Guitar Rags & A Too Fast Past

AMG Review of Guitar Rags & A Too Fast Past

Bruce Eder
All Music Guide

Containing five CDs and 141 songs, and runs nearly seven hours, this set is pure gold, whether you like Travis's instrumental string dazzlers or his novelty hits of the late '40s -- and it's just about 100% indispensable to anyone who likes good folk, hillbilly, country, or blues. Disc One is worth half the cost by itself, 20 of its 28 tracks drawn from Travis's early/mid-'40s career on King, Capitol, and a handful of forgotten labels, in duets and group settings. This includes his recordings with Grandpa Jones (on guitar, no less) as the Sheppard Brothers from 1943, and his topical (anti-Axis) songs recorded under aliases. All of this stuff features not only Travis's superb guitar, but excellent harmony singing by him as well. The first Travis solo track as we would know it, "That's All," is worth the wait, and later selections find him slipping into the sound recognized from his familiar recordings. Part of Disc Two is given over to Folk Songs of the Hills, but Travis's full band sound is also well represented. Disc Three contains more of Travis's full-band pop numbers, and a similar new discovery in an alternate take of "Merle's Boogie Woogie," the first multi-tracked country recording ever done. Disc Four, with 31 tracks, covers 1950 to 1953, when Travis's sound became more varied -- there were still full-band pop numbers; his group was stripped down, and there were fewer novelty numbers. Disc Five is a mix of superb instrumentals and rousing pop numbers, along with some blues and a few reworked old standards. It may be the strongest of the five. The book is excellent -- all 80 pages of it -- and the sound on all but a handful of tracks is as good as being at the session.