Country Style! Steve & Eydie Edition
David Cantwell with the first installment of an occasional series devoted to pop-soul-etc. acts releasing country albums.
There’s a subgenre of album I’ve been obsessed with for years: It’s what I call the “Country Style! Album,” when a non-country artist records an album full of country standards and then, often as not, titles it something like So and So Visits the Country! Or …Sings Golden Country Hits or …Sings Country Style! These efforts really took off in the 1960s, after Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music opened up a kind of second Great American Songbook for singers everywhere, but they were around before Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You” moment and continued long after it—spiking in those periods when country has for whatever reason regained a bit of crossover cool and when pop, soul or rock singers want to seem a bit more grounded. I’ve accumulated quite a collection of these albums through the decades and am always frustrated that they tend not so much to get dismissed by critics as they are overlooked entirely within a given artist’s discography. I’d been wanting to start an occasional series writing about “Country Style! Albums” here at NFR, so when news came last week that pop crooner Steve Lawrence had died, the time seemed right—especially since both Lawrence and his longtime wife and (even longer) professional singing partner, Eydie Gorme had each released a post-Modern Sounds “Country Style!” LP of their own.
Please think of these entries, and all of the ones to sporadically follow, more as first reactions and notes for further study than as definitive statements. With that in mind… Steve and Eydie, take it away, “Country Style!”
Steve Lawrence – Swinging West, 1963
You can tell Lawrence isn’t from these parts; he doesn’t even know enough to drop his “g” in the album title. Still, this well-enunciated collection of country and/or western associated numbers is surprisingly solid. Lawrence was a reasonably swinging old-school crooner, a poor-man’s Frank Sinatra, working in an era when rock and roll had rendered that very type old-fashioned as hell. He often compensated for that assessment, as he does here, by embracing the corny, favoring the even older-fashioned Crosby songbook—his gently groovy “Don’t Fence Me In” and saloon-piano “San Antonio Rose” are standouts—or by cutting up. On another old Crosby number, “I’m an Old Cowhand,” he introduces a brass break with “Here’s the Sons of the Pioneers!”, delivers the words “Rio Grande” with cartoon twang, then ends things with a quick “Injun” skit that could have slid easily into one of his many later appearances on The Carol Burnett Show and that today is just… cringe. Much better are the trumpet-blast of a near-title track written specifically for the project, “The Day the West Was Swung,” and a couple of Hank covers, “Your Cheatin’ Heart” and “Half As Much,” that suggest some kind of long-lost Sinatra-and-Riddle collab—Songs for Swingin’ Honky Tonkers, say. (They also remind that Williams’ songs almost always transition seamlessly to pop—it’s almost as if ol’ Hank WAS a pop artist!) Lawrence closes the album with two country-related pop song smashes from the year before, fine big-band jazzy runs (arranged like everything here by Marion Evans) through Nat King Cole’s “Ramblin’ Rose” and, of course, Ray Charles’ “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” Of possible additional interest, because the songs have been so rarely recorded, are Lawrence’s versions of “A Gal in Calico” (a Best Original Song Oscar nominee from The Time, the Place and the Girl in 1946) and “Wagon Wheels” (the title song to a 1936 oater starring Randolph Scott).
Eydie Gorme – Gorme Country Style, 1964
Swinging wasn’t really Eydie Gorme’s thing, but she did have a fresh, inviting voice—think a poor woman’s Doris Day—and when she leaned into the alto part of her range, it added a mild huskiness to her performances. The first half of her entry into the pop-goes-country sweepstakes, Gorme Country Style, finds her doing just that, amidst comparatively quiet string-and-piano arrangements from old-pro Don Costa. While nothing ever really sticks, each track is more than fetching enough while it lasts. When she leans soprano, though, she sounds like no one in particular and, up against Side II’s occasionally bigger, brassier arrangements, she barely registers. Still, the song selection here, even though I guess it’s by now all pretty trite, is ridiculously strong: Her bouncy “Oh Lonesome Me” misreads the room, but her “I Really Don’t Want to Know,” “I’m Sorry,” “I Walk the Line” (a lyrically appropriate walking-bass nails the rhythm she normally nixes) and of course “I Can’t Stop Loving You” are worth a spin or three, and she takes on several other country songs you know by heart written by Cindy Walker, Willie Nelson, Hank Cochran and so on. Nothing here to love, I’d say, but what’s not to like? (A 2002 CD reissue added three bonus cuts, including a much-less-is-much-more version of “Please Help Me I’m Falling” that would have been the album’s finest cut if it had been here to begin with.) –DC
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