Lefty Frizzell Life's Like Poetry (12-CD-Box & Book)

(Bear Family Records ) LP-sized 12-CD-Box set with 330 tracks. Stock Copy- First Edition 1992 Archive Copy

This box set features every studio recording Lefty Frizzell made for Columbia and ABC, plus many rare demos and previously unreleased material. Contains also a vinylsized 152-paged book with a biography, a discography and many rather rare photographs.


Which is why this breathtaking, 152-page book accompanied, all-encompassing 12 CD edition will be universally acclaimed as the Country release of the year.
New Musical Express - Fred Dellar

Lefty was the most influential country singer of the post-War era. He influenced Merle Haggard, and, through Merle, half the singers now on country radio. His own recordings are among the most perfectly-realized country records of the 1950s and 1960s, and we like to think we've been at least partly responsible for bringing his legacy to a new generation first with our LP box and now with this.

Here are the original versions of Lefty classics like 'I've Got The Money', 'I Love You A Thousand Ways', 'Always Late', 'Mom & Dad's Waltz', 'Long Black Veil', and all the later hits on Columbia and ABC. This is a complete career collection - everything Lefty cut from the early demos to the last recordings. It's a big set, and an expensive set, but it's no exaggeration to say that modern country music starts here.

A long overdue celebration of a giant's life and work!

Preface by Charles Wolfe

It was the fall of 1973, at one of those late- night Nashville hotel room jam sessions where they sit around with somebody's old Martin and a couple of bottles of Jack Daniels `Black Label' trading songs and stories. Johnny Rodriguez was there, hot from three number one hits in a row, as was Kenny Serratt, fresh from a new MGM contract. Merle Haggard was holding court, in from the coast plugging his new one called If We Can Make It Through December. The fourth man in the room was the oldest, and looked older; he was a big, easygoing man who spoke with a soft Texas drawl, and dressed in a fringed shirt with long wide collars and wore his graying hair long and swept back.

After the four had traded songs for a while, Merle Haggard sat back and pointed to the big man and said, 'Right there. That's where all the Haggards, Rodrigue-zes and Serratts come from!' The big man looked startled, then embarrassed, and folded his hands in front of him. A big ring sparkled on his left hand, a big ring with diamonds that formed the initials L.F. Everyone knew it stood for Lefty Frizzell.

From the very beginning, when he burst on the complacent music world of the 1950s with a spectacular string of hits that has never been equalled in country music since, Lefty had been a singer's singer. While millions were casually listening to the drawling Texas baritone on hit after hit on the local jukebox, the young singers across the land listened intently, trying to pick up every nuance and grace note of that style that was more intense, and more personal, than any that the music had seen. This was the generation that was to define modem country singing, and in the young man from the Texas oilfields, they had found their model.

As early as January 1954, when a young ex-marine named George Jones made hits first audition records in Beaumont, the Frizzell mystique was in place. As Pappy Daily listened to young Jones, he recalled: 'George at that time sounded exactly like Lefty Frizzell. I said. 'People don' t want somebody that sounds like somebody else.— Yet it was hard to sing a modem country love song with any feeling, and not copy Lefty's style - or some of it. As Dottie West remarked years later. 'Most all country ar-tists were touched by his style. Mickey Newbury recently said: 'Wasn't Lefty always right?' I agree.'

Most open in his admiration for Lefty has been Merle Haggard, and his story of first seeing Lefty conveys some of the intensity with which the younger generation of singers viewed Lefty, and conveys a sense of the impact Lefty had on the music of the time: 'I first saw Lefty Frizzell in 1951 at the Rain-bow Gardens in Bakersfield. I believe he was the hottest country artist in the nation. No one, not even Hank Williams, was as hot as Lefty was then. He was just dynamic on stage, and he real-ly inspired me to try and sing a song. A year or so later, he came back to Bakersfield and I was introduced to him. I sang a couple of songs for him, and he got me up on stage - that was one of the greatest thrills of my life, to be on stage with him.

'From then on when I' d get on stage, and I'd wonder how I should do a song, and maybe I'd be in doubt, I' d just mentally try to remember how Lefty would do it, and that pulled me out of a lot of holes. We became close friends. Years later someone said to me 'Merle, that guy sounds a lot like you.' I can remember when having someone say that about Lefty was a dream beyond ever coming true.

'Lefty Frizzell was ninety percent of the reason that I'm in the business. He was my inspiration, and I feel that he was the most unique thing that ever happened to country music. When I was fif-teen years old, I thought he hung the moon. You know ... I'm still not sure he didn' t.'

Like the prime movers in any art form, Lefty attracted his share of legends. Some were foisted on him by eager press agents in the 1950s as part of an early and effective image-building campaign: others came from his mammoth capacity for hard drinking and hard living: others came from his sudden spectacular success and early fame: and many came from his own shyness and difficulty in explaining himself. 'He hated inter-views,' his wife Alice recalled, 'and if he had to do one, he would have to get loosened up with drinks before he did one.' The late journalist Bob Claypool, who followed Lefty's career for years. 'He was one of those wild men of country music, the central figure in hundreds of riproaring tales - some true, some make-believe ... (Did Lefty really do THAT?).'

In a few serious attempts to write about Lefty's career, these legends have crept in over and over, jostling the true facts and salient details. They appear in everything from liner notes to record company publicity to official Hall of Fame biographies. Some of them are useful, even if they are not accurate, for they give us something of the way Lefty was perceived by his friends and fans. Others are simply misleading. This ac-count is an attempt to start from scratch, and to reconstruct the career of one of the seminal figures of American music.