Waylon Jennings Archives

New Reissue Finds Elvis Costello Covering Waylon Jennings

Posted by Luke Poling at 9:00 am No Responses »

Oct 082024

A new, expanded version of Elvis Costello’s 1986 album, King of America, includes a previously unreleased live version of the Waylon Jennings classic, “The Only Little Daddy That’ll Walk the Line.”

The box set, titled King of America & Other Realms includes 6-discs of additional material, including a January 27th, 1987 performance of the song at a sold-out Royal Albert Hall in London. And that isn’t the only cover Costello played that night. He also performed Buddy Holly’s “True Love Ways,” Ray Charles’ “What Would I Do Without You,” and Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Your Funeral and My Trial.”

Costello’s backing band that night was not The Attractions, but instead included guitarist James Burton and bassist Jerry Scheff from Elvis Presley’s TCB Band, drummer Jim Keltner, Benmont Tench from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers on keyboards and T-Bone Wolk on accordion and mandolin. (Many of these musicians also played on the album as well.)

Costello’s version hews closely to the original, as Costello continued his exploration of American music, including folk and, in this instance, country.

King of America & Other Realms is available on November 1st.

The Best Cover Songs of September 2024

Posted by Ray Padgett at 10:10 am 3 Responses »

Oct 012024

Andrew Bird & Madison Cunningham – Crying In The Night (Buckingham/Nicks cover)

Armored Saint — One Chain (Don’t Make No Prison) (The Four Tops cover)

Review: Willie Nelson’s ‘I Don’t Know a Thing About Love: The Songs of Harlan Howard’

Posted by Seuras Og at 9:00 am No Responses »

Mar 092023

With a work ethic that dwarfs musicians a third of his age, good ol’ Willie keeps pumping ’em out, praise be. When listening to him sounding impossibly youthful on I Don’t Know a Thing About Love, his tribute to famed songwriter/contemporary/buddy Harlan Howard, it is impossible to believe Nelson turns 90 at the end of next month. These songs are staples by now, avoiding any purely Nashville C&W silo, so he and (largely) his regular crew, can imbue these songs with some outlaw life, verve and, where necessary, pathos.

It is over 20 years since Harlan Howard died, aged 74, in 2002. Despite that, his songs have remained timeless, seeming to avoid being locked into any of the stylistic cliches of the last century. Striking lucky only a year or two after he began to write, he swiftly scored a couple of major country chart hits, with massive crossover success of the second of those, one you’ll know, his best known song, “Heartaches By The Number,” which Guy Mitchell took to the top of the pop charts in 1959. Unrestricting himself to Nashville, he wasn’t even averse to dabbling in R’n’B, penning “The Chokin’ Kind,” a hit for Joe Simon in 1969. Howard summed up his writing style with the legendarily pithy phrase, since adopted as the yardstick of a good country song, “three chords and the truth.”

I Don’t Know a Thing About Love bounces out the corral convincingly with “Tiger By The Tail,” all chunky guitar twangs and Nelson sounding like he’s having a hoot. Howard cowrote this song (and many others) with Buck Owens, and it gave Owens his biggest hit. It was inspired by the Esso/Exxon tagline of the day, around putting a tiger in your tank. Nelson here certainly sounds as if he has one in his. That aforementioned Joe Simon hit follows, with Nelson slowing it down, stripping out the funk, finding a classic truck stop weepie in the remains. Those of us who can never wait for the inevitable appearance of Mickey Raphael’s mournful harp on any Nelson record need wait no longer, as Raphael blows a corker on this one, ahead a typically stuttering solo from Trigger. (Trigger? Google it, in the context of Willie Nelson.)

Heartaches always a stock in trade for Howard, “Excuse Me (I Think I’ve Got A Heartache)” could almost be a rerun for the better known song, itself not included, perhaps as Nelson covered it before, if back in 1965, on Country Music Favorites, Willie Nelson Style. A pity, as that was not Nelson’s finest moment, arguably before he hit his stride. Nevertheless, this lighter song gets a good seeing-to that doesn’t disappoint. Mike Johnson’s steel is especially good. As is the piano, provided by Jim “Moose” Brown, for another tears-in-your-beer number, “Life Turned Her That Way,” another short doozy of a harmonica interlude from Raphael, bookending with more whining steel. The title track may be the weakest song in the set; it’s pleasant enough, but Nelson can do this sort of thing in his sleep, it sounding he here he was on automatic pilot.

Thankfully, that is retrieved by a sterling version of Howards’s other best-known song, “Streets Of Baltimore,” popularized to more modern audiences by Gram Parsons and Dwight Yoakam. Lyrically it could be the flip of “Life Turned Her That Way,” taken from the view of the embittered husband rather than those with a kindlier view. The band play it like the best Texas bar band in the world, and hey, maybe they are. “Busted” here manages to find a middle road between the best-known other versions of this song, capturing Johnny Cash’s swagger with Ray Charles’ soul, with Raphael puffing and blowing like an old bluesman. Moose’s organ is great, too.

