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20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Well worth it with a lot more than What Amazon tells You, March 15, 2004
Ray Benson and various aggregations of Asleep at the Wheel have been making records for almost 30 years now. The truth is that there are a bunch of standards of Western Swing that just have to be done and done again. Recently he has tried to get the variety in by doing live albums, and so-called tribute albums like this one, a tribute to Bob Wills. They are a nice excuse to do covers of Bob Wills Songs that Asleep at the Wheel has already recorded. This works well because a lot of the people he uses on the record are veterans of the Western Swing revival Merle Haggard and Ray launched in the 1970s from different directions, although you might not know it now. It works because the band sounds looser, a bit wilder, and not as concerned with perfection and style as it does on their studio records, which, by the way I think are terrific.
Of course the Amazon listing here is incorrect. All of these tunes have guests. Red Wing for example has the one the only, the Tyler Rose, the greatest living Western Swing musician, the guy that Bob Wills had play Faded Love rather than himself, Johnnie Gimble on both fiddle and Mandolin. Ray gets by the problem of the racial insensitivity of "Across the Alley from the Alamo" by having Johnny Rodriguez sing it, and Susie Bogus does a great job on the early Wills Tune "Old Fashioned Love." Marty Stuart has always been a great musician, starting out playing in Lester Flatt's band when he was 15, and being an ace on both guitar and mandolin. Besides some good picking on some of the other tunes, he does a great version of the great tune Misery, a tune from the days of the Wills/Duncan reunion in the late 1950s and early 1960s that should be better known. Riders in the Sky join in with the band to do a great harmony on one of Cindy Walker's masterpiece "Dusty Sky." This song is so much more powerful about the dust bowl and the farm crisis of the thirties than anything that Woody Guthrie wrote. They say Tommy Duncan who had been destroyed as a farmer by the dust bowl droughts, broke down in tears when they recorded it. On the original recording you can hear Bob Wills trying to keep him going. Haggard, well Haggard recorded the same tune he sings on this record with Bob Wills. Can't get better than that! Even Huey Lewis gives us a little taste of where he was in the 1970s with a great version of Will's Hubbin' It! The only thing I don't like here is Brooks and Dunn's Corrina Corrina. It has nothing to do with Western Swing, just your country rock rendition that sounds like a thousand other top 40 country recordings, although done with flavor and a solid dance beat. Asleep at the Wheel have never been reconstructionists. They have never tried to sound like the Texas Playboys, even in the early days when they were able to include former Texas Playboys like Johnny Gimble, Tiny Moore, and others on their records. They always have tried to have a hot, jamming sound. So, they are the ideal band for this kind of tribute.
They are really, really jamming and jamming hard drawing in the talents of other pickers and singers and making this a real event.
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