Customer Reviews

Wanderin' On - The Best Of The Yodelling Ranger

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I am an avid Hank Snow fan and have many CDs and previously cassettes and lps. The first portion is the worst example of Hank Snow. The first songs are old radio recordings and one can barely recognize the singer as Hank Snow. There are very few Snow recordings that I don't care for but some of these are not pleasant to the ear. The early recordings are like hearing your next door neighbor who can't quite sing. Truly part of the CD is that bad. I wanted to purchase Sammy Morgan's Gin on CD but I should have ordered another Bear family set. Half of the CD is wonderful. The CD is a Bear family release. As a collector one might want to own the early recordings done in 1937 and up.

This is a fantastic disc. I don't notice any parts that sounds as bad as my neighbour as the first reviewer apparently heard. This is of the highest quality throughout. Now it is one man with a very good voice singing with only his acoustic guitar for most of it, but I don't find it much different from his quality recordings of the 50's. This is old-time cowboy music at it's finest. It compared with the legends of the 40's that I was familiar with, like Bob Wills, Sons of the Pioneers and Gene Autry. Not a big band like Wills, no harmonies like the Sons, but outstanding music nonetheless. If that is what you like, this disc is dynamite. Almost of the songs are written by Snow, and they stand up to other greats of the time in my opinion. If you read this far, you should definitely buy it! 4 1/2 stars, just a notch below the aforementioned legends.

You shouldn't go into this disc expecting to hear Snow's hits, or even much stylistic similarity to his Nashville years. This is a fascinating look at his early years, when Snow was still a regional performer building up a national reputation in his native Canada. He didn't move down to Nashville until the early 1950s, and before that he was finding his voice up North, having started out as an unabashed Jimmie Rodgers imitator, then skirting the edge of the whole Western-oriented "singing cowboy" style.

This is a single-disc version of Bear Family's exhaustive look at Snow's early years. (You can also find a more thorough, 4-CD box set that covers the same material...) If you want to hear Snow's hits, there are a zillion other collections that have them, but if you want to find out where Snow, the country superstar, came from, and how he developed his style, then this is an invaluable archival document. It's pretty cool.