Customer Reviews

Dance Ranch / Songs for Rounders

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Two great albums on one CD! Dance Ranch the first album is a definitive western swing album maybe a bit glossy in production at times but the pickin is superb. Songs for Rounders is just an amazing album if there was a western swing equal to Sinatra's Swingin Lovers this is it. Ii's as if Dean Martin had possesed Bob Wills, songs like "Teach em how to swim" Bachelor til I die and Cocaine Blues are awesome. Yes, alcohol gambling drugs and smoking are evil but if done with a western beat it can be cool.

Hank Thompson's web site boasts that Hank Thompson studied in Princeton's Physics Department when Albert Einstien department chair!!!! While Thompson was at Princeton just to learn enough math and science to be a wartime military radio announcer, Einstien's operations did not take place in the physic department. Thompson's lineage is more in the Spade Cooley variety of Hollywood big band Western Swing, although he has more of a honk6y tonk repetoire.

Three instrumental tunes here are worth the whole price: Summit Ridge Drive and Woodchopper's Ball, two swing hits and the old time Texas fiddle tune, Beaumont Rag which the band turns into a great swing hit. The arrangements with the strong hard fiddles, the rocking drummer, and the tightness of the arrangments and the walls of swinging song with great solos coming through compare to anything anyone in Western Swing ever put together. They give you a feeling what could have happened with the ideas of the Spade Cooley (Hank's real teacher not Einstien) Orchestra if Sapde hadn't degenerated it off into businessman's beat pop irrelvancy but had been allowed to ferment the way the musicians wanted it.

Hanks voice is strong, deep, and powerful, full of humor and jive. There's no phoney country cowboy BS here, just straight strong Western pop singing. Of course, this cd is filled with Honky Tonk favorites like Bubbles in My Bear, Driving Nails in my Coffin, and Headin Down that Wrong Highway. He's got those sentimental folk songs like Can I sleep in your barn Tonight Mister, a gem from the turn of the century that was a revival tune when Charlie Poole recorded it in the twenties.

However, what really works is the strong hard core singing and swinging here. It isn't about the macho Honky Tonk image, a lot of it is about a very high standard of singing, a higher standard of musicianship, and a band that was meticulously arranged, and perfectly recorded.

Go get em Hank