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mywifeleftme · 1 year

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126: Don Gibson // Oh Lonesome Me

Oh Lonesome Me Don Gibson 1958, RCA Victor

The back cover blurb is a lost art in today’s record design business, and I think it stinks! How many generations of music buyers have been robbed of the opportunity to read some record producer or anonymous A&R flack hyping up Kool Keith as a “talented young man with a sound that is really out there” or Radiohead as “the next James”?

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I bring this up as I look at the back of Don Gibson’s Oh Lonesome Me, which features an ‘introduction’ to the man behind the music by Lowell Blanchard, the station manager at WNOX, Knoxville, Tennessee, where Gibson had worked on “The Midday Merry-Go-Round” programme for the past seven years. Although the album contains two all-time country standards in the title track and “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You,” Blanchard’s write-up reads more like a letter of reference for an applicant to the pipefitter’s union. “I think you’ll enjoy Don’s album,” Blanchard concludes. “It’s good music by a nice guy who likes people.” That’s very mild flogging for the album that launched both Gibson and producer Chet Atkins to stardom, and inaugurated the Nashville Sound that would dominate country music for the next two decades, but perhaps Tennesseans are a more reserved people than I’d figured them for.

A friend who’s weathered my periodic bouts of Gibson mania calls him “Buddy Holly as an Adult Man,” and I think that’s pretty good; stripped (by Atkins) of the usual fiddles and steel guitars, Gibson’s sound is as legible as rock ‘n’ roll as it is country. He was a fine singer, if not a particularly distinctive one, but as a songwriter, he was a wonder. It’s no exaggeration to say every Gibson song is fundamentally about the same thing, or that pretty much all of them are maddeningly catchy. Nicknamed “the Sad Poet,” the large-domed chanteur wrote fizzy hit after hit about the car door being slammed on his (emotional) dick. It’s hard to choose a favourite sadsack Gibson lyric: “Give Myself a Party” maybe, in which he throws a solo rager with all the stuff his ex left behind; or “(I’d Be) A Legend in My Time,” one of several songs where he turns being a loser into a competitive sport. Despite this artistic fixation on misery, his lyrics aren’t a baroquely weird psychic mess like Roy Orbison’s (a fan who once recorded an entire LP of Gibson covers); his writing has such an elemental simplicity any performer can make them their own. That’s why he’s such a popular cover choice, with “I Can’t Stop Lovin’ You” alone having been recorded over 700 times.

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Still though, I tend to prefer Don’s steady, reliable takes to those of his interpreters. Oh Lonesome Me has a lot of his biggies (including both “Bad, Bad Day” and “Blue, Blue Day”), and with Atkins’ eye on not only the country but the pop charts, everything gets the star treatment. The (cut me into little pieces and mail me around the country) unsung heroes are Elvis Presley’s backup singers, the Jordinaires, who hang a heavenly gauze over the ballads and lend the fast ones a bubbly excitement. It doesn’t hurt having Atkins, the ace of session ace guitarists, sitting in either—his jazzy, Les Paul-ish licks on slow blues “Heartbreak Avenue” are an absolute treat.

I’ve got quite a few Gibson records on my shelf, and you can’t really go wrong with any of his ‘50s and ‘60s output, though things get a little ropey by the ‘70s. To name but two, the ’63 compilation I Wrote a Song is a desert island disc for me, and Girls, Guitars and Gibson from ’61 is every bit as good as Oh Lonesome Me despite not being quite so laden with hits.

126/365

#don gibson #'50s music #'50s country #country music #classic country #music review #vinyl record #big head #chet atkins #the jordinaires

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