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THERE’S MORE WHERE THAT CAME FROM
(MCA Nashville)
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Womack has always been quick to mention the education in classic country music she received from her disc-jockey father when she was growing up in Texas. Here the multiple Grammy winner puts that education to work. Setting the dials of her Wayback Machine for 30 years past, she’s crafted a set of tunes that recalls the days when emotive women like Tammy Wynette, Lynn Anderson, and Tanya Tucker ruled the charts with a mix of mountain sass and elegant vocal delivery. Even the album’s cover, a soft-focused portrait of Womack and a list of the CD’s songs, is a flashback to the late 1960s and early 1970s, before Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers minted the "countrypolitan" sound. The arrangements are delicately colored by gently weeping steel guitar, piano, harmonica, and fiddle. Each number flows at an unhurried tempo. And then there’s Womack’s lightly sugared confection of a voice as she explores the stuff that hardcore honky-tonkin’ is made of. "There’s More Where That Came From" is an old-fashioned cheatin’ song; "Painless" is a tearjerking tale of marital collapse. She gets autobiographical with "Twenty Years and Two Husbands Ago." The dirty guitars and big rhythm of "When You Get to Me" are the only concessions to pop modernity; otherwise, Womack proves that country’s old virtues are still its best.
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