Porter Wagoner The Best I've Ever Been (Echo)

Porter Wagoner

The Best I've Ever Been (Echo)

Porter Wagoner? Bet you'd forgotten about this country warhorse, but he's still around. Back in the days of his pairings with Dolly Parton, Wagoner was often jeered at by country-music haters as the pinnacle of country hokum, with his rhinestoned Nudie suits and hair now favored by Baptist evangelists on the 3am preacher feature. The Best I've Ever Been finds Wagoner doing what he does best: singing unabashedly maudlin ballads aimed squarely at the blue-hair set. His voice is still a model of honky-tonk purity, the playing and production is seamless (and goes easy on the reverb-y gloss preferred by the Nashville mainstream), but the songwriting ... Take "Broken Hearts Beat On" for instance: "Boat springs a leak and it won't float. When poems don't rhyme they don't get wrote. Hearts get walked on like stepping stones, but broken hearts beat on." Ouch. Titles like "Daddy's Ole Sayins, Mama's Beliefs" and "House on Mulberry Street" bring on homespun homilies with scarcely any soul or feeling behind them, exercises in the Nashville songwriting hack's craft; "Brewster's Farm" beats the listener over the head with its political bent. This could be a great CD with better songwriting, or if Wagoner had opted to cover songs by his Sixties country contemporaries. As it is, it's a rather grueling slow boat to Branson.