If you like your songs sad and your voices keening, the latest overlooked classic unearthed by Righteous will be right up your street. Goldie Hill has a good claim to pioneering the role of women in country music – for good and bad. Along with Kitty Wells, she blazed a trail for those who followed, such as Skeeter Davis, Patsy Kline, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette. It’s the latter two Hill’s closest to vocally, while the subject matter of her songs here became standard fare for women singers: marriages called off, betrayal by lovers, desperate pleas for love from an unresponsive swain and the perils of getting liquored up.
In one sense there’s nothing exceptional about this collection, apart from the fact that Hill was performing the material so early in the 50s. The arrangements predate the rigid Nashville Sound imposed by Chet Atkins at the beginning of the 60s, but are nevertheless entirely predictable; not a bad thing, and always enjoyable, just not innovative. So – a classic piece of female country, or the sound of country women being trammelled? Discuss.