“She Called Me Baby” captures a glossy retro feel, in waltz time, with lots of echo on the steel and the guitars. That’s lots of echo, and I feel the 50’s Western swing mood deliberate. It is certainly better than the gloopy strings when Charlie Rich covered it and had a hit. (It would have been interesting had there been an effort to look at it in the style of Candi Staton, who also had a hit with it, changing the sex of the protagonist!) “Too Many Rivers” returns to the template elsewhere, with Nelson in as fine vocal fettle as anywhere on this project, he presenting the words convincingly and believably. Trigger gets to show his chops again. Finally, and to close this engaging album comes “Beautiful Annabel Lee,” a sweet song of thwarted childhood love, steel and harp the fuel that feeds this one. A bit soppy, but since when was this sort of music not?

Nelson could possibly put anything out at this stage of his career, and have it praised by default. To be fair, I Don’t Know a Thing About Love stands up on its own legs, irrespective, as does indeed his last album. And for that matter the one before that. So, it is true you do have to have a fair bit of love for country, and it may not quite steer sufficient into Americana crossover territory for some, but that is their problem. Any lover of Nelson and any covers lover should have a field day here.

I Don’t Know a Thing About Love Track Listing:

1. Tiger By The Tail (Buck Owens cover)
2. The Chokin’ Kind (Waylon Jennings cover)
3. Excuse Me (I Think I’ve Got A Heartache) (Buck Owens cover)
4. Life Turned Her That Way (Little Jimmie Dickens cover)
5. I Don’t Know A Thing About Love (Conway Twitty cover)
6. Streets Of Baltimore (Bobby Bare cover)
7. Busted (Johnny Cash with the Carter Family cover)
8. She Called Me Baby (Harlan Howard cover)
9. Too Many Rivers (Claude Gray cover)
10. Beautiful Annabel Lee (Burl Ives cover)

The 25 Best Steve Earle Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 10:00 am 2 Responses »

May 272022

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

Today, Steve Earle releases the fourth in his occasional series of covers albums. They pay tribute to his musical heroes and teachers who’ve passed on – Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Jerry Jeff Walker – plus, in one tragic case, his son Justin Townes Earle, who died in 2020.

We’ll be reviewing the new one, Jerry Jeff, in the near future, but as we celebrate covers by Steve Earle, we thought we’d also celebrate covers of Steve Earle. Though he’s never been a big generator of hit singles, this songwriter’s songwriter has had a number of songs become stealth standards, particularly in the Americana, folk, and alt-country worlds. When everyone from Johnny Cash to The Pretenders is singing your songs, you know you’re doing something right. Continue reading »

Rarely Covered Bob Dylan Songs V: 1990s and Beyond

Posted by Ray Padgett at 9:00 am 2 Responses »

May 272022

Rarely Covered looks at who’s mining the darkest, dustiest corners of iconic catalogs.

Today concludes our weeklong series celebrating the weirdos who skip over “Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Make You Feel My Love” to cover the strangest, oddest, most obscure songs in the vast Bob Dylan catalog.

We’re cramming a couple decades into this finale, for a simple reason. If you’ve been following along, you know the primary criteria for inclusion has been that the song hasn’t been released on an album. Well, recent years simply don’t have that many non-album tracks. And some of the best – “Huck’s Tune,” “Tell Ol’ Bill,” etc – haven’t ever been covered well. So we’re loosening the restrictions a little bit today, mixing covers of some recent-album deep cuts in with the usual oddities and outtakes. Continue reading »

The 40 Best Billy Joel Covers Ever

Posted by Staff at 9:00 am 5 Responses »

Aug 022021

‘The Best Covers Ever’ series counts down our favorite covers of great artists.

When Bruce Springsteen invited Billy Joel to play with him at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s 40th anniversary concert, he described their meeting as the “Bridge and Tunnel Summit.” This crossover surprised no one; the two artists are similar in many ways, riding careers that exploded from modest singer-songwriter origins playing dive bars to filling stadiums across the world. But one of the ways their trajectories have diverged: The Tunnel side of that equation (that’s Bruce from New Jersey) is about 100 times cooler than the Bridge side (Billy from Long Island). As a result, Springsteen songs have been covered far more often than Joel tunes, despite both having quite a few household-name hits under their belt.

Or maybe they’ve just been covered differently. When we did our Springsteen list, we had an abundance of genre-spanning covers to choose from, the hippest artists around finding meaning in Bruce’s work from every conceivable direction. Doing this month’s Joel list, we had an abundance too – of lounge piano. So much lounge piano.

Joel’s songs deserve better treatment than they often get. So we had to dig deep for this list, sifting through the schlock. There’s a little jazzy piano sprinkled in here and there, sure, but there’s also hardcore punk, ’90s R&B, spectral folk, robot electronica, south-of-the-border disco, and more. Turns out there are plenty of revelatory Billy Joel covers out there; they’re just lurking a little below the surface.

Dive in.