Rating:
Genre:
Country
Release Date: 10/04/2005
Hux's 2005 two-fer
Stoney Edwards/She's My Rock is the first time
Stoney Edwards' first two albums have been released on CD, thereby righting one of the major wrongs within
country reissues.
Edwards has been perennially overlooked over the years, the kind of singer who only hardcore
country fans know about -- which, in a way, is appropriate, since he was a pure hard
country singer who adhered to the classic '60s
honky tonk sound. Yet for as consistently good as his music was, he never had really big hits -- he had two singles,
"She's My Rock" in 1973 and
"Mississippi You're on My Mind" in 1975, peak at 20 -- which may have been down to him being a black singer in a genre where African-Americans were a rarity and had a hard time being heard, even in the wake of
Charley Pride's considerable success. But it's also true that in the early '70s, when
country-pop was dominating the upper reaches of the charts,
Edwards' hard
country wasn't as commercially appealing, no matter how well executed it was. That might have made his 1971 debut,
Stoney Edwards, and 1973's follow-up,
She's My Rock, underachievers in terms of the charts, but artistically they were both first-rate, and have held up extraordinarily well over the years. While many of the main cuts showed up on
Razor & Tie's excellent 1998 overview
Poor Folks Stick Together, both of these albums were consistently good, both in terms of songs and performance, with no weak spots -- so anybody who enjoyed that compilation should certainly pick this two-fer up, because it is simply further proof that when it came to pure, straight-ahead
honky tonk in the
Lefty Frizzell tradition, few did it better than
Edwards in the early '70s.
~Stephen Thomas Erlewine, All Music Guide
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