Milestones

Hank Thompson

Name: Hank Thompson – Songs For Rounders
Item: Songs For Rounders
Author: Federico Romagnoli

Songs For Rounders

1959 (Capitol)

honky tonk, western swing

by Federico Romagnoli

Hank Thompson makes full use of the two stereo speakers […] and delivers an exceptional listening experience […]. Singing the lively "Cocaine Blues", Hank answers his own questions by "ping-ponging" between the right and left [channels]. He sings the other songs from the center, backed by piano, drums and rhythm guitar on the left, while a steel leads the melodic instruments from the right. An expanded horn section joins Hank on "Deep Elm", with the left and right sections alternately taking the lead.

The words quoted above appear on the inner sleeve of the first vinyl edition of the album "Songs For Rounders", released by Hank Thompson on Capitol Records in 1959.

It was important to point out that the album was recorded in stereo rather than mono, since this marked the first time an artist country used the new sound-diffusion method, which had been introduced into the recording industry just a year earlier.[note 1]

It's no accident that Thompson was the one to pioneer this technology: at university he had studied electrical engineering, before redirecting his career toward music once he saw the response he was getting, and in 1947 he had already become the first country artist – and one of the very first artists of any kind – to record his masters on magnetic tape rather than acetate disc. Moreover, as his touring schedule grew more demanding, he built a portable system for handling sound and stage lighting [note 2], since he almost always found the equipment supplied by the venues and dance halls he played to be substandard.

His obsession with technology had, in short, always run deep, and at Capitol he found kindred minds to support him on this front: three of the label's leading figures worked there – Cliffie Stone, Lee Gillette and Ken Nelson – all of them talent scouts, songwriters, arrangers and producers. Nelson in particular would stand by him through the most memorable chapters of his career, including the album in question.

By early '59 Thompson is one of the biggest names on the country circuit, with twenty-four songs to his credit that had placed in the genre's top 10, as compiled weekly by Billboard. Often at his side is guitarist Merle Travis: one of the greatest country songwriters of the era, who, after a run of success concentrated in the second half of the 1940s, failed to sustain his commercial appeal, and so reinvented himself as a prestigious session player thanks to his prodigious guitar technique.

Like many other Thompson records, "Songs For Rounders" is also built around the trio of himself alongside Nelson and Travis.

The idea behind the album says a lot about Thompson's character, always ready to take on a new challenge: when he suggested to Nelson that they record "Cocaine Blues" as a single, the producer pointed out that its racy lyrics would make it impossible to get any radio play, and suggested instead cutting it as an album track. Thompson seized on the idea and proposed making an entire album of songs on similar themes: booze, drugs, illicit affairs, gambling, nightlife and so on. Even suspecting the project was unlikely to be a commercial success, the three of them got to work, backed by the band that had accompanied Thompson since his recording debut in 1946, the Brazos Valley Boys.

In August '59 the album hits stores, introduced by a striking, cinematic cover. It opens with the previously unreleased "Three Times Seven", written for the occasion by Travis together with Cliffie Stone.

The track immediately showcases the technological innovation the team had pushed for, managing to polish up what is essentially a romp in western swing [note 3]style. By this point the genre is nearly extinct, having been in steady decline within the country world since the 1950s. Thompson is practically the only one still championing it with any real conviction, though it's not the sole face of what he has to offer. The stereo sound, crisp and spacious, makes the song feel like a science-fiction version of what the genre's master, western swingBob Wills, was playing about ten years earlier.

"I'll Be A Bachelor 'Till I Die" is a cover of a classic honky tonktune, written and released by Hank Williams in 1948: fairly faithful in tempo and melodic line, but with an arrangement puffed up once again in western swingstyle, thanks to the fiddle [note 4] mixed in the foreground, along with the jazzy interplay of the piano and the instrumental interlude with shuffling triplet drums.

“Drunkards’ Blues” comes from the repertoire of the aforementioned Bob Wills, always a key reference point for Thompson. The original dates back to 1939: Thompson slows it down into a funereal, dark hybrid of blues and jazz, with the rhythm marked out by acoustic guitar and fiddle plucked notes, while piano, acoustic guitar and guitar steel trade off in the background, weaving endlessly.

The previously unreleased “Teach ‘Em How To Swim” shows off Thompson’s great eclecticism, with its calypso feel, rather unusual for a country record of the era. It’s not easy to pin down who actually wrote the song: depending on the edition, it’s credited to Thompson, songwriter William Penix and/or writer Orville Proctor, both regular collaborators of his.

“Dry Bread” once again draws from Travis’s pen, who had already recorded it himself in 1950. It’s one of the sparest tracks on the record and seems to edge close to the Bakersfield sound, which at that very moment was scoring its first successes thanks to its standard-bearer Buck Owens.

“Cocaine Blues” is a cover of the little-known outfit western swing W.A. Nichol’s Western Aces, who released it in 1947: it remains their only recorded output. It was a reworking of the traditional “Little Sadie”, made by the band’s singer, Troy Junius “Red” Arnall, about whom likewise little else is known. Thompson’s version is decidedly more muscular, if only because it adds drums, which were originally absent.

