Honky Tonk Amnesia: The Hard Country Sound of Moe Bandy - Classic Country Music Album for Road Trips & Honky Tonk Nights

Product Description Only a former rodeo rider could round up a bundle of Top 10 country hits from 1974 to 1984, the best of which have been compiled on the first CD to pay tribute to his "hard country sound"! Includes Bandy the Rodeo Clown; It's A Cheating Situation; Hank Williams, You Wrote My Life; I Cheated Me Right Out of You; Two Lonely People; She's Not Really Cheatin'; Rodeo Romeo , and more. Amazon.com "Well, it really tears me up when I hear a hurtin' song," sings Moe Bandy, "and I'm someone who likes a good cold beer." And there you have it: Moe Bandy in a nutshell. That line, from the quintessential Bandy song "Soft Lights and Hard Country Music," sums up his aesthetic quite nicely, but what it doesn't tell you is that Bandy seemed to be the only country singer who had that aesthetic in the 1970s and early 1980s. The Mississippi-born Bandy was raised in Texas and on the music of fellow Meridian native Jimmie Rodgers, honky-tonk master Hank Williams, and eventually his idol George Jones--hear how Bandy pronounces "woman" in "I Just Started Hatin' Cheatin' Songs Today" for proof of his reverence for Possum. Despite the country-pop trends of the day, he saw no reason to ever stray far from the hardcore honky-tonk that's as natural in Texas as cowboy hats. You might say he presaged the neotraditionalism of the late 1980s, except that he really wasn't "reviving" anything. He was merely playing the music he'd always loved, and since all 20 of the singles on this collection hit the Top 25, it appears that fans still loved hard country too, no matter what the popular style was at the time. After all, "a steel guitar in a dim-lit bar knows exactly how I feel." --Marc Greilsamer