15 Years: A Retrospective

構成数 : 1枚
合計収録時間 : 00:59:55
If a group can stay together for 15 years, that's reason enough to celebrate. If that group, like the Sons of the San Joaquin, specializes in keeping music from a bygone era alive, the feat is even more special. Fifteen Years: A Retrospective celebrates three singers' commitment to the wide-open plains, cattle roundups, and drinking coffee from a tin cup. As with the Sons of the Pioneers, the band -- Jack, Joe, and Lon Hannah -- fill their romantic odes with lots of close harmony and spare arrangements. Familiar fare -- "Happy Cowboy," "Song of the Rover," and "Ghost Riders in the Sky" -- mesh with a number of Jack Hannah originals to fashion an album as easy rolling as the prairie wind. The group's vision of the west is a romantic one: cacti, dusty trails, campfires, coyotes, and ponies litter the landscape. The cowboy might be punching cattle to the day he dies, as in "Utah," but he wouldn't have it any other way. If a song is titled "Anything but a Cowboy," one can be sure that the phrase will be qualified by, "That's why I'll never want to be." For anyone with an interest in '30s and '40s cowboy music, Fifteen Years: A Retrospective offers an excellent introduction to one of the best Western revival bands. ~ Ronnie D. Lankford, Jr.