Charley Pride's Greatest: 20 Country Favourites

Very nice vinyl, good clean cover.

Charley Pride is apparently RCA's biggest-selling act after Elvis Presley, though I've no idea whether that's an indication of the sheer size of the country-music market in the USA, or simply a damning indictment of RCA's talent-spotting abilities! Either way, whilst this collection is in its own way pleasant enough easy-listening country, it's all distinctly generic Nashville production-line material.

And Pride's delivery seems to me to be an entirely paint-by-numbers approach to country-singing, reflected in his rather pointless renditions of other people's material, such as Johnny Cash's "Folsom Prison Blues" - Pride's version adding nothing to the original, not even by way of being an 'interpretation'. Or compare Pride's rather knockabout version of the old standard "Lovesick Blues" with Leon Redbone's (both are on YouTube) superbly-read interpretation, the latter endowed with some real feeling for the song.

But ironically, Pride's rather flat delivery of "The Banks Of The Ohio" does work to advantage, in that his deadpan approach tends to tease out the disturbingly psychopathic subtext of the lyric, concerning the brutal murder of a woman quote because she would not marry me unquote - either drowned or stabbed, take your pick - something that country fans are apparently quite unfazed by, given the song's enduring popularity.