Stardust (30th Ann. Legacy Ed)

Country artists taking on pop standards wasn't a new idea when Willie Nelson released the ten tracks of 1978's Stardust LP. Ferlin Husky had released an entire album's worth on 1957's Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and other country stars regularly drew from the Great American Songbook. Nelson himself had recorded "That Lucky Old Sun" two years earlier for his The Sound in Your Mind LP. What made Stardust so audacious was the confluence of Nelson's iconoclastic career and the times in which the album was released. Where his outlaw compadre Waylon Jennings had directly confronted Nashville, Nelson vented his subversion by retreating to Texas, and waxing concept albums like Phases and Stages and The Red Headed Stranger.

Nelson's previous release, the 1977 tribute to Lefty Frizzell, To Lefty From Willie, didn't straightforwardly set the stage for an album of standards, but the depth of his song selections, the respect he showed the material, and his idiosyncratic phrasing revealed an interpretive stylist whose talent stretched well beyond his own words. With the outlaw country movement in full swing, Nelson's choice to drop an album of classic American pop was perhaps the most revolutionary move of his career. Recorded with his band and produced by Booker T. Jones, Nelson re-contextualized the songs to expose their common roots in the American experience, much as Ray Charles had managed with 1962's Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music.

Predictably, Columbia's brass didn't have a clue, yet the album turned into the biggest success of Nelson's career, producing a pair of chart-topping singles ("Blue Skies" and "Georgia on My Mind," the latter snagging a Grammy®) and the #3 "All of Me," sold millions of copies, and stuck to the country album chart for over ten years! The album's crossover success wasn't quite as pronounced, though it did stay two years on the pop album chart. Nelson's vision brought the songs of Hoagy Carmichael, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill, Duke Ellington, George & Ira Gershwin, and others to a new audience and a new generation. He did this by staying true to both the songs and his own art, blending together a reverence for the compositions with his personal musical style.

The arrangements include several of Nelson's trademark sounds, including Mickey Raphael's harmonica and Nelson's gut-string guitar; Booker T's organ adds soul, jazz and gospel notes throughout. Nelson's band proves itself superb company for pop standards, able to underline the vocals and swing ever-so-lightly as needed. The results are a perfect rendering of pop standards in the Willie Nelson style. As strongly as these tracks took hold with the public, they exerted an even deeper spell on Nelson, who continued to record from the pop songbook for years to come, including 1981's Somewhere Over the Rainbow LP.

Columbia/Legacy's 30th anniversary edition of Stardust includes a second CD of sixteen additional standards waxed by Nelson between 1976's The Sound in Your Mind and 1990's Born For Trouble. Drawn from across fifteen years, there's more variety and less cohesion between the arrangements, which makes disc two less an album and more an opportunity to hear Nelson's evolving creativity. Few of these tracks measure up to the inspiration of the original Stardust, but there are highlights, including a gypsy-jazz country-blue version of "I'm Confessin' (That I Love You)," a downbeat, pre-Stardust take of "Lucky Old Sun," and a romantically yearning cover of "Mona Lisa" that features guitar runs reminiscent of Anton Karas' zither in The Third Man. Completists should note that neither of the bonus tracks from the 1999 Stardust reissue ("Scarlet Ribbons" and "I Can See Clearly Now") are included here. New liner notes from Rich Kienzle are worth reading, but with the original album a five-star release on its own, it's really difficult to make improvements. [©2008 hyperbolium dot com]

I bought three copies of this cd., one for me other's for friends. I was so happy to know this had been released on cd, nearly wept with joy! My friends and I loved this from the moment Willie originally recorded it to vinyl. Can't tell you the memories this brings back for us, thank you Willie Nelson, it was beautiful then, and is still wonderful music now, will always be timeless and joyful.

What more can I say, it won a Grammy, took Willie to the Whitehouse....launched his career as a movie star....
This is what Willie Nelson is all about, a true classic laidback songwriter & musician that loves REAL MUSIC, not the crap that Nashville pushed and continues to push today, I have every Willie ever recorded and this started it for me,,,,,Grab "TWO MEN WITH THE BLUES" while your at it, I say it is the BEST Willie since STARDUST, it really is, it's another Grammy winner in my book.

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