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Treasures Untold
Transcription series offers a spate of cool new reissues
By Jim Ridley
MARCH 22, 1999:
The "insurgent country" released by Bloodshot Records hasn't so
much turned heads on Music Row as turned up noses. Yet the Chicago
alt-country label is about to start issuing slabs of stone vintage
country--the likes of which Nashville has literally never heard before.
Thanks to a lucky break, Bloodshot is teaming up with the Soundies oldies
label to issue unreleased "transcription recordings" of country greats such
as Rex Allen, Spade Cooley, and Hank Thompson.
Throughout the 1940s and '50s, artists would cut what were essentially
promotional live recordings and send them on 16-inch lacquer platters to
radio programmers, who would either lease or buy the recordings for
broadcast. The outsized platters required special turntables with a 16-inch
arm. When these transcription recordings fell from favor in the 1960s, the
customized players disappeared; the platters thus sat unheard for decades
afterward. A former recording engineer in Colorado Springs, Colo.,
contacted Soundies to say he had a basement full of these transcription
records.
What the label found was a treasure chest: literally thousands of hours
of recordings by country artists both famous (Ernest Tubb, Patsy Montana)
and obscure (Hank Penny, Texas Jim Lewis). The hurried recording schedule
produced tracks of raw vitality and spontaneity, and the vast majority have
never been released before, making them a collectors' bonanza.
The first Bloodshot/Soundies release, The Last of the Great Singing
Cowboys by cowboy star Rex Allen, hits stores Mar. 20, with the
follow-up--a zippy live workout by Spade Cooley & the Western Swing Dance
Gang--due exactly one month later. In this fashion, the labels hope to
issue five to seven releases a year.
"We have so much stuff we don't know yet what we've got," says Bloodshot
label chief Rob Miller. Even so, the label has already found enough
material on Pee Wee King for a double CD, and the great Hank Thompson (of
"The Wild Side of Life" fame) has an astonishing 71 tracks ready to go. Not
only are the performances ferocious, Miller says, but the lacquers are in
mint condition.
The artists themselves are delighted, Miller adds. Rex Allen contributed
to the liner notes of his CD, and Thompson gave Bloodshot his best wishes
in a phone call last week. "It's nice to get their blessings--and to get to
pay them something," Miller says. "Some of them have been ripped off all
their lives." Watch for these releases at the Ernest Tubb Record Shop,
Lawrence Bros., and other stores where fine country music is sold.

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