“Deep Elm” is a full-on rock and roll number, based on “Deep Elm Blues”, a song first recorded in 1933 by Leon Chappelear’s Lone Star Cowboys, itself a reworking of the traditional “The Georgia Black Bottom”, whose earliest version dates back to 1927, courtesy of the Cofer brothers’ Georgia Crackers. We’re going back so far in time that Thompson’s version amounts to a genuine overhaul, though the song had a strong rhythmic drive from the very start.

“Bummin’ Around” had been Jimmy Dean’s debut single in 1952, written by Pete Graves (while Dean would go on to become one of the biggest names in 1950s country and Sixties, Graves’s name remains essentially tied to this standard). In this case, even more than the instrumental arrangement, it’s the vocal approach that makes the difference: Dean’s style at the time was still very rustic and nasal, tied to the dictates ofhonky tonk, whereas Thompson delivers it in a more mature tone, closer to the crooning.

"Little Blossom" is the only traditional song on the tracklist whose discovery came after Thompson's recording debut: it was in fact first recorded in 1948 by the musician bluegrass Clyde Moody, in waltz form. Thompson keeps the same tempo: aside from the ever-remarkable instrumental flourishes of the Brazos Valley Boys, this is one of the tracks closest to the original version.

Imagination runs wild instead on "Rovin' Gambler," a traditional song that goes back much further, having been discovered in 1909 and, by the time of this recording, already cut by at least twenty different artists. The arrangement sounds like a hybrid of the sound sound of Bakersfield (the snappy drums, the ringing electric guitars) and that of Nashville (the piano, handclapping): a stylistic contrast that perhaps only Thompson could have dreamed up.

"Left My Gal In The Mountains" was written by singer-songwriter Carson Robison in 1929, at the roots of country music, and recorded by Bud & Joe Billings. Here too the time gap between the two versions makes direct comparison difficult, but setting aside the huge stylistic distance (a bare acoustic arrangement on one side, an electric, layered one on the other) and the technological gulf, the pace and melody remain clearly recognizable, proof of Thompson's intent to renew the classics without disrespecting them.

"May I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister?" is finally a traditional song built on the same melody as the even more famous "Red River Valley" (it's unclear which of the two derived from the other, and the earliest recordings of both date back to the mid-1920s). Thompson closes the album with one of its most complex arrangements, which over a classic honky tonk piles up piano virtuosity, tremolos of fiddle and guitars steel that play with different timbres.

As expected, the record doesn't achieve success: the lyrics are too much for the country radio of the time. There's the negative view of the institution of marriage ("I'll Be A Bachelor 'Till I Die"), the wife who leaves her husband for a stranger ("May I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister?"), a life ruined by gambling ("Rovin' Gambler"), the man who loses everything because of a toxic relationship and becomes a drifter ("Dry Bread"), the drunkard who by now sees death as the only way out ("Drunkards' Blues"), right up to femicide under the influence of drugs ("Cocaine Blues"). It's true that most of these were already existing songs, but no one had ever strung them all together in what amounts to a genuine concept album. The whole operation frankly seems better suited to the age of theoutlaw country, which in 1959, however, was still far from becoming reality.

Thompson would recover commercially already with the following “At The Golden Nugget” (yet another wall he broke down: it's the first live album in country music), but despite the reception it received at the time, today “Songs For Rounders” [note 5 is regarded as his masterpiece and as one of the first great country records, perhaps the album that, more than any other, made the genre realize that the LP format could also be used to create works with their own artistic dignity, rather than simply serving as collections of singles.

[note 1]In the liner notes of a recent CD reissue of “Songs For Rounders” (Omni, 2014), unfortunately unsigned, it's claimed that it is “one of the first” country albums recorded in stereo, while musician and critic Cub Koda credits Thompson with that distinction without any hesitation.

[note 2]For further reading on the subject, we recommend an interview given by Thompson in 1992, which can now be heard on the websiteWaco History.

[note 3] Western swingjust as honky tonkand the Bakersfield sound and the Nashville sound: these are different styles of country music that have followed one another and sometimes overlapped over the years. Explaining them to those not well versed in the subject would require separate articles altogether, so, simplifying brutally to make this review easier to follow: the western swing was precisely a fusion of country and swing, popular mainly between the mid-1930s and the late 1940s; thehonky tonk is the most emblematic style of 1940s country music, stripped-down and built around the sound of electric guitars and fiddle (it also laid the groundwork for all the later country movements closer to tradition); the Bakersfield sound and the Nashville sound, named after their respective cities, finally dominated country music from the late 1950s to the end of the Seventies: they were opposites of one another, one more rough-hewn and attuned to the rock and roll revolution, the other closer to pop music and full of ballads, complete with choruses and strings.

[note 4]This is what the fiddle is called in country and folk music circles. It may differ technically and structurally from the classical violin, though not necessarily.

[note 5]The AllMusic page for “Songs For Rounders” gets the writing credits wrong on no fewer than two of the tracks in the lineup. It attributes “Deep Elm” to Willard Robison, the jazz singer, pianist and composer who did indeed record a song titled “Deep Elm (You Tell 'Em I'm Blue)” in 1925: but it's actually a different song. It also attributes “May I Sleep In Your Barn Tonight Mister?” to street musician George Reneau: Reneau was indeed one of the first to record it, in 1925, but he wasn't its author.

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07/01/2024

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition