Various Artists "MELODY RANCH" (Melody Ranch Records, 1966) (LP)
(Produced by Ken Becker & Carl Cotner)
A fairly snoozy souvenir album from the mid-1960s cast of Gene Autry's Melody Ranch TV show, which broadcast live on Southern California's KTLA, making the transition from radio in 1964. This album was more or less lost under an avalanche of Melody Ranch-related albums, singles, reissues and western nostalgia videos... and that's probably just as well. There's some real country talent on here -- Johnny Bond, bandleader Carl Cottner, and our hero Billy Mize, who had been kicking around since the mid-'Fifties, but was still a few years away from his own solo breakthrough. Also on board is a gal singer named Cathy Taylor who was also working in the demo-ish demi-monde of the Hit Records cheapie label, and Mr. Autry himself, who stops in to sing a couple of tunes, "No Back Door To Heaven" and "You're The Only Good Thing That Happened To Me," which turn out to be album highlights. Unfortunately the performances are subsumed to the bland pop sensibilities of the time; Melody Ranch may have booked a lot of the nation's top country talent, but on this album the house musicians seem to have been taking their cues from Ray Conniff, rather than Ray Price. Still, this may be of interest to fans of Billy Mize, in particular: there's also an CD of his Melody Ranch recordings out there, somewhere, which might have a little more vigor than this particular disc.
Billy Mize "This Time And Place" (Imperial Records, 1969) (LP)
Billy Mize "You're Alright With Me" (United Artists, 1970) (LP)
Billy Mize "Love 'N' Stuff" (Zodiac Records, 1976) (LP)
(Produced by Jim Mallory & Ray Pennington)
This was Billy Mize's swansong as a charting artist, and gathers several singles released on the Zodiac label between 1974-77, including one, "It Hurts To Know The Feeling Is Gone," which actually cracked into the Top Forty, but just barely. The album is pretty emblematic of the challenges facing country musicians in the mid-to-late 1970s -- mainly, how much of their rural roots they needed to shed ins pursuit of radio airplay. Mize leans heavily into his Bakersfield roots, but mostly in the sense that he was remarkably good at imitating his old pal Merle Haggard, which by this point meant singing gooey, overwrought countrypolitan material while infusing it with languid Okie vocal authenticity... Mize didn't try very hard to disguise his soundalike debt to Haggard, though many songs fall flat because, well, they weren't written by Merle himself. Some of these tunes were previously released as singles, dating back to 1974-75, made with a mix of different producers and studio crews, which gives this album a pretty uneven feel. The best stuff is all on Side Two, where a little bit of hard-country vigor pops up, and much better songwriting. One highlight is Dave Kirby's first-class cheating song, "Heaven For The Weekend," a surprisingly explicit and kind of depressing narrative about a guy on a "business trip" to LA who agonizes only a little bit about deceiving his wife, but still gets all hot and sweaty thinking about his mid-week rendezvous. Kirby, who played on the sessions, also provides a mildly scandalous tune called "Letting Go," which is superficially about a couple breaking up, but is actually an explicit (though subtle) song about two lovers failing to have simultaneously orgasms -- a great example of the sub-genre of oh-so-naughty, sex-drenched erotic ballads that mainstream country singers were into in the early 'Seventies. Eddie Rabbit also contributes a few tunes, including two co-written with Even Stevens; one of these, "Linda's Love Stop," is a fairly dismal novelty number about a gal who has a love shack behind a truck stop somewhere in Kansas, one of those leering, nudge-nudge, wink-wink tunes that don't hold up that well a few decades later. This album has its rewards, but also a fair amount of tedium, mostly clustered on Side One. Definitely worth a spin, but don't get your hopes up too high.
Billy Mize & The Texas Playboys "A Salute To Swing: A Tribute To Tommy Duncan" (G&M Records, 1987) (LP)
(Produced by Tommy Allsup & Bob Sullivan)
A nostalgia-drenched double LP