Mac Wiseman – ‘Tis Sweet To Be Remembered: Complete Recordings 1951-1964 (6-CD box)

You’d figure Mac Wiseman would be one of the handful of universally recognized first-generation bluegrass giants familiar to listeners well beyond the hardcore fans of the genre. Before 1950, after all, he’d already dueted with Lester in Flatt & Scruggs’ band, moved on to sing leads with Bill Monroe, and played bass in Molly O’Day’s country band as they recorded “Tramp On The Street” and then-unknown Hank Williams songs. Still a fixture on the bluegrass festival circuit in more recent years, the smiling Virginian’s 1987 collaboration The Osborne Brothers And Mac Wiseman is considered another classic.

The classy credits were built on his singular voice — “The Voice With A Heart”, as it was often billed, marked by a defining sweetness and warmth in the lower register. Wiseman never really sounded “lonesome,” even when leaping up into some very high highs indeed. His voice was always especially effective on old sentimental parlor songs, evoking nostalgia. It’s not an accident that “‘Tis Sweet To Be Remembered” and “I’ll Still Write Your Name In The Sand”, probably his best-known numbers, deal with memory and loss.

But Mac Wiseman is not a household name — and that’s not because of any performance weaknesses on his part, but, ironically and frustratingly, because of the nature of his musical strengths and where music business trends took them. This fascinating, repeatedly surprising six-disc, 164-cut Bear Family box contains the evidence of those strengths, and maps the directions they went.

For the most part, in the years included here, the heart of his recording career, Wiseman isn’t singing bluegrass at all. Mainstream pop, honky-tonk, TV themes, old Tin Pan Alley material, new Nashville Sound excursions, even rockabilly dominate the sides that appeared on Dot Records, then on Capitol.

To the bluegrass orthodoxy, that tends to be viewed as the result of bad timing and unfortunate (if probably understandable) capitulation to market demands. Considered from a wider perspective, as this completist overview allows, the variety argues that Wiseman is a singer with a lot of fish to fry, who can win you over in a dozen ways — and who’s often strongest when least confined to the bluegrass hillside.

Wiseman was a working record executive himself, eventually an A&R chief at Dot in its growth years. There’s every reason — as the 60-plus-page hardback’s worth of bio material from Charles Wolfe and Eddie Stubbs makes clear — to see his wanderings as deliberate, both as a search for pop success in the face of the 1950s pop and rock sensibility, and as explorations in areas that appealed.

Wiseman’s solo voice was the attraction from the beginning, so when he starts out recording bluegrass tunes, as he played them with his band the Country Boys, there’s little emphasis on the genre’s instrumental pyrotechnics. The banjo is first downplayed, then removed; Mac found its sound too harsh for his voice, and he’s demonstrably right about that.

Sessions in and around Nashville from 1952-54 turn heavily to sentimental balladry, with an emphasis on slower tunes. As early as 1953, the backup has been transformed to the likes of Hank Garland and Grady Martin, soon to be followed by more urbanized pickers such as Joe Maphis and Skeets McDonald — and then by the lavish Nashville Sound of Chet Atkins and Pig Robbins and Buddy Harmon, with the Jordanaires behind.

Unexpectedly, Wiseman turns out to have quite a way with rockabilly material. His turn on Smiley Lewis’ “I Hear You Knockin'” is a standout, managing to still sound like sweet Mac even as it rocks. The man’s comfortable with a rockabilly-era ballad such as “Gone” and a high school rocker such as “Teenage Hangout”.

His facility with story-songs set him up very nicely to be a sort of twangier Burl Ives in the pop markets, making the time right for an upbeat, orchestrated turn on “Jimmie Brown, The Newsboy”, a tune he already owned in the bluegrass world.

The coming of the commercial folk revival offered a modest career boost. “Dark As A Dungeon”, “Wreck Of The Old 97”, “Tom Dooley” and “Barbara Allen” are predictably effective in his hands, circa 1959-60. He even had a minor hit with “The Ballad Of Davy Crockett” from the TV series.

The experimentation and synthesizing reach a dizzying height in a previously unissued 1960 cut, “I Like This Kind Of Music”, a title appropriately vague as to what sort of music “This” is. It’s a sort of electric hoedown with pop, rock and stroll breaks as illustrations of the alternatives to country rhythm, all used in the same number — and then this one-off cut brings on telltale banjo solos.

Bluegrass instrumentation starts to show up again in his Capitol years, added subtly, instrument by instrument, through the early days of the folk revival, until it’s a full bluegrass ensemble behind him again. When he records “I Like Good Bluegrass Music” in 1962, he clearly means it. And Maybelle Carter’s on harmony vocals and the great Cecil Brower’s on fiddle!

This set will no doubt find its way into the collections of many fans of a unique talent who deserves more credit even within the bluegrass realm. But it also helps us begin to see Mac Wiseman in a different way — as one of the premier, engaging, eminently flexible pop singers of his generation.