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:: I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby ::

:: Pitfall ::

:: When I Stop Dreaming ::

:: In The Middle of Nowhere ::

I've been lovin' the Louvin Brothers ever since a friend turned me on to "Satan Is Real" about 10 years ago. At the time, I didn't much care for country music, period, but one look at the cover art and I was intrigued, to say the least. Upon listening, I discovered some incredibly well produced and well written old-timey music, with close harmony singing the likes of which I'd never heard before. I started telling other people about it, and it was always the same thing: The fire and brimstone engulfed goofy Satan standup and jazz-handed Louvins on the cover induced guffaws, and the sermon that takes up much of the title track dropped a few jaws, but ultimately the sheer beauty of the music and the earnest dedication of the musicians transcended any jilted, irony laden '00 sensibilities inherent in the listener.

I started picking up any vinyl I could find by them and in the last 10 years, I've found most everything, except "Satan Is Real" of course (unless I want to spend a couple hundred bucks on Ebay or something). The Louvin's are very consistent - just about everything they did was a winner. They tended to do a gospel album, then a secular album, then back to gospel and so forth. I'm sure Capitol would have been happy if they dropped the gospel altogether, but thankfully they stuck to their guns because although they could write and sing a country love song with the best of 'em, Jesus always brought out a passion in them that was awesome.

I found this EP recently at a street fair, and I didn't really recognize the song titles, but I figured they were probably on one of the albums I own. Turns out they're not, except "In The Middle of Nowhere" which is on a late '60s comp, so that's way cool. "When I Stop Dreaming" and "I Don't Believe You've Met My Baby" were early hits for Ira and Charlie, so I guess this EP is a comp of some kind. I don't know if it originally came in a picture sleeve or not. Once again, it's a damn fine collection of tunes though, and I'm glad to add it to my collection. Now, if anyone wants to sell me a copy of "Satan Is Real" real cheap...


Mike

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25, 2006 at 6:22 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.