Various Artists – Touch My Heart: A Tribute To Johnny Paycheck

The sensibility connections between the subject of this tribute (the late and unforgettable honky-tonker Johnny Paycheck) and the album’s producer (the live and irreplaceable Robbie Fulks) go a long ways toward describing this music and the performers brought together to deliver it with so much audible affection.

Both of these guys, you see, love hard country music unabashedly, in its sounds and instrumentation and even its fairly modern production styles. They’re perfectly willing to buy into the sentiments of some of your quality, straight-ahead country songs, to a considerable degree; but then, they just need to push the subject range a little further. Sometimes a lot further.

So it should be no surprise that this collection cuts across the lines, surveying the brilliantly and bizarrely far-out Little Darlin’ label Paycheck songs that “all alternative, no Nashville” fans latch onto, but also his more mainstream successes, whether labeled “outlaw” at the time or otherwise. It should not be a surprise that Fulks simply turns to singers who seem a good match for a given song — regardless of whether they’re talented mainstreamers almost unknown to the alt-country world (Billy Yates); artists of similar sensibility who’ve worked both sides of the fence (Jim Lauderdale, Gail Davies, Radney Foster); alternative heroes (Neko Case, Jeff Tweedy, Dave Alvin, Bobby Bare Jr.); or monuments (Bobby Bare Sr., Buck Owens, George Jones). This schema doesn’t even corral in the soulful turn on the Paycheck co-written “Touch My Heart” by Mavis Staples.

The “market category” breakdown reaches wondrous and wonderful proportions on the most famous Paycheck single of all, “Take This Job And Shove It”, which brings together, very nicely, Foster and Tweedy with Bare Sr. and Owens. There are other notable musical meetings here: The guitars of Alvin and Kenny Vaughan combine behind Alvin and Fulks’ vocal take on the Billy Sherill/Nashville Sound-era “11 Months And 29 Days”, and the voices of Case and Lauderdale unite on the ripper of an opening cut, which has a title that says all you need to know about the Paycheck sensibility: “If I’m Going To Sink, I Might As Well Go The Bottom”.

This one would be worth it just for the fine-form George Jones take on “She’s All I Got”; the genuinely burnt takes on “I Did The Right Thing” by Dallas Wayne and “A Man That’s Satisfied” by Mike Ireland; and the junior Bare’s horn-driven, boozy “Motel Time Again”. But these sixteen varied tracks are full of sweet, tough, batty, buried treasure, creating a cross-boundary tribute record that stands with the recent Webb Pierce or Louvin Brothers salutes for likely twang listener satisfaction.