting inside of a tin can. 

Ask your friends to give you an example of this crazy menacing sound and they're likely to name Satisfaction by the Rolling Stones.  Or maybe they'll refer you to Jimi Hendrix, The Yardbirds, or even Davie Allan & The Arrows, who recorded tons of fuzzy guitar instrumentals for biker movie soundtracks.  Given the rock and roll reputation of the fuzztone sound, those are all pretty understandable responses. 

I'm here today, though, to share with you some fine examples of country music fuzz.  While that might sound counter-intuitive it actually makes perfect sense given the fact that the fuzztone sound was created by the legendary Nashville session picker Grady Martin.  Martin's immense talent was used to great effect on thousands of recordings, probably none of which were more influential than the rock and roll sides he cut with Johnny Burnette Trio in Nashville in 1956.  On songs like Honey Hush and Train Kept A Rollin' (MP3), record buyers heard Martin cut loose with astonishing levels of distortion that hinted at the fuzztone sound he accidentally created a few short years later.

It happened in the summer of 1960, when Grady was hired to work on a Marty Robbins recording session in Nashville.  While recording the tune Don't Worry, a malfunctioning channel on the mixing board caused Martin's six string bass to be recorded with an insane amount of distortion, a sound that would come to be called fuzztone.  Despite the jarring sound, the record was released as it was originally recorded, fuzztone and all, which turned out to be a successful gamble.  The record bolted to the #1 position on the Billboard country charts and #3 on the pop charts. With results like that, it's really no surprise that other country artists soon started experimenting with fuzztone sounds on their own records.

Porter Wagoner, The Last Great Hillbilly? (MP3s)

For several generations of country music fans it's hard to imagine a world without Porter Wagoner.  His death from lung cancer on October 28th, however, leaves us with no choice.  So the least we can do is take advantage of this opportunity to salute a few highlights from the brilliant body of work he created over the course of a recording and performing career that spanned six decades. 

Porter's friendly persona and countrified mannerisms, along with his bright blond pompadour and spectacularly flashy rhinestone-studded stage wear, pretty much embodied the stereotypical image of a hillbilly singer in the 1950's and 1960's.  For the lack of a better description, the bulk of the material he recorded would probably be regarded as "normal and straightforward" country music.  And while it would be difficult to overstate the excellence of that work, many fans  probably best remember him for a long string of extremely lurid and graphic songs about murder, incarceration, infidelity, tragic deaths, and skid row winos.

Sometimes, he would devote an entire album to grim examinations of topics like alcoholism, murder or prison.  As jarring as many of these songs turned out to be, many of the accompanying album covers were even more sensational.