Customer Reviews

Great Records Of The Decade: 40's Hits - Country

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Right there on the cover of this CD are the words "The Original Recordings" which, to era music collectors like me anyway, is a signal that they are not re-done hits by the original artists. And, for the most part, that is the truth in this instance, from the rollicking Mule Train, which Tennessee Ernie took to # 1 Country and # 9 Pop in 1949, to the original version of You Are My Sunshine, penned and sung in 1940 by Jimmy Davis, legendary governor of Louisiana. Also here are the hard-to-find I Love You Because, a # 1 C&W for Leon Payne in 1949, and the 1946 Merle Travis # 1 C&W [for 14 weeks]/# 26 Pop, Divorce Me C.O.D.

And, or so I thought, Capitol's first million seller in 1947's Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! [That Cigarette] which Tex Williams took to # 1 C&W AND Pop for a combined 40 weeks in 1947, including 16 and 6 respectively at the top positions. But when you play it you'll hear the line "the other night I had me a date with the cutest little girl in these FIFTY states."

Now, unless old Tex had a crystal ball that showed him 1959 and the induction of Alaska and Hawaii as the 49th and 50th states, you have to think that the song was either re-recorded that year, OR dubbed in that one spot to override "forty-eight." Either way it is clearly NOT the complete original.

I doubt if Mike Curb even noticed the glitch when putting the CD together in 1990 and wonder if ANYONE other than me - an admitted nit-picker when it comes to such things - ever picked it up? In any event, I would still recommend it to anyone seeking out some of the top C&W tunes of that era, despite the lack of liner notes.

This is the real stuff not the slickly produced modern country music and for that alone it's worth picking up. Having said that I can understand why I'm not a huge fan of country as singing out of tune and that twangy guitar sound grates after awhile.

For the non-country obsessed fan I found only Hank Thompson's "Humpty Dumpty Heart" and the classic Tex Ritter's "I Got Spurs" hold up. The rest are fine but I think most music fans would get bored after a few listens.

I was more fascinated by the "sound" they got back in the 1940s more than the actual content of the songs.