Back In The Saddle Again CD

This double CD (originally a double LP, which explains its somewhat short 90 minute running time) was produced and annotated by Charlie Seeman, curator of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. The scholarship shows -- the selection of songs includes old-time authentic material such as "The Old Chisholm Trail" by Harry "Haywire Mac" McClintock (who was the real article, a cowboy as well as songwriter, union organizer, and muleskinner) as well as modern recreations of traditional material, by the likes of Harry Jackson ("The Pot Wrassler") and Van Halyoak ("The Gol-Durned Wheel"). There's room along the way for Carl T. Sprague ("When the Work's All Done This Fall"), John G. Prude (a stripped-down, authentic sounding rendition of "Streets of Laredo"), Ken Maynard ("The Lone Star Trail"), the Arizona Wranglers ("Strawberry Roan"), Glen Rice and His Beverly Hill Billies ("Ridge Runnin' Roan"), and Marc Williams ("Sioux Indians"), as well as the expected classics by Gene Autry ("Back in the Saddle Again"), the Sons of the Pioneers ("One More Ride," from an unissued radio transcription), Tex Ritter ("Riding Old Paint"), Tex Owens ("Cattle Call"), and more recent works by Rex Allen and the Riders In the Sky. It's worth owning just for Jules Verne Allen's "The Cowboy's Lament" (aka "Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie"), which sounds like a field recording sung from the other side of heaven. The notes are voluminous, and nearly as compelling as the music. Overall this is a somewhat more compact and perhaps more informative antecedent to Rhino's four-disc Songs of the West, less broad but a lot deeper (especially in the source research), with a lot more devotion to the real article and less to the pop-culture aspects of cowboy music. ~ Bruce Eder