Rose Maddox with the Vern Williams Band – Beautiful Bouquet CD 9058

Description

CD 9058

All Gospel Bluegrass.
The legendary Rose Maddox was know as the Queen of California Country Music and was also the first woman to record an all bluegrass album. She spent much of her later years playing with bluegrass bands and in 1982 she went into the studio for two days with the amazing Vern Williams Band to record this album of her gospel music favorites. There was no one like Rose Maddox and there never will be.

Rose Maddox – vocals; Vern Williams – vocals and mandolin; Delbert Williams – vocals and guitar; Keith Little – vocals banjo and guitar; Ed Neff – fiddle and mandolin; Kevin Thompson – bass.

1. We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder
2. Life’s Evening Sun
3. Church In The Wildwood
4. When God Dips His Love In My Heart
5. I Can’t Feel At Home
6. Farther Along
7. I’ll Fly Away
8. In The Sweet By And By
9. Kneel At The Cross
10. Turn Your Radio On
11. Beautiful Bouquet
12. Take Me In The Lifeboat
13. If We Never Meet Again
14. Sweet Low Sweet Chariot

REVIEW

“Rose Maddox and Vem Williams! Rose Maddox and Vern Williams!!! OK since every Bluegrass fanjust dropped the magazine and ran out the door to go get this record let me just mention a few things for the rest of y’all. Rose Maddox fronted ‘America’s most colorfull hillbilly band’ back in the ’40s with a voice so exuberant hard-edged and loud it could shatter plywood. Along about 1960 when Rose and her bandmate brothers had moved to the Pacific Northwest and she was working the Bakersfield circuit (which was anchored at one end in Tacoma by young Buck Owens’ radio station and roadhouse) she ran into Bill Monroe who suggested she sing Bluegrass. Skeptical but game she cut a sensational record and thereafter used Bluegrass as a career fallback. This worked out well as her brand of max-twang Country was wiped out by the ‘Nashville Sound’ in the 1960s while Bluegrass festivals were on the rise.

Enter Vern Williams the Godfather of West Coast Bluegrass ascendant during the same decade; it was natural that these two peerless performers would wed their talents through the 1970s and 1980s. They eventually cut an album of Bluegrass standards then in 1982 this record of Gospel songs. Appearing as it did between Bluegrass revivals the original vinyl run came and went so it is a joyous day now that it has been resurrected on CD. The playing is fabulous-occasionally restrained but always Monroe-esque in its power and accuracy. Rose’s all-out style perfectly suits shouters like ‘Take Me In The Lifeboat … .. Farther Along’ and ‘Turn Your Radio On ‘ but is apt to startle on a few cuts: this ‘I’ll Fly Away’ ain’t no sweety-sweety Peasall Sister deal! Priceless in its own way for sure. Now the rest of you drop the mag and run out and get this record!”

(Tom Petersen — Victory Review)