Hank Cochran – Livin’ For A Song

Hank Cochran has written some of country music’s most enduring ballads: “Make The World Go Away”, “I Fall To Pieces”, “She’s Got You”, “Don’t You Ever Get Tired Of Hurting Me”, “Don’t Touch Me”, and “A Way To Survive” among them. Of course, they became standards not just because Cochran wrote great songs, but also because great singers (with a lot of help from producers and studio pickers) made them into great singles. Vocalists Ray Price, Patsy Cline, Eddy Arnold, and Elvis Presley, to name just a few of the acts who’ve scored with Cochran tunes, have a way of making the most out of most any song, great or otherwise.

So an album where Cochran, now 66, does all the singing himself doesn’t seem very promising. On Livin’ For A Song, that suspicion is reinforced out of the box, with a pedal-to-the-floor (albeit rhythmically wooden) juke-joint rendition of “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels”, a song Cochran didn’t even write and one that finds his gravelly voice straining to keep pace. Then there’s “When Cotton Was King”, a fatuous Andy Wrenn-penned song that waxes nostalgic for the era of Jim Crow and widespread rural poverty.

When Cochran turns to his own ballads, however, things improve instantly. His voice remains ragged — thin, breaking unexpectedly, going flat — but it also sounds right somehow. For one thing, the slower tempos of marvelous originals such as “Something Unseen”, “He Little Thinged Her”, and “You Wouldn’t Know Love” (a 1970 hit for Ray Price that was co-written by Dave Kirby) let the band relax into a fine Cherokee Cowboys-styled groove. For another, these more relaxed numbers let Cochran get a running start at each line, and give him the space to steer clear of troublesome high or low notes, the way even decent tennis players sometimes play around their backhand. Indeed, when Cochran, accompanied by a boohoo-ing pedal steel guitar, drags himself wearily through the title line of “I Fell Apart”, his vocal flaws sound almost perfect.