True Grit Soundtrack CD

Composer: Elmer Bernstein.
Composer: Elmer Bernstein.
Arrangers: Al DeLory; Artie Butler.
Apart from Glen Campbell's vocal performance on the title track and its reprise, this is an all-instrumental collection of vintage, Elmer Bernstein-composed, late-1960s Hollywood film music. It's remarkable in comparison with its 21st-century counterpart for its lack of brooding strings, authentic Native American war chants, or snatches of Americana-laced banjo and dulcimer. Instead, it's a mostly sunny collection of big-country orchestral arrangements with odd snatches of then-trendy electric sitar, with no pretensions to anything other than providing a little background atmosphere, which it does an excellent job of.
John Wayne won his only Academy Award for his portrayal of aging U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn in True Grit, a successful Western of the late 1960s also notable as the screen debut of country-pop singer and television host Glen Campbell. Naturally, Campbell sang the title song, written by the film's score composer, Hollywood veteran Elmer Bernstein, with lyrics by British journeyman Don Black. Bernstein was familiar with the Jimmy Webb-style country-pop Campbell was accustomed to singing, and Black, as usual, turned in something serviceable, even given the challenge of inserting a nearly unsingable word like "grit" into a lyric. ("The pain of it / Will ease a bit / When you find a man with true grit.") The result was a Top Ten country and Top 40 pop hit as well as an Oscar nomination for best song. The soundtrack album, which contains two versions of the song (first the hit single, then the one from the closing credits), like many soundtrack albums, does not actually consist of material drawn straight from the film soundtrack, but rather of suites constructed separately in the recording studio. Unlike many soundtrack albums, however, this one admits to the switch. "Elmer Bernstein conducts Themes From his Original Score Arranged by Artie Butler," reads a statement on the album cover. Butler's arrangements also take contemporary pop writers like Webb and Burt Bacharach into consideration for a set of instrumentals that suggest light pop/rock, as if the album had been made by Henry Mancini or Ray Conniff. In "A Dastardly Deed," for example, an electric guitar is made to sound like a sitar; elsewhere, a single wind instrument carries a melody, Bacharach-style, before it is caught up by horns as drums pound, and then an organ intrudes. None of this sounds much like the Old West, of course, but it does sound like typical easy listening, instrumental pop of the late '60s. And that, along with the hit single, was enough to place this album in the Top 100. ~ William Ruhlmann