Jimmy Martin – Songs Of A Free Born Man: Recordings 1959-1992

Probably the first album to feature a cover photo of the artist standing beside his own tombstone, this hodge-podge puts to test the proposition that Jimmy Martin has never made a bad record. In the end the collection scrapes through with a passing grade, for while it would make an abysmal introduction to his music, it has some genuine interest for those already equipped with at least a few of his classics.

Composed of selections from three projects — a late 1950s home recording of Martin and two of his greatest Sunny Mountain Boys (with bass overdubbed years later), a live album originally released in 1990, and an album of duets recorded in the early 1990s that may or may not have been sold at his record table for a brief period — the collection ranges from the adequate to the outstanding, in purely musical terms.

The six cuts from Big Jam Session, which first surfaced in the mid-1980s, are fine, and there are solid moments among the rest, including Little Jimmy Dickens’ contribution to “Don’t Let Me Cross Over” and Ricky Skaggs’ vocal and mandolin turns on the mistitled “Darlin’ Cory” (actually “Cora Is Gone”). On the cuts from live album, the band’s work is more than competent, if less than inspired.

Ultimately, though, this collection’s greatest value lies in its status as a kind of aural supplement to Tom Piazza’s essay, “True Adventures With The King Of Bluegrass”. Balancing out Martin’s serious accomplishments with his colorful character requires drawing on a number of sources, and while that variety has been available in written material, the spoken interludes and interjections here bring something new to the table on the recordings side. And then there’s that photo…