Mel Street - 20 Greatest Hits

Mel Street's easy, comfortable honky-tonk voice embodies the sound of country music in the mid-70's, the time from where all of these hits came. Street wrote timeless country classics, and as this collection shows, he was definitely the king of the two-step cheatin' song. From "Lovin' on Back Streets" to "I Met A Friend of Yours Today" to "You Make Me Feel More Like A Man," Street gave every honky-tonk devil and angel a song to call their own

In 1972, Mel Street recorded "Borrowed Angel," the first of his long string of cry-in-your-beer cheatin' songs, and it soared up the charts to the Top 10. He followed it up with the next, "Lovin' on Back Streets," a song that's been recorded by several other artists as, perhaps, the greatest cheatin' song of all time.

He continued to ride high through the middle of the 70's, doing well through the beginning of the "Urban Cowboy" years, as he charted again and again, including the magnificent "Smokey Mountain Memories" and one of the best tear-jerking country music puns of all time, "Looking Out My Window Through The Pain."

Mel Street's chart-topping career came to a tragic early end in 1978, when the singer succumbed to depression and took his own life on his 45th birthday. He left behind a legacy of music which has a joyous life to it, and is some of the best two-steppin' music I've ever listened to. The only jarring moment in this collection is Street's cover of the Jim Croce classic "Bad Bad Leroy Brown," which doesn't suit the singer and, in bowing to country music's "kinder, gentler" attitudes of the time, changes the phrase to "baddest man in the whole darned town." It doesn't work, and doesn't really fit on this disc. But the rest? Wonderful, and a great way to remember a great talent.