Been waiting and waiting! So great; cannot wait for volume 2. GET THIS NOW; DO NOT HESITATE!!!
It's difficult to put into words just how wunderful a collection this is. Covering roughly two and a half years with Musicor, there are about 20 titles George spun into golden country immortality. Padded out with 122 more that suffer only from relative obscurity. The original productions and remastering are first rate. George's voice is the golden standard of country croonin' at an absolute apex. The songwriting varies, that's the only caveat I can come up with. Bear Family sets are top notch collectors items, lots of pictures, details and notes in big bold print, which is why they're more $. Old Brush Arbors, is just one example of a song on this collection that I had never heard. It's now one of my favorite Possum tunes. American country via Deutchland, keep 'em comin', Der Komesar. #%* !
I completely, totally! beg to differ with that off the wall negative review of this tremendous box set. That reviewer must have been reviewing the wrong box set, either that or his CD player must be worn out or broken. You ought to take that out immediately! I'm telling you folks, the sound quality on this 5 CD box set! Man! Is it ever out of this world! It is stupendous! I have been wanting to have Jones's Musicor works for years and finally! Bear have out done themselves with these 2 magnificent sets of his complete works with Musicor! I guess the highlight of this box set is on disc 5! I have been a life long fan of outtakes and studio chatter, and this 5th disc has a lot of that! It is just incredible! His first version of Walk Through This World With Me, in my opinion, is far better than the released version. In fact I played this song and sang it while my sweet friend was beside me and she started crying, and I did too. She's not what you might call a classic country fan, but hearing that song I think made her like it now! I sincerely hope Bear will do a set on George's works with Starday and Mercury. This set plus the A Good Year For The Roses set, are Highly, highly recommended!
About ten years ago I decided George Jones was the greatest vocalist of the 20th century. I set out to find every commercially released George Jones record. There were great compilations from the Mercury years, the United Artists years, and the Epic years. Strangely, the only Musicor stuff was available on budget CD's and cassettes. Even career-spanning retrospectives like Sony/Legacy's 2-CD best of and Rhino's 1-CD compilations only had 2 or 3 Musicor titles. Even George's "50 Years of Hits" compilation had zero Musicor titles.
Apparently, the notoriously eccentric Aubrey Mayhew owned the Musicor masters and wouldn't license them to anyone. He licensed his Starday and King holdings to everyone, but the Musicor stuff was strangely held back, except for the budget-line CD's and cassettes usually found in non-traditional retail outlets like truck stops.
I bought every single budget-line cassette and CD and put them together on CDR's. I then started discovering multitudes of Musicor LP's on ebay and other places and started buying those, along with Mercury, Starday, Epic, and United Artists LP's.
Why oh why wouldn't Bear Family or some other label do justice to George Jones' staggering body of work? Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow, dozens of others have seen their entire catalogues reissued by Bear Family and eased the minds (and wallets) of us country music fanatics. Now I think I have answers to all of my questions.
It pains me to type type this, having purchased dozens of Bear Family boxed sets and single disc sets, but the sound quality on this is awful. The latter half of the box sounds like they were transferring the songs from 7th or 8th generation tapes that had been sitting in a leaky 300 degree attic. The high end on the tapes is gone - the low end is muddy, and the whole thing should have been left on the shelf. I'm guessing anyone that approached Mayhew or whomever had these tapes backed off when they heard what awful shape the masters were in.
Had I been in Bear Family's shoes, I might have searched high and low for clean copies of the vinyl to reissue, as my LP's fidelity is heads and shoulders above the damaged tapes presented here.
That being said, the session information and discography presented within are invaluable. Roughly 40 per cent of the box does sound great, it's the latter 60 per cent that has massive problems. I do question why they would hire Rich Kienzle to pen the liners, as he apparently hates the Musicor material and bad-mouths it throughout his notes in this set (and elsewhere in his allmusic.com reviews). "Hey, thanks for buying this boxed set, too bad George Jones' Musicor stuff sucks!"
Buyer beware on this one - it would be worth your while to hunt down the original vinyl and burn your own box. I was so excited when I saw this on Bear's release schedule - I've been waiting for this for a decade. If you are in the mood for a George Jones Bear Box, I'd stick with "She Thinks I Still Care," the United Artists years.
