Classic Mel Tillis!! - This is a awesome CD. 24 classic Mel Tillis tunes. A few songs were redone later, and they did well again. Mel can just sing. This CD will get your feet tapping for sure. Some have a Rock n Roll sound, but Mel hasn t missed touching base with country. It s just a great selection. I bought this for my mother s birthday. I m sure she ll enjoy it. Mel Tillis is her favorite too!
The missing years of a onetime country legend - It s funny: looking at all those old Webb Pierce albums, I always imagined he and Mel Tillis were best buds, collaborating together on those rock-influenced honkytonk shuffles, along with Webb s songwriting secret weapons, Wayne P. Walker. Turns out, though, that Tillis was one of those woebegotten Nashville second-stringers whose work Webb would poach at will, rushing out his own versions of other people s songs (with the full weight of the Decca Records publicity machine behind him), and locking down the chart hit before the original artist s single could gather any steam. For Mel Tillis, it was definitely a double-edged sword -- Pierce s version of I m Tired (poached from Ray Price) established Tillis as a popular songwriter, but Webb s subsequent preemptions put a stranglehold on Tillis s early hopes at a career as a star. If Webb always had a hit with the songs, how could Mel establish himself as a performer? This disc captures the drama of these formative early years, recording for Don Law and the folks at Columbia... Tillis tried tossing a lot of stuff at the wall, to see what would stick, there are plenty of teenpop tunes, penned for the Elvis Presley/Ricky Nelson crowd, adapted folk tunes, and even a few historical tunes, ala Johnny Horton and Claude King... But it s the honkytonk numbers that really stand out: Tillis s own versions of songs such as No Love Have I, Heart Over Mind and Tupelo County Jail (which all show an interesting stylistic debt to George Jones...) Mel s singles mostly flopped, and it would be several years before he d start to have hits, over on the Kapp label, and later on MGM... Still, his early work sounds fun today... This is a nice historical set, and a must-have for Tillis fans!