Country Fuzz Spectacular - Part 2 (MP3s)

October 06, 2011

So here's a long overdue follow-up to a 2007 Beware Of The Blog post about country music records featuring fuzztone guitar sounds. Call me nuts, but I find extraordinarily endearing the improbable blend of country music traditionalism with tastefully restrained space-age guitar pyrotechnics that can be heard in these tunes.

A quick recap: the fuzztone guitar sound was born in the summer of 1960, on Don't Worry (MP3), a Marty Robbins country record that featured Grady Martin's fuzz-drenched 6-string bass guitar coming through engineer Glen Snoddy's mixing board. In some accounts this new sound was the result of a malfunctioning channel in the sound board, while others attribute the sound to a loose wire in Martin's amp.

Some hold that the fuzztone sound was born earlier - in the 1950s, with the jolting guitar blasts heard on some amazing-sounding records by the Johnny Burnette Trio, like Train Kept A Rollin' (MP3) or Link Wray's Rumble, but I tend to side with the experts who refer to those wild sounds as distortion, rather than fuzztone.

In any event, here's another dozen country fuzz tunes for those who enjoy exploring the odd sounds heard on the fringes of country music.

Johnny Dollar - Do Die (1:39)

Cowboy Copas - Sold The Farm (2:19)

Bob Morris - Queen Bee (2:32)

Johnny Dollar - Windburn (1:49)

Curtis Leach - Wheelin' & Dealin' (2:39)

Sanford Clark - The Fool (2:33)

Sue Thompson - Who's Gonna Mow Your Grass (2:25)

Loretta Lynn - It'll Be Open Season On You (2:42)

Buddy Merrill - Gentle On My Mind (2:10)

Bobby Zehm - Sitar Pickin' Man (2:18)

Billy Gray - Rotten Love (1:47)

Cornell Hurd Band - This Gun Don't Care (2:43)

from WFMU's Beware of the Blog http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2011/08/country-fuzz-spectacular-part-2-mp3s.html

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