Albert E. Brumley Jr. – 36 Greatest Gospel Memories-A Loving Tribute To Albert E. Brumley

In 1928, while picking cotton in eastern Oklahoma, Albert Brumley, consumed with the desire to escape from the cotton field, and with the strands of “The Prisoner’s Song” running through his head, began writing his most famous gospel song, “I’ll Fly Away”.

Began is the operative word. Unlike Hank Williams, who felt that if a song couldn’t be written in a half-hour, it wouldn’t make it, Brumley would often spend years tinkering with a song, looking for just the right combination of words and music that would reach out and touch his audience. The Brumley kids would often hear him pecking at the piano late at night in his lifelong quest to perfect yet another song.

By the end of his life, Brumley had written over 700 songs, many of them timeless standards — from the starkness of “Rank Strangers” and “Nobody Answered Me”, to the sweetness of “I’ll Meet You In The Morning”, to the unstoppable bounce of “Turn Your Radio On”. James R. Goff Jr., in his book A History Of Southern Gospel, observed that Brumley transformed earlier country gospel styles to both sentimental and upbeat songs which resonated with an audience trying to adjust to the pace and technology of the twentieth century.

Brumley spent virtually his entire adult life in the tiny Ozark Mountain town of Powell, Missouri, where he raised five sons and a daughter. One of the Brumley boys, Albert E. Jr., grew up to become a powerful gospel singer, and over the past five years, Albert and singer/producer Tommy Overstreet assembled this consummate two-disc collection of his father’s songs.

The list of artists who joined with Albert Jr. to pay respect to his father reads like an encyclopedia of country music; among them are Merle Haggard, George Jones, Glen Campbell, Crystal Gayle, Chet Atkins, Porter Wagoner, and Hank Thompson. The selections reflect the sweep and diversity of both Brumley’s masterful songwriting skills and the highly personal styles of the artists performing them.

Many of Brumley’s songs were based on feelings of nostalgic memories of his childhood home. In one of his last recorded performances, Chet Atkins plays a melodic and beautifully articulated solo on “Did You Ever Go Sailing”. The mournful “Nobody Answered Me”, with the late Johnny Russell, was so closely associated with Roy Acuff that many people thought Acuff had written it. “He Set Me Free,” written in 1939 and sung here by Albert Jr. with the Jordanaires, provided the musical inspiration for Hank Williams’ “I Saw The Light.” George Jones tears out the slats on “Jesus Hold My Hand”, though it’s rivaled by Merle Haggard’s riveting, impossibly catchy duet on “Turn Your Radio On”.

Holding the whole collection together is the remarkable straight-from-the-shoulder baritone of Albert Brumley Jr., who shapes his voice perfectly to every partner. He can swoop, slide and bend notes like a bluegrass singer, match grit for grit with George Jones, or blend harmoniously with the Sons Of The Pioneers.

I found it impossible to listen to any or all of these 36 cuts without finding a better human being revealed from within.