The title track follows the life cycle of a wedding ring and the doomed couple who buy it in a Chicago pawnshop. Released in 1976, a year after their split, Golden Ring is an incredible example of heartbreaking music reflecting heartbreaking reality. When their chaotic marriage reached its inevitable D-I-V-O-R-C-E in 1975, their popularity was still so huge they were forced to keep publicly performing the fantasy by touring as a couple. Married in 1969, George Jones and Tammy Wynette toured together in a bus that had “Mr. Breezy arrangement aside, it takes a big streak of rock star to pen a love-’em-and-leave-’em anthem as cold as “I’ll Be Gone.” D.M. But it had rock bonafides, too, especially producer/guitarist Pete Anderson’s stinging six-string leads and Yoakam’s way with a put-down. Between Yoakam’s Kentucky drawl and Brantley Kearns’ looping fiddle on the breakthrough hit “Honky Tonk Man,” the album had more than enough honest twang for Nashville. his debut album and first of three consecutive Number One Country LPs. But Alvin’s prediction ultimately came true with Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. Trio opens with Harris and Parton’s trembling harmonies on the latter’s “The Pain of Loving You” and Parton tenderly soaring on the mournful bluegrass standard “Making Plans.” Ronstadt sings lead on three tracks (most notably an exquisite reading of Jimmie Rodgers’ “Hobo’s Meditation”), and the three are downright hypnotic on Phil Spector’s “To Know Him Is to Love Him.” But Parton carries the day, with her subtle liberation tale “Wildflowers,” traditional poetic lament “Rosewood Casket” (arranged by her mother Avie Lee) and the immersive lonesome wail of “These Memories of You.” C.A.Īs recounted in the 2012 biography A Thousand Miles From Nowhere, Blasters main man Dave Alvin caught one of Dwight Yoakam’s early shows in Los Angeles and was so blown away that he told him, “Order the limousine now! You’re gonna be a star.” Yoakam was opening for the Blasters, X and other Angelino punks in short order, which had him looking like he’d be a classic victim of the too-rock-for-country/too-country-for-rock divide. And this multiplatinum, Grammy-winning classic by the so-called “Queenston Trio” backs up that claim, with the two best country singers produced by the Sixties folk/rock scenes going deep into Parton’s Appalachian roots and starkly intimate Nashville virtuosity. “Dolly Parton is to Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris what Chuck Berry was to the Rolling Stones and the Who,” wrote Seventies rock critic Barbara Charone. After this album he would tour with Grand Funk Railroad, record with Pantera, live in a cave when the IRS took his money and release an offensive album of joke songs that included the worst racial slur there is. A disaster as a role model, Coe still possesses scary musical skills. “A Sad Country Song” is a last-call classic and “Atlanta Song” is a passive-aggressive stripper lament that Drake would feel. If rock & roll is mostly attitude, biker ex-con and outlaw country pioneer David Allen Coe might be the most rock & roll artist on this list - when a Rolling Stone writer questioned the veracity of a story Coe told about killing a fellow inmate over sexual advances, Coe replied with the song “I’d Like to Kick the Shit Out of You.” This major-label debut, which reflected a time when Coe wore rhinestone duds, wigs and a mask onstage while living in his car (a white hearse), posits him as a doomed, lonely troubadour of the lost-cause South (“I Still Sing the Old Songs,” “Old Man Tell Me,” “The Old Grey Goose is Dead”). Plus, how many guitar players do you know who were immortalized in a Scooby-Doo episode?” C.W. “Folks these days don’t realize what a great guitar picker Jerry was nor his incredible sense of groove,” said Les Claypool, whose alt-metal band Primus covered “Amos Moses” in 1998. This collection of 20 hits features his most iconic characters: the mean-as-a-snake, one-handed alligator hunter (“Amos Moses”) the misunderstood, monkey-meat-eating swamp man (“Ko-Ko Joe”) and the paranoid poker loser with a razor in his hand (“The Uptown Poker Club”) - told with Reed’s funky lilt. But during his hitmaking days - from 1967’s hard-grooving “Guitar Man” to the post-trucksploitation crash of the early Eighties - Reed was a one-of-a-kind pop star living in the nexus of country, funk, furious fingerpicking and novelty song. Jerry Reed was, as Brad Paisley said, “a true master of his instrument,” one of the greatest country guitarists of all time and a fount of blazing licks equal parts Earl Scruggs and Django Reinhardt.
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