VA - Dim Lights, Thick Smoke & Hillbilly Music: Country & Western Hit Parade - 1954 (2009)

Bear Family’s Dim Lights, Thick Smoke and Hillbilly Music series is one of the great treasures of hardcore honky tonk music recorded during the golden years of country & western. Each volume is packed to the gills with original versions by the original artists. In addition, these single-disc sets are lavishly illustrated and exhaustively annotated; they are packaged in a handsome hardbound book-style digipack. Sonically, they are remastered with loving care and up-to-the-minute technology, all while keeping the full integrity of the original recording in the final mix. Compiled chronologically, this volume covers the year 1954, when jukeboxes throughout the south, west, and Midwest were stocked with what we now consider to be pillars of hard country sound. Hank Williams may have been gone by this time, but the music was still in full flower as evidenced by the 28 tracks included here. Radio was breaking new artists all the time, while furthering the careers of established ones. There are great tracks from Slim Whitman (“Rose Marie”), Webb Pierce ("Slowly,” and “Sparkling Brown Eyes” with the Wilburn Brothers), and Hank Snow (“I Don’t Hurt Anymore”). That said, newer voices and sounds were emerging onto the scene in a big way, as honky tonk singers established themselves as great balladeers -- who were still firmly entrenched in the honky tonk sound. For instance, Ray Price’s “Release Me” and “I’ll Be There (If You Ever Want Me)” are included here, as is Little Jimmy Dickens’ “Take Me as I Am or Let Me Go.” Elsewhere, voices like Jim Reeves with “Bimbo,” and Roy Acuff with “I Closed My Heart’s Door” reflect an earlier, more folk-oriented style of country that still scored with listeners and the record-buying public. But it’s the final two cuts on this set that really showcase how the music was changing: the skittering double-time rhythms of the snare and cymbal on Carl Smith’s “Loose Talk,” and “That’s All Right,” by a trio known simply as Elvis, Scotty & Bill, that showcases the movement away from the fiddle as the primary upfront instrument on records to guitars and drums -- whether it be the steel guitar in the former or the electric six-string in the latter. In the middle of the '50s, honky tonk was beginning to shift and change shapes, and this volume illustrates that fact beautifully. This entire series has proved itself invaluable as documentary evidence of the evolution of country music, and this volume adds to that argument.