Complete Mother’s Best will round out series

I was under a misapprehension over the past couple years of Mother’s Best Hank Williams releases. From earlier articles and releases, I had concluded that there would be a third box set this fall under roughly the same format as the first two. I wrote that several times, but I was wrong.

The Complete Mother’s Best to be released at the end of September will finish off the current series. I’m sure there will be various packages in different formats and outlets as the years go buy, but the new release will round out the series.

I should have realized there would have to be a change as I checked  through the Hank Williams Sr Listings Website which I have linked to in the Blogroll at the side. There are two things I forgot until I reread the fine color coded listings  of the content of all the Mother’s Best shows. When you do that, you find out two things;
One: There is a lot of repetiton of the Hank performances, and
Two: There are a lot of Audrey performances.

I don’t trash Audrey as most other commentators do, so don’t bother looking for it.

This means there really isn’t much left on the original acetates.

However, I still think a nice much more inexpensive package of edited  single performances could have been put together. There are a number of repeated performances I would like to hear. I’m especially interested in the different versions of the up tempo  rockabilly foundation numbers.

There are alternate versions of ‘Why Don’t You Love Me’, ‘Nobody’s Lonesome For Me’, ‘Move It on Over’, ‘I Just Don’t Like This Kind of Living’,’Hey Good Lookin’, ‘Mind Your Own Business’ and ‘Moanin the Blues’. There are also different versions of ‘Sing, Sing, Sing,’ and ‘My Sweet Love Ain’t Around’.

So I would like to see an inexpensive one disk release of edited singles from Mother’s Best which haven’t been released yet, even if they are duplicates..

But at the same time, there is an absolute historic necessity that the Mother’s Best Shows be released in their entirety as they were recorded. And shouldn’t all of the Armed Forces Recordings be assembled and released as well? I assume there’s more of that material than was released on ‘Live at the Grand Ole Opry’. But I’m not a researcher so can’t be sure.

My quibbling can’t detract at all from Time Life’s  enormous achievement  in this whole Mother’s Best release project. And the Williams’ estate deserves credit for selecting this company to handle this important historical artifact. The format, notes, packaging,  song selection, and remastering have been beyond criticism. I’m sure the new ‘Complete’ 16 disc set will live up to the standard set by the two 3CD releases. But I would still like to see some of those unreleased duplicates released in single song format.

Once again here’s the website for the new release.