Hank Snow – The Essential Hank Snow

With the Nashville Sound, Countrypolitan, Urban Cowboy, and Hot New Country movements to color our view of such things today, Hank Snow is generally known as just one more golden-age example of classic, hard country tradition. One of the most interesting things then about RCA’s new 20-track disc, The Essential Hank Snow, is how untraditional, uncategorizable even, these songs must have sounded at the time they were recorded.

Like his hero Jimmie Rodgers, Snow sang about trains and about moving on, but he flew past each town at a clip that was unprecedented. The fiddles on his recordings, as well as the steel and flat-top guitars, were played old country hard, but they were gussied up with a pop polish that country music had rarely seen. He sang numbers with a rhumba beat and a South American style in a voice that was a flat-out croon, but a croon that somehow never sacrificed its twang. But perhaps the most striking reminder on The Essential is that, in a music best known for its broken-hearted love songs, Snow’s biggest hits were more likely to burst with an unbridled joy.

This upbeat bent to Snow’s vision is especially unexpected if we keep in mind just how much misery and trial he knew. Born Clarence Eugene Snow in Brooklyn, Nova Scotia in 1914, young Hank was sent to live with an abusive grandfather after his parents divorced when he was only eight. When he returned to his mother he discovered that her new husband was an even more dangerous man. To save his own life, Snow took off at the tender age of 12 to work the region’s fishing boats. Through all this, Snow had been a fan of country’s slickest sounds — he especially enjoyed Vernon Dalhart — but it was when his mother played a nearly 15 year-old Snow some Jimmie Rodgers records that he knew he just had to be a musician.

Soon, he’d taught himself to be a pretty hot guitar picker and was calling himself the Yodeling Ranger in Rodger’s honor. When his voice changed, though, he couldn’t yodel any more, so he began calling himself the Singing Ranger. He eventually garnered several Canadian hits in the ’30s and ’40s, but it wasn’t until he’d bombed on two trips to Hollywood that Snow’s career, with a push from new pal Ernest Tubb, really took off. By the time he finally scored his first American hit, “Marriage Vow,” in 1949 (inexplicably not included here), he was already nearly two decades into a career that has lasted over 60 years.

The Essential Hank Snow doesn’t even cover half of the singer’s Top 10 hits, but it does include his best known cuts — all of which say something profound about the kind of persevering attitude Snow had acquired during his troubled Canadian years and about his penchant for seeking out so many happy songs. Someone like George Jones would pack “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” with gut-wrenching irony, but Snow, whose version of the song stayed at No. 1 for 20 weeks in 1954, just sounds sincerely glad to have “forgotten, somehow” the pain he knew.

Similarly, Snow’s two biggest 1950 compositions — the breakneck “I’m Movin’ On” (his first big hit, which was No. 1 for 21 weeks in 1950) and “The Golden Rocket” — are concerned more with the possibility of future happiness than past losses, and 1951’s “The Gold Rush Is Over” is a pleased goodbye to a woman who’s been bad news. As exquisite as any ballad he ever recorded, his “Beggar To A King,” from 1961, is nothing but gratitude itself. And he was especially fond of shouting his love for the “Music Makin’ Mama From Memphis” or “The Girl Who Invented Kissing,” not to mention joyously bragging that “I’ve Been Everywhere” in a voice so damn fast that it was impossible for anyone else to keep up.

Not that everything he recorded was happy; 1952’s “I Went To Your Wedding” is as heartsick as country gets. On early ’60s hits like the revenge masterpiece “Miller’s Cave,” Snow not only manages seemlessly to combine the Nashville Sound with traditional country content and structure. He also sounds like a crazy murderer: His mocking “I said ‘You’ll pay, both you and Davey'” is just plain creepy. But these are exceptions.

Generally, Snow would found hope in even the most hopeless songs. Sometimes this was due to the sheer beauty of his quavering and twangy, perfectly enunciated singing. When Snow croons a weeper like “(Now And Then, There’s) A Fool Such As I,” for example, it somehow comes off more sweet and loyal than foolish. But mainly it was the ebullient pop sound of his recordings that made the difference. Check out the elegant, Tin Pan Alley piano rolls on “Let Me Go, Lover” for just one example.

Typical of most of the discs in RCA’s Essential series, far too much of Snow’s essential career is absent here. It would’ve been nice, just to identify a few of the significant omissions, to have something from his duet albums with Chet Atkins or Anita Carter, or from his Outlaw-sound LP, #104 — Still Movin’. But considering just how extensive the man’s catalogue is (if you bought all the Snow Bear Family has to offer, you’d wind up with 41 discs, at about 22 songs a pop!), The Essential Hank Snow will do as a reasonably solid introduction to one of country’s most prolific, eclectic and accomplished artists.