The Ways To Love A Man/Tammy's Touch/My Elusive Dreams/Inspirations 4 Albums On 2CDs

Raven's 2006 two-fer combines the first two albums Tammy Wynette released after her 1969 Greatest Hits LP: 1969's The Ways to Love a Man and 1970's Tammy's Touch. Although neither of these are quite as iconic in their titles (and title songs) as Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad or D-I-V-O-R-C-E or Stand by Your Man, these are excellent records in their own right and can be seen as portraits of the queen at the peak of her reign. The Ways to Love a Man found her and producer Billy Sherrill at cruising altitude, delivering an album that easily replicated the sound and feel of Stand by Your Man. If anything, the album felt a bit too easy, as Sherrill began making his productions smoother and silkier, sanding away any of the lingering rough country edges that were on Stand by Your Man, giving Tammy's impeccably luxurious surroundings. It's an appropriate setting for the First Lady of Country Music even if it ironically feels a bit more pop than country, but the key to Sherrill's productions was how he made them so grand and then singers like Tammy or her husband George Jones grounded them. More than any of Sherrill's other vocalists, Tammy seemed to slide into the soft textures of his productions, and nowhere was that sound softer than it was on The Ways to Love a Man, where Tammy comfortably covered Johnny Mathis' "The Twelfth of Never." This may have been the only time on the record that she sang an old-fashioned crooner, yet the album retains a romantic mood, verging on being a countrypolitan make-out record (which is quite befitting for an LP called The Ways to Love a Man and whose biggest hit was the title track). This sustained mood is appealing, even seductive, but the album is just a shade less compelling overall than its immediate predecessor...but that is a pretty tough yardstick to judge any country album by, really. If The Ways to Love a Man had the hazy gauze of romance hanging over it, its 1970 successor Tammy's Touch returned the First Lady of Country to tales of heartbreak, and with this return to tales of woe, Billy Sherrill peppered his production with more prominent steel guitars, cascading pianos, and crisp acoustic guitars. It could hardly be called hard, bare-bones country -- Billy Sherrill always favored the operatic in his arrangements -- but compared to the enveloping softness of The Ways to Love a Man, Tammy's Touch felt a bit harder and firmer (ironically so, given the title), more like Stand by Your Man and D-I-V-O-R-C-E in its sound and attitude. Like those albums, Tammy's Touch also had a pair of major hits -- "He Loves Me All the Way" went to number one, while the opening "I'll See Him Through" went to number two -- but the bench on this album ran pretty deep, thanks to Sherrill's solicitation of songs written especially for Tammy. He wound up with songs that played on previous hits ("The Divorce Sale") or country classics ("He Thinks I Love Him" echoes the title of George Jones' immortal "She Thinks I Still Care"), songs that fit into a nicely balanced blend of broken-hearted weepers and bubbly pop, best typified by that hit "He Loves Me All the Way." That expert blend helps make Tammy's Touch one of her most satisfying albums of the '70s. Raven's two-fer also features four bonus tracks: both sides of the non-LP single "Run, Woman, Run" -- which went to number one in 1970 -- are here in the bonus tracks, as are the title track from the film "Run, Angel Run" and its B-side "Too Far Gone." ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine