The Greatest Country Love Songs (US)

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For all of its excesses, which might include an enormous fascination with whiskey and trucks, there can be little debate that country music has produced some of the most believable love songs in our befuddled species' whole history of singing about such matters. The list of romantic masterpieces in the genre is endless -- George Jones' "She Thinks I Still Care" and Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces" come immediately to mind, as does Hank Williams' "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" and Johnny Cash's "I Still Miss Someone" and dozens of others like Merle Haggard's "Today I Started Loving You Again" -- and if often the scene of the song is a bar at closing time, well, just ask any bartender what seems to be uppermost in the minds of his clients when the lights finally get dimmed for the last time. Some of them can't wait to get home and some of them hope never to get home and all of it is for the sake of love, good or bad, fiery or indifferent. Romance defines us both by its presence and by its absence. Either way, it's what we live for and dream of, and it's a good part of why we drink and end up in a bar at closing time confessing to a bartender who no doubt has his own romantic complexities to try and fathom. So when you title an album The Greatest Country Love Songs you better be on top of it, because country love songs suffer no fools. All of these 13 tracks are new recordings, so we get Pam Tillis singing "Ring of Fire" instead of Johnny Cash, Tracy Byrd singing "Today I Started Loving Her Again" instead of Merle Haggard, etc. Which is fine, but the truth is, most of the songs here wouldn't make the Top 20 of most people's lists of greatest country love songs. And since when is "Ring of Fire" a love song? Sure, technically it is, but it is really more cautionary than romantic, and you certainly wouldn't sing it to woo someone. Not only that, Tillis' version replaces the trademark mariachi horn arrangement (done by Jack Clement) in Cash's original with fiddles, and it just sounds wrong without those horns, however nicely done. Byrd, meanwhile, does a nice job on "Today I Started Loving You Again," and it's a great song, but where is "I Fall to Pieces," "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," "Crazy," "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain," "She Thinks I Still Care," "I Still Miss Someone," or any of the hundred other greatest country love songs? Calling this set "Country Love Songs" would have been fine. Greatest Country Love Songs? Nope. Not even close. ~ Steve Leggett