Consumer Guide Album

Ernest Tubb: Live 1965 [Rhino, 1989]
You may never love his amazingly resonant baritone--he always sings flat, and by his own admission can't hold a note for longer than a beat. After nearly 50 years on the road, though, his two "live" albums were applause-added phonies, so this posthumous find is something new. Cut by an engineer friend when Tubb was 51 (not so bad when you consider that he rerecorded his compilations for stereo and full rhythm section in his mid-forties), it documents a show that evolved but never really changed--unhurried, genial, skipping from Tubb standards to chart fare to honky-tonk classics to band features to climax with his first and greatest hit, "Walkin' the Floor Over You." Reliable, reassuring, the man who invented honky-tonk belies truisms about how great pop music is always passionate or urgent or necessary. And sounds weird as hell. A−