Country comedy, singing and master musicianship

Master multi-instrumentalist Roy Clark is most broadly known for his 1969 crossover hit “Yesterday, When I Was Young” and the cornpone personality he played for more than two decades on the television program Hee Haw. But long before Hee Haw, Clark made a name as a musician, winning two national banjo championships as a teenager, appearing on the Grand Ole Opry, and appearing on regional television programs. Though well-known to country audiences, his 1969 pop success and the debut of Hee Haw provided national exposure that led to guest hosting slots on The Tonight Show and touring stops in showrooms of Las Vegas. His live shows had always proved him an entertainer who was both a deft comedian and a consummate musician. The seventeen tracks collected here, cherry-picked from a pair of live albums (1972’s Roy Clark Live! And 1976’s In Concert), were recorded at two long-gone Las Vegas hotels, and include generous helpings of Clark’s humorous between-song patter, his hit singles, and extensive demonstration of his prowess on guitar, banjo and fiddle.

In an era when country music’s mavericks were getting edgy, Clark provided twangy music in a comfortable adult-contemporary context. The breadth of his offerings is impressive, including hot-picked versions of “Foggy Mountain Breakdown,” “Orange Blossom Special” and “Riders in the Sky,” the old-timey “Alabama Bound,” a cover of Wilbert Harrison’s “Kansas City” that shows Clark a winning R&B picker, pop-country tunes “Thank God and Greyhound” and “Green Green Grass of Home” (the latter of which he colors with jokey new lyrics), and the full-on adult-contemporary sound of “Yesterday, When I Was Young.” His eight-minute version of “Dueling Banjos” pits him in a master class battle against fellow five-string legend Buck Trent, and Clark’s classical guitar technique is displayed on a dramatic version of “Malagueña.”

Clark’s show was geared to his mainstream audience of the time, with jokes about hippies and Geritol and a band that sounds more Vegas than Opry. Even so, he wove together genuine musical artistry with comedy schtick as only a master entertainer could manage. Taken from the peak of his mainstream popularity, these tracks have been out of print for over thirty years and are a vast improvement over the latter-day Branson-era live material that’s been available on CD. This is a great introduction to the vast range of Clark’s talents, as a musician and as a comedian, but mostly as an all-around entertainer. [©2008 hyperbolium dot com]