Customer Reviews
Average Customer Review
(11 customer reviews) 15 of 15 people found the following review helpful
"40 Historic Songs from America's Favorite Singing Cowboy",
August 4, 2005 This review is from: Essential Gene Autry (Audio CD)
The Gene Autry recordings keep surfacing and gathering plenty of steam with this latest release "THE ESSENTIAL GENE AUTRY"...the sound quality is excellent and nostalgic for the wranglers who grew up listening to "America's Favorite Singing Cowboy"...for the first time ever a 2-CD-Set covering his entire Columbia Records career, absolutely essential for all cowboys and gals...Gene's good guy image with catchy lyrics and beautiful melodies are pleasant and extremely calming...after listening these songs over and over, you are transported back in time when life was simpler and the good guys always won. Gene was the screen's first "Singing Cowboy", already well known in the late '20s as a radio and recording star. Autry began making films in 1934 and kept cranking them out except for a short visit with Uncle Sam in the United States Army Air during World War 2.
Ride down the trail to Melody Ranch and meet the only entertainer with five stars on the "Hollywood Walk of Fame"...Read more
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
Great collection of Autry's best material,
January 14, 2005 DJ Joe Sixpack (...in Middle America) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Essential Gene Autry (Audio CD)
Like many of the old-time singing cowboys, screen star Gene Autry has long been discounted by some country snobs, who see him as too hokey to be part of the classic country canon. Too bad for those folks, though, because Autry's music is both rich in country tradition and musical show-biz savvy. Like Roy Rogers and other hayseed Hollywood harmonizers, Autry dipped liberally into jazz and swing, giving his music a nice little bounce. The songs are delightfully corny and often well-crafted, drawing on the traditions of the Tin Pan Alley composers -- this is music that was made to entertain, and it still works its magic, all these decades later. This is a nice 2-CD set that gathers material from many of the labels Autry recorded for, including Columbia, Okeh, Vocalion and a slew of smaller outfits, and spans his career from 1931, when he was still singing roughneck blues (ala Jimmie Rodgers) up through the early 1950s, when his success with "Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer" had led...Read more
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
The best Autry collection out there,
March 10, 2006 Christopher F. Roth (Milwaukee, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Essential Gene Autry (Audio CD)
If you're only going to buy one Gene CD, it should be this, especially now that the compilation that pulls songs right off of his film soundtracks is no longer in print. My only reservation is that this collection doesn't include "The Last Round-Up" or "Bury Me on the Lone Prairie" -- also I would have replaced this original "Silver-Haired Daddy" with a more soulful one, but then again the one here was the one that won Gene the first Gold Record ever (not HIS first, but THE first), so it's hard not to include it. Quibbles aside, there's so much else on here that it's hard to complain -- including two very early and eerily good Jimmie Rodgers covers, with haunting guitar work, that make one wonder what Gene might have produced in his long life if Hollywood hadn't gotten hold of him. Hi ho, Champ!
