Porter Wagoner – In Person

Porter Wagoner was born in 1927 just outside West Plains, a small town in the heart of the Missouri Ozarks. Like so many other kids in the rural country audience, he grew up loving the down-home offerings of the Grand Ole Opry even as he was simultaneously dreaming of life outside his own little town. When Roy Acuff came through in 1942, Wagoner not only found a lifelong model for his own performances, he also discovered a way he might get to see the wide world.

By the time he returned to his hometown in 1964 to record In Person, the country audience had changed drastically. While many fans still lived in the country, a large chunk of the audience had, during the postwar years, headed down that hillbilly highway out of their hill-country counties to find good jobs in places such as Kansas City, Cincinnati or, as Bobby Bare had sung the year before, “Detroit City”. By contrast, Wagoner’s gift has always been his willingness to embrace the rural, just-folks quality of those old Acuff and Opry shows during a period when most country music was sounding increasingly uptown and urban.

In Person is a wonderful document of Wagoner’s down-home quality in repertoire, performance and stage presence. The second of three live albums he cut in the ’60s — it came between The Porter Wagoner Show in 1963 and On The Road in ’66 — In Person kicks off with a rolling banjo and a rousing call to get comfortable with old friends, “Howdy Neighbor Howdy”, then maintains that friendly mood over 16 songs. Along the way, Wagoner sings charming versions of hits such as “Misery Loves Company” and a medley of “Haven’t You Heard”, “Eat, Drink And Be Merry”, and “A Satisfied Mind”.

Some of the most entertaining moments, though, come when Wagoner lets his band members shine for the folks. He has fiddler Little Jack Little tear through “Sally Goodin'”, and Pretty Miss Norma Jean (Porter’s “girl singer” before Dolly Parton joined up) offers several fine numbers, including comparatively modern-sounding versions of “Head Over Heels In Love With You” and “Talk Back Trembling Lips”.

Finally, Wagoner lets Speck Rhodes, his famous comedic bass player, sing a “Sweet Fern” that manages to be quite sweet indeed. Even better, Rhodes runs through a couple of brief comedy routines in which he hilariously skewers the stereotype of the unsophisticated rural rube. (Just a sample: Told by Porter that Little Jack owns an expensive antique chair that “goes back to Louis XIV,” Speck deadpans, “Well, he ain’t got nuthin’ on me. I bought a bed that goes back to Sears the 15th.”)

But the best moments come from Wagoner himself, especially when he chooses songs that seem especially well-suited for this hometown crowd. With “The Old Log Cabin For Sale”, he mourns the passing of old-time ways, and in “I Thought Of God”, he recounts the struggle to maintain old religious values in a rapidly changing world.

At the latter song’s beginning, Wagoner tells those in attendance that he walked “through a whispering forest [where] not a man-made sound could I hear,” but by the end of the number he strides the crowded streets of a big town. “I walked through a busy city, it was built by men and steel,” sings Wagoner, who himself had left West Plains for the bright lights of Nashville. “A young one cries, an old one dies,” he tells his old friends, “where love and hate are real.”

Despite even these great changes in his life, though, he still assures his rural, hometown audience: “There in the busy city, I stopped and thought of God.”