Charlie Rich - Charlie Rich (1964)

Charlie Rich was an American singer-songwriter and pianist, best known for his success as a country artist.

Charlie Rich had scored Top 40 hit on Sun Records in 1960 with "Lonely Weekends", but he failed to produce a follow-up and so by 1964 he had been dropped by the label and signed to the Groove label. A subsidiary of RCA Victor, Groove had originally been an R&B label but had recently been relaunched with a focus on country and pop. Rich's recordings for Groove were produced by Chet Atkins, and so it is unsurprising that he was guided in the direction of country. A self-titled album was released in 1964, and though country material was present, R&B-based material still featured heavily, and a few of the songs were notably very jazzy. Atkin's 'Nashville Sound' production tied the whole thing together with heavy doses of backing vocals and strings, and it could be argued that a lot of the material would have worked much better without this treatment. The result was an eclectic fusion of blues, country and jazz stylings somewhat obscured by the overproduction, but at certain high points Rich's soulful vocals and jazzy piano playing broke through and really showed what he was capable of. The songs featured covers of Jimmy Reed's "Big Boss Man" and the old standard "Ol' Man River", but for the most part consisted of originals (and very good ones at that).

Unfortunately he still struggled to produce a hit, and his time on Groove would prove to be short-lived.

Lonely Weekends (1960) <|> That's Rich (1965)
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Charlie Rich - The Sun Sessions (1958-1963)

Compilation
Charlie Rich was an American singer-songwriter and pianist, best known for his success as a country artist.

Charlie Rich was born in rural Arkansas in 1932, and raised on a musical diet of gospel, blues and country - he learned to play blues piano from C.J. Allen, a black sharecropper working on his family's land. He married Margaret Ann Greene in 1952 and joined the US Air Force in 1953. On leaving the military in 1956 he began to play jazz and R&B in clubs around the Memphis area, and also began writing his own material. In the late 50s he became a regular session musician at Sam Phillips' Sun Records, and also wrote songs for Sun artists such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Ray Smith and Johnny Cash. The demos he recorded himself were deemed too jazzy by Phillips, so he was steered in the direction of rockabilly in hope of some commercial success of his own. It paid off in 1960 with the single "Lonely Weekends", with it's Elvis Presley-like vocals, which charted at #22. However none of the follow-up singles charted, and he left Sun in 1963.

This is a good compilation bringing together eighteen of his recordings from the Sun years, with the focus mostly on rockabilly, but also with some very good jazz and blues flavoured recordings, which show where his talents really lay right from the start of his career. The highlight is undoubtedly his own composition "Who Will The Next Fool Be", which was recorded by Bobby 'Blue' Bland for a Top 20 R&B hit in 1962.

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