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[ Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash & Johnny Horton ]
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The text below is taken from a Sony Music Nashville & Legacy Recordings press release. |
WILLIE NELSONRed Headed Stranger (Originally released in 1975.)
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After breaking down the walls of the traditional country Lp format with Shotgun Willie and Phases and Stages, concept albums recorded for Atlantic in 1973-74, Willie Nelson moved from Nashville to Texas and his career changed forever. As Chet Flippo's liner notes point out, the Austin music scene matured around him, and his July 4th picnics became legendary. Willie was signed to Columbia Records in 1975, and given complete artistic control over his next project. The new album was a breakthrough, conceived with his wife Connie during a long car trip from Colorado to Texas. It crystallized country music's myth of the outlaw with a song cycle that could only have come from the pen of Willie Nelson, built around the tale of the "Red Headed Stranger," which Willie used to sing to his kids at night as a bedtime story. Recorded in a local studio with his working band, it was in start contrast to the slick 'Countrypolitan' sound in vogue at C&W radio. The LP hit #1 for 5 weeks and earned Willie his first multi-platinum album, notched two major hits, and won Willie his first Grammy award for "Blue Eyes Crying In the Rain." This commercial success sparked the revolution that gave country music its first major change of direction since the infusion of rock and roll in the 1950s. It also led a decade later to the production (on MGM/United Artists) of a film version of "Red Headed Stranger," from whose soundtrack comes Willie's interpretation of the Bach Minuet in G on acoustic guitar.
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JOHNNY CASH
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"San Quentin, you've been livin' hell to me ... San Quentin may you rot and burn in hell!" The tension surrounding Johnny Cash's fourth "concert" appearance at the California penitentiary is wrapped up in the warning given to June Carter and her husband (as she relates in her liner notes), not to look the inmates directly in their eyes during the show. Cash, no stranger to steel bars back in his wilder days, knew that everyman, no matter his crime -- or innocence -- deserved a respite, deliverance if only for an hour. In 1969, by virtue of the success of his double-platinum Folsom Prison album of the year before and its two #1 singles, "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Daddy Sang Bass" (written by Carl Perkins), Cash was the music industry's top performer of the year. He brought his whole troup -- Perkins, June, sisters Helen and Anita, Mother Maybelle, the Statler Brothers, and the Tennessee Three -- to sing, and that's exactly what they did. Sun rockabilly ("I Walk the Line," "Big River"), the two recent Columbia hits and "Ring of Fire," a Nashville-flavored pop tune (the Lovin' Spoonful's "Darlin' Companion"), a new Bob Dylan song ("Wanted Man"), a Grand Ole Opry folk ballad ("Wreck Of the Old 97"), spirituals ("He Turned the Water Into Wine," "(There'll Be) Peace In the Valley"), and some nobody'd heard before ("Starkville City Jail," "This Old Account Was Settled Long Ago"). The result was the 10-song album that hit #1 pop for 4 weeks and #1 C&W for 20 weeks, and a hit single (Shel Silverstein's "A Boy Named Sue") that is heard here in its original "uncensored" version. Guest annotator (and former Cash band member) Marty Stuart celebrates this new "Complete" album, restored to the show's correct one-hour running order. His interview with Merle Haggard (who was an inmate during Cash's first San Quentin show in 1958) provides added perspective, as does manager Lou Robin's recollection of the historic events of February 24, 1969.
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JOHNNY HORTON
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A hard-traveling jack-of-all-trades, Horton was first known as The "Singing Fisherman" when he began recording on small labels in the early '50s. In 1956, he played a major role in bridging the gap between Hank Williams-style honky tonk and modern C&W with his very first Columbia chart hit, "Honky Tonk Man." Three years later, after five trips to the Country Top 10, Horton was there to ford another stream, this time between C&W and the burgeoning folk music movement with his first #1 hit, "When It's Springtime In Alaska (It's Forty Below)," whose Gold Rush-era setting was also the backdrop of "Sam Magee." Horton had ignited a new genre of 'saga' songs (cf. Johnny Cash's "Don't Take Your Guns To Town") that included "The Battle Of New Orleans," a Jimmy Driftwood tune that commemorated the final battle of the War of 1812. Its fusion of country, folk and rockabilly stayed #1 pop for 6 weeks and #1 C&W for 10 weeks, was Billboard's #1 Song Of The Year, won Grammys for Song Of the Year and Best C&W Performance, and was one of the first country records ever certified gold by the RIAA. It was so popular that a special 'equal time' version had to be cut for the U.K. (who initially banned the single), included on a U.S. release here for the first time. The 1959 LP, Horton's finest collection, produced by Don Law at Owen Bradley's Nashville studio, ranges from (in annotator Billy Altman's words) the "teen bopping" "All Grown Up" to moon Mullican's "Cherokee Boogie," from Horton's folk-rooted "The First Train Headin' South" to the Hank Williams staple, "Lost Highway." Ironically, Hank had died in the back seat of his car at age 29 (from pills and alcohol abuse), and Horton -- who had married Hank's widow and always predicted he'd die young -- was killed by a drunk driver in a car crash on November 5, 1960.
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