Bonus Tracks
Fri., April 25, 1997
The Essential Flatt & Scruggs: `Tis Sweet to be Remembered (Columbia/Legacy)
LEFTY FRIZZELL
Look What Thoughts Will Do (Columbia/Legacy)
CHARLIE RICH
Feel Like Goin' Home: The Essential Charlie Rich (Columbia/Legacy)
Country music's foundations are in three places: the hills, the honky-tonks, and the church, but two CDs each of Flatt & Scruggs, Lefty Frizzell, and Charlie Rich make quite a foundation themselves. Each of these CDs represents a vital -- and certainly varied -- element of country music's development. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs possessed knowledge of their instruments rivaling a clockmakers', as well as a visionary's sense of how far the sounds of those instruments could go. Every fiddle solo, guitar chording, and banjo run on 'Tis Sweet to be Remembered is indispensable. Each song is a different illustration of their rich Appalachian palette, delicately altering a mood or phrasing just a shade. And for all their instrumental prowess, Flatt and Scruggs just loved to play. The hootenannies, hoe-downs, and breakdowns of their youths became a part of them, the bluegrass legacy they left behind became something much bigger. If anything, it became as big as that of Lefty Frizzell, son of the East Texas oilfields. When Frizzell died in 1975, he left behind much more than he inherited from Bob Wills and Jimmie Rogers; his Texan sensibility lives on in Willie Nelson, George Strait, and Clint Black, and that's letting mere geography exclude Merle Haggard. In his gentle barroom twang, Frizzell details the bright lights and pretty women of his honky-tonk world, where if you've got the money he's got the time. Few musicians anywhere were ever more aware of fun and its consequences, but Charlie Rich was (one listen to "Sick, Sober, and Sorry" is all it takes). Rich, a native of Colt, Arkansas, had so much soul it constantly threatens to carry him away, but as long as he kept it in check, he could out-shout even Elvis and Sam Cooke. His thoughts are often on matters of the heart, but God is never very far from his mind. Gospel infuses his songs with a preternatural amount of feeling, making even the schmaltzier numbers bearable. Rich was a man who felt something shaking him at his core, and he was able to get it out by singing songs like the sublime "You Can Have Her." Lefty Frizzell, Lester Flatt, and Earl Scruggs all felt the same thing: a need to give voice to the music inside and around them. Their voices became three hallmarks of country music; these collections of their voices are essential indeed. -- Christopher Gray
"Bonus Tracks" reviews all Texas-centric releases commercially available. Send to: "Bonus Tracks," The Austin Chronicle, PO Box 49066, Austin, TX 78765.
