VA - Dim Lights Thick Smoke & Hillbilly Music: Country & Western Hit Parade 1962 (2011)

Bear Family's fine ongoing series of country chart hits year by year is not only an eye-opening history of country music's various trends and fashions, it also serves as a reminder of how a pop music genre builds, grows, and evolves while still retaining its commercial viability and audience, and given country's longstanding lip service to tradition, it serves as proof to the old axiom that the more things change, the more they stay the same. This volume takes on 1962, and includes such enduring genre gems from that year as Hank Snow's "I've Been Everywhere," George Jones' immortal "She Thinks I Still Care," Flatt & Scruggs' "The Ballad of Jed Clampett" (which also shows country's inroads into television), Carl Butler's "Don't Let Me Cross Over," and Buck Owens' "Kickin' Our Hearts Around."