Mac Wiseman – The Singles/Bluegrass Favorites
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Posted On January 1, 2004
Mac Wiseman, “The Voice With A Heart”, was inducted into the bluegrass Hall of Honor ten years ago, but he’s been woefully underrepresented on CD, and consequently is probably the least familiar of the Hall’s members to anyone not immersed in the genre and its history. Though they are not without their packaging flaws, these two CDs — one a straight album reissue, the other a collection of singles — begin to set the record straight.
Recording for Capitol in the early 1960s, Wiseman — by then a veteran of almost 20 years in the business — was at the peak of his vocal form, with a husky edge to his wide-ranging tenor and a jaunty style that made him instantly identifiable. Favorites billed him as a “master folk singer”, and the set list accordingly leavened his typical mix of bluegrass and heart songs such as “I’ll Remember You, Love, In My Prayers” with folk revival material from Lead Belly and Elizabeth Cotten.
The cuts on The Singles, on the other hand, were geared more directly for country radio — “Your Best Friend And Me”, a straightforward shuffle, actually made it to #12 on the Billboard chart — and generally featured his strongest songs and performances, including the doleful 1962 B-side “Just Outside”, which finds a death row prisoner asking his darling to “please kiss my lips before they grow too cold/When they give you back my body just outside.”
To listeners fixated on the austere sounds of Bill Monroe and Ralph Stanley, much of this material may sound unforgivably lightweight, if not outright mawkish or silly. That’s OK, albeit shortsighted, but for the rest of us, there’s a lot to recommend these sides, including some fine picking from musicians such as mandolinist Benny Williams on Favorites, an engaging blend of country and bluegrass touches on The Singles and, most of all, Wiseman’s fine, friendly voice.
