Single Review Roundup: Vol. 3, No. 34

This week’s highlights include Willie Watson and The Oak Ridge Boys featuring Willie Nelson.

“99 ½ Won’t Do”

Bobby Rush & The Blind Boys of Alabama feat. Dom Flemons & Dustbowl Revival

Written by Traditional

Jonathan Keefe: Rush is a blues legend who has been dubbed The King Of The Chitlin’ Circuit, and I love hearing him lean into an arrangement that foregrounds the country elements in his approach to southern soul music. “99 ½ Won’t Do” is a blues standard, but I won’t feign that it’s one I’m super familiar with outside of this version by Rush, but I’m eager to hear more renditions of it now. It’s the kind of blues number that’s driven by a sense of humor and laughing at difficult circumstances: Here, Rush sings of trying to live right and “make a hundred,” knowing that anything less just isn’t going to cut it.

Rush sounds like he’s having fun with this recording, but there’s no getting around how the power of his voice has been diminished by age. I imagine he’d have worked himself into a right and proper frenzy on this back in his prime. His collaborators are game, too, though Blind Boys of Alabama are more subdued than they usually are on their backing vocals, possibly trying not to overshadow Rush’s lead. Dom Flemons’ banjo picking is, as always, a wonder, and his contributions are what really elevate this single. B

Kevin John Coyne: What I love about this record is how it brings into modernity the heavily Black roots of American country music. Somewhere, Miko Marks is smiling.

Now, “99 ½ Won’t Do,” but I dare say that 3 ½ would’ve done just fine. This record goes on slightly too long, diluting the impact of the surprising musical directions that it goes in during its runtime. My kingdom for a radio edit!  B

 

“I Don’t Know How to Say Goodbye”

Dwight Yoakam feat. Post Malone

Written by Dwight Yoakam 

 

KJC: I’ve had just about enough of these ridiculous feature artists, 95% of which seem to involve Post Malone lately. 

This is a fantastic, fantastic Dwight Yoakam record. The musicianship, his time-impacted but still thrilling vocals, his clever songwriting. It’s as good a Dwight Yoakam record as has been sent to radio in the last twenty years.

Post Malone has no idea what to do with it. He can’t play off Yoakam’s personality like Buck Owens or give a bone-chilling hillbilly harmony vocal like Patty Loveless. His phrasing is a mess and his attempts to replicate Yoakam’s enthusiastic singing fall flat. He simply does not understand the components of a Dwight Yoakam record well enough to contribute to one.

If this was a live recording from a Yoakam concert that Malone attended, it would be fine. But as the canon version of this delectable Dwight disc? Absolutely not. B- 

JK: I’m on record as stating that Posty’s solo efforts in the country space are far superior to any of his 583619491762 collaborations, and this does not one thing to disavow me of that notion. He’s at least competent within the country music idiom when he’s not doing some weird, strident cosplay because he’s trying too hard to replicate someone else’s successes. When he’s partnering with an established genre act, his efforts to imitate that act’s style in some way come to bear: He can half-sing like Morgan Wallen (better than, even…) or over-emote all the livelong day like Tim McGraw.

But Wallen and McGraw and Shelton and Wilson are not Dwight Yoakam, and the chasm between Yoakam’s skill set and Post Malone’s is a vast and infinite void. I think Yoakam is quite sincere in his affection for Malone and his efforts to prove his country bona fides, but I don’t think Yoakam does him one single favor by actually recording with him. Maybe if Yoakam had written with him or produced his record, Malone’s talents would be even more apparent and F-1 Trillion might’ve been a far better album than it is.

Because here? Dwight treats Posty the way he treated poor doomed Jared Leto back in Panic Room, just with terrible face tats in place of terrible cornrows.

But Dwight’s parts of this record? The man still cooks, and hallelujah, we’re getting a whole new album. If it’s as good as his parts here, look out. C+

 

“Slim and the Devil”

Willie Watson

Written by Sterling A. Brown and Willie Watson

JK: “That place was Dixie that I took for Hell.”

Watson waits almost four minutes into this travelogue before he delivers an absolute sucker-punch of a line, as the titular Slim tells Saint Peter that he can’t account for what the Devil’s been up to, because his compass had mistakenly told him he was in Hell, when he was really just traveling through the Jim Crow south.

Slim’s entire journey is captivating– and Watson’s such a master of this type of old-timey form that, if you’d told me this was some age-old tune he’d unearthed rather than one he’d co-written, I’d have fully believed you– and it stands as a stark reminder that those who reminisce fondly about Good Old Days are always erasing the experiences of others whose lived realities were starkly and sometimes fatally different.

The former OCMS picker has for sure still got it. A

KJC: The Jim Crow south has moved north, with Confederate imagery and white supremacist rhetoric completely dominating a major political party. The breathtaking racism on display would make the devil feel right at home on both sides of the Mason Dixon line.

Our new hell of hardworking Black immigrants hiding in their homes as political leaders slander their community and endanger their safety, doubling down on their hate as bomb threats evacuate schools and hospitals, evokes the Ku Klux Klan terrorism of days gone by. But all I can think about is the Haitian kid on the playground being bullied in language borrowed directly from the former president of the United States.

“Slim and the Devil” captures a specific place and time, but my fellow northerners dare not feign moral superiority while listening to it. This hate is in our homes too, and Watson’s words are a warning to all of us. 

Kudos to Watson for delivering such a powerful statement in such a rich and rewarding musical way. A

“I Thought About You, Lord”

The Oak Ridge Boys feat. Willie Nelson

Written by James Coats

KJC:  This is an old song that I’ve heard many times, including many performances of it from Willie Nelson himself. 

Never has the song had the poignancy it does here, delivered by older, wiser men who are so very close to meeting the maker they are admiring here.

It just hits different knowing that the days of thinking about the Lord are drawing to an end, and meeting Him is just around the corner. I wish I could’ve played this for my dad in his final days, and I hope I remember to listen to it if I’m lucky enough to live as long as the extraordinary talents on this record.

The eighties feature made me an Oaks fan for life, and this is a timely reminder that their gifts have long outlasted their lengthy run at country radio. A

JK: A lovely and poignant record that is elevated by the elder statesmen who are performing it. I don’t know that this hits quite the same devastating emotional beats as Nelson’s new “Last Leaf” from a couple of weeks back, but I don’t know of many songs from any of country’s golden eras that do.

The Oaks’ harmonies on this are just tremendous: Nelson is so tricky to sing well with, and of course they nail the assignment. Listening to this, when they sing about how they’re thinking about, “the songs that [they] keep singing and… the joy that they keep bringing,” my mind kept returning to the Oaks’ many #1 singles of the 80s and how, more than anything else, their career has been grounded in a true sense of joy.

With the recent death of Joe Bonsall, hearing the Oaks sing overtly about that very notion is just so timely, and this single makes for a fine career capstone, even if it’s just yet another brilliant late-career effort from Nelson. A

Open in Spotify