Red Sovine Juke Joint Johnny - Gonna Shake This Shack Tonight

1-CD DigiPac (4-plated) with 48-page booklet, 31 tracks. Playing time approx. 78 mns.

First comprehensive overview of Red Sovine's early up-tempo honky tonk, hillbilly boogie and near-rockabilly recordings!
Includes rare songs unavailable since their original release in the 1950s and one previously unissued track!
Features Sovine's collaborations with label-mates Webb Pierce and Goldie Hill!
A 48- page booklet features one of the first detailed biographies of Sovine's early career!

Red Sovine is best remembered today for his sentimental, off-kilter trucker's recitations from the 1960s and 70s, but before the days of 'Phantom 309' and 'Teddy Bear', he was a journeyman country singer. The hits were few but he was a star for several decades. Sovine first found success when he joined the Louisiana Hayride as Hank Williams' replacement, and he followed Williams to Nashville, the Grand Ole Opry, and MGM Records. This collection features the best of his up-tempo hillbilly boogie, honky tonk and near-rockabilly sides for MGM, and Decca. Included are two duets with Goldie Hill - the country hit, 'Are You Mine', and their cover of the top ten R&B hit, 'Ko Ko Mo (I Love You So)', along with Sovine's #1 cover of George Jones' 'Why, Baby, Why' - featuring Webb Pierce. Also of special interest is the song 'You're Barking Up The Wrong Tree Now', a Hank Williams-Fred Rose song never officially recorded by Williams, along with the rockabilly classic 'Juke Joint Johnny' and many other rare recordings. Thirty-one great tracks of hillbilly and rockabilly music recorded between 1949 and 1961, rarely if ever reissued until now, that will be a revelation to country-rockabilly music fans only familiar with Sovine's later recordings. Randy Fox's liner notes provide the first extensive biography of Sovine's early career! XXXXX

Red Sovine

 

Woodrow Wilson Sovine was born in Charleston, West Virginia on July 17, 1918. With his head full of red hair, he was destined to receive the most common nickname assigned to carrot tops. His father, Alonzo Sovine, was a steam engineer, specifically on large construction machinery. While still a lucrative profession at the time of his little Woodrow's birth, the spread of gasoline and diesel powered machinery soon resulted in hard times for the Sovine family.

Red's mother, Rebecca West Sovine, played the harmonica and concertina but never pursued music professionally. She taught Red and his siblings many older hymns and 19^th Century popular songs. She also shared a love for the early recordings of Jimmie Rodgers and Jimmie Davis.

The young Red was also influenced by his mother's first cousin, Billy Cox. Known as the 'Dixie Songbird,' Cox appeared regularly on Charleston, West Virginia. radio station WOBU (later WCHS) in 1928 and made his first recordings for the Gennett label one year later. Cox became very successful in the early thirties, recording for A.R.C. and Columbia records with his most notable compositions, Sparkling Brown Eyes and Filipino Baby.

Cox often took his young cousin Red to the radio station or to live appearances in the nearby area. With such frequent exposure to music and the behind-the-scenes workings, there was little surprise that Red soon wanted his own guitar. As Red told Douglas B. Green in a 1975 interview, "I was twelve years old when I told my father I wanted a guitar, He said, 'Well, if you'll show me that you really want to learn to play it,' he said, 'I'll buy you one.' So I had a friend of mine that used to come to the house and show me some chords. I learned three chords, and I went and showed my dad, and he bought me a guitar, one of them with the resonator on the front…Paid twelve dollars for it."  Red immediately began acting out his own pretend 'radio' shows in the family barn – performing songs, reading the news and commercials, and practicing jokes.

By 1934 or 1935 Red had performed enough pretend shows that he felt ready to become a professional musician. Hooking up with his boyhood friend, Johnnie Bailes, the pair began billing themselves as Smiley and Red, the Singing Sailors. Bailes was from a musical family and already had experience appearing on radio station WCHS in Charleston and performing in churches with his two younger brothers as the Bailes Brothers Hymn Singers. But 'Smiley & Red' focused primarily on Jimmie Rodgers songs and other popular tunes. They performed at church socials, parties, dances and won $15 at a department store-sponsored talent show in Charleston – which they managed to waste in one evening.

The partnership was short-lived, however, when Red's family moved the thirty or so miles upriver to the recently built community of Eleanor, West Virginia. Constructed in 1934, the town of Eleanor was a New Deal homestead community. These communities were constructed by the Federal government to provide housing and subsistence farming land to poor families, along with incentives for rural industrial initiatives that reinvested in the local community.