Country Gentlemen – High Lonesome: The Complete Starday Recordings

By the time Folkways Records released the first full-length Country Gentlemen LP in the summer of 1960, the group had already recorded several 45 rpm singles for Starday. All of those early tracks — plus six previously unissued tunes — are now available on a 51-song, two-disc set from King Records. A 20-page booklet of photographs and song notes accompanies the music.

It’s not entirely uncommon for a band to start off good and get better. The Country Gentlemen, however, started off better and stayed that way. From the opening guitar run of “Backwoods Blues”, recorded in December 1957, the Gents push their instruments to the very edge of tradition. Their vocals are equally impressive. Charlie Waller’s voice bears a mature, resonant quality that is unmistakably his own. John Duffey’s fragile tenor makes the term “high lonesome” come alive, and “The Church Back Home” closes with a soaring vocal finale that foreshadows Duffey’s later work with the Seldom Scene.

These recordings trace the Country Gentlemen’s development from 1957-1965, and the personnel changes are many. Bill Emerson, Pete Kuykendall, Ed Ferris, and dobro player Kenny Haddock are among the more familiar names. More than a dozen cuts feature the “classic” configuration of Duffey, Waller, Eddie Adcock, and Tom Gray. The material here is strong, though the second disc’s foray into the folk revival — “This Land Is Your Land”, “500 Miles”, “Blowin’ In The Wind” — is a bit less engaging than the rest of the project.

The group continued exploring songs outside the bluegrass mainstream on The Country Gentlemen (1973) and Remembrances & Forecasts (1974). Vanguard has now reissued both those albums on a single CD. By the time of these recordings, the Country Gentlemen had been around for more than fifteen years, certainly long enough to seem rooted. Yet they still chose songs from such contemporary writers as Gordon Lightfoot, Kris Kristofferson, Steve Goodman, and John Prine. Bill Monroe’s “Lord Protect My Soul” is really the only bluegrass standard on either of their Vanguard albums.

Duffey had left the band by the early ’70s, and his absence is felt on these recordings. But there’s the added perk of hearing Doyle Lawson before Quicksilver, and Ricky Skaggs and Jerry Douglas before the New South or Boone Creek. As ever, Waller’s solid vocal and guitar work holds the entire package together.

Vanguard reissued half of these 24 tracks as The Country Gentlemen Featuring Ricky Skaggs On Fiddle in 1987. (Eight others were pulled from The Country Gentlemen, and four from Remembrances & Forecasts.) However, this new release is valuable, if only for offering the latter album in its entirety. There’s no shortage of technical prowess on any of the Gents’ Vanguard recordings, but only Remembrances & Forecasts comes close to matching the youthful energy and passion of their Starday sessions.