Happy New Year! 2022 was quite an eventful year and I think I could use fewer events in 2023. A nice quiet year. Yeah, I’m sure that’s what will happen.
Disc 1611 is…The Best of Johnny Horton
Artist: Johnny Horton
Year of Release: 2017 but featuring songs from 1955 to 1960
What’s up with the Cover? Mr. Horton himself, looking very dapper in his ‘outfit for cowboys who don’t actually have to work on the range’ attire. This lack of authenticity is also what sets some of the tunes back – but more on that later.
How I Came To Know It: I grew up with Johnny Horton and I’ve loved him all my life.
I already had a solid Greatest Hits package for Horton, but this release has a ton of songs I’d never heard before, so I decided to give it a shot. You can’t have too much Johnny Horton in your collection. Or can you…?
How It Stacks Up: as a compilation album, this doesn’t “stack up” under CD Odyssey rules.
Ratings: No ratings for best of albums. This is because they’re not records in the strictest sense, but more of a selection of music.
Do you like Johnny Horton? Maybe you own Johnny Horton’s Greatest Hits (reviewed back at Disc 725, FYI). Well, before you take the leap from the 13 songs on that record to the 50 on this one, you better like Johnny Horton a lot.
I do like Johnny Horton a lot, but this compilation put that opinion to the test in places. As with more aggressively curated collections, Horton’s music falls into one of three broad categories: working man tunes, romantic rambles and historic set-pieces. Here you just get more of it.
Country Life
These are tunes where Horton celebrates the slow meandering country life. These are the “countriest” of his tunes and are often punctuated with fiddle and steel guitar solos. I will give the 1950s credit on those – back then Soulless Record Execs landed some Grade A studio talent. Despite the early recording techniques on this stuff, it is hard to not love the musicianship.
The tunes themselves are OK, but that jumpy pop-country delivery of Horton’s can take a heartfelt expression of pastoral love on a song like “In My Home in Shelby County” and make them feel kind of…fake.
Worse is “Go and Wash Your Dirty Feet” which is a song about how young kids in the country used to run about barefoot. It is supposed to be whimsical and fun, but I just couldn’t get the thought of those dirty feet tromping through the house at the end of the day. Yech. Better is “Sleepy-Eyed John” which I like to imagine features the same rapscallion, now fully grown and finding himself not only without shoes, but without britches as well.
Romantic Rambles
These are mixed bag, with some of Horton’s best songs ever in this genre, but also some of his creepiest.
On the “best” side is “Whispering Pines” a beautiful warbler of a tune, featuring a lovelorn fellow serenading the trees in the hopes they’ll send his baby back to him. On the strength of lyrics alone, this tune is unadulterated schmaltz, but with Horton’s high tenor evoking the gods of love, you will be well and truly smitten. The guitar bits in the song are also sublime.
On the creepy side, we have “All Grown Up”. Opening with a chorus of very childlike singers chanting, “hey daddy, I’m all grown up.” It gets worse from there with…
“Standing at your
door just like I done before
You've changed so strange, you're all grown up
You wear those heels and hose dressed up in your mama's clothes
You're hip, I'm flipped, you’re all grown up”
Yeesh.
Historic Set-Pieces
This is what Johnny Horton is most famous for, with enduring ballads “The Battle of New Orleans” and “Sink the Bismark” still kicking around most record collections of any significant vintage. I grew up loving this stuff as a kid, and it has sunk pretty deep into my consciousness over those formative years. These tunes still hold up well, although songs like “Sink the Bismark” are over too soon. That 2:30 song length of the 1950s gets in the way of what could’ve been even more memorable verses.
On this massive collection, Johnny reminded me of Swedish metal band, “Sabaton” in his propensity to tell exactly the details of each battle or historic event, never mind the metaphor. We learn young Abe Lincoln was good at wrestling and that John Paul Jones killed one of his crew, but don’t expect much exposition beyond that, because the “Cole’s Notes” approach to song length leaves precious little time to tell a story.
Overall, I enjoyed getting a whole host of new (to me) Johnny Horton tunes, even though some of them land flat. Horton is great when he’s crooning away, or digging into some historic Civil War battle, but despite great musicianship, there are too many moments where the emotional authenticity is missing, often because the song is in too much of a damned hurry to wrap up.
In those moments Horton leaves behind his folksy country and western charm and becomes a studio vocalist, in tune and with a lovely tone, but uninspired. His voice is a joy to hear, but I liked it best when I felt a bit of gravitas and pain in the delivery.
Best tracks: North to Alaska, When It’s Springtime in Alaska (It’s Forty Below), Lost Highway, Joe’s Been A-Getting’ There, Young Abe Lincoln, The Battle of New Orleans, Sink the Bismark, Comanche (the Brave Horse), Whispering Pines
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