Hank Cochran – The Heart Of Hank: The Monument Sessions

Hank Cochran and his generation of songwriters — Bill Anderson, Harlan Howard, Willie Nelson, Roger Miller, Mel Tillis — left a mark on Nashville in the late 1950s and early 1960s as indelible as that of Hank Williams. They did so by creating songs that probed country’s quintessential subjects but added unheard of levels of complexity, introspection and emotional depth, at a moment when audiences were ready for greater sophistication in country songs.

He sang close harmony in California with non-relative and future rockabilly icon Eddie Cochran, but Hank’s writing potential didn’t surface until he arrived in Nashville around 1960 and signed with Ray Price’s new Pamper Music (to whom he soon brought his new friend, Willie Nelson). Starting with Patsy Cline’s classic recording of “I Fall To Pieces”, penned with Harlan Howard, Cochran’s writing career kicked into high gear with “She’s Got You”, “Little Bitty Tear”, “The Chair”, and “Make The World Go Away”.

While Cochran and Howard both recorded, neither aspired to the stardom their peers found. Howard had one charted single; Cochran had seven. His biggest, the 1962 top-30 “Sally Was A Good Old Girl”, predated the fifteen numbers on this collection, taken from three 1963 recordings for the tiny Monument-affiliated Gaylord label and his 1967 Monument LP The Heart Of Hank. It includes two more of his charted singles: “A Good Country Song” and an eloquent rendition of Merle Haggard’s “All Of Me Belongs To You”.

Cochran’s artless, offhanded performances reveal a man singing purely for himself, unburdened by the pressure his more visible peers faced to find their next hit. He’s utterly relaxed, with tiny veins of George Jones and Lefty Frizzell inflections in his phrasing; “I Woke Up” and the aching “Speak Well Of Me To The Kids” are as brilliant as any of his better-known material.

Augmenting a tightly focused studio band including Lloyd Green’s extraordinary pedal steel, Monument owner Fred Foster threw in occasional iconoclastic touches, like the trumpet-harmonica duel on the bridge of “When You Gotta Go, You Gotta Go”. Cochran would record again, but unlike his bloated all-star 1980 effort on Capitol, this one captures the man’s essence.