Connie Smith – Born To Sing

Connie Smith — though never a star on the level of Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn or Tammy Wynette — nevertheless has always been a first-class singer who deserves to be held in as high regard as her better-known peers. She has been publicly praised by Dolly Parton, and George Jones went on record in the mid-’70s (with then-wife Wynette in attendance, no less) referring to Smith as his favorite female singer.

Indeed, when Smith went to Nashville in 1964, she was widely touted as the successor to Cline’s recently vacated throne, and with good reason. Her specialty is delivering heart songs in a soulful, deep-throated manner, not unlike fellow West Virginian Cline in her less-restrained moments. Often singing at the top end of her natural range, Smith has a fetching tendency to occasionally peg the VU meter into the red, resulting at times in slightly distorted vocal tracks. Imagine, if you can, a C&W equivalent of White Light/White Heat (minus the sailors and the needles, of course), and you’ll begin to have a sense of the emotional maelstrom that lies within the confines of this box.

As with most box sets, the earliest material here tends to be the best. Not only was Smith supplied with first-rate songs right away by the likes of Baker Knight, William Morgan, and, most predominantly, Bill Anderson (whose “Once A Day” became Smith’s first and biggest hit), she also happily fell into the care of ace producer Bob Ferguson.

Lower-profile than studio chief Chet Atkins — but no less responsible for the luxurious Living Stereo sound of RCA’s classic mid-’60s Studio B sessions — Ferguson keeps the proceedings here tough, tight, supple and punchy. By wisely recording steel guitarist Weldon Myrick (in whom Connie found a musical foil as perfect as Ralph Mooney was to Wynn Stewart or Sneeky Pete was to Gram) almost piercingly trebly, Ferguson ensured these early records would burst out of not only the tiny blue transistor radios of the day, but also the more sophisticated stereos of the decades since.

After her fourth platter, a gospel LP that could almost be seen as a warm-up for Elvis’s How Great Thou Art sessions a mere three months later (same studio, a number of the same participants, even some of the same songs), RCA made a vain attempt to break Connie into the MOR territory inhabited by Jim Reeves and Eddy Arnold by forcing pop material on her.

The results, both artistically and commercially, were marginal, and the label, to its credit, was mercifully quick in returning Connie to the country she was born to sing. As this set closes, Smith is back on familiar turf, belting out vintage material by the likes of Dallas Frazier and Jean Chapel, not to mention an entire LP of Anderson songs.

Though she continued with RCA for several more years before moving to Columbia and, more recently, Warner Bros., it is these 1964-1967 recordings upon which Smith’s reputation rests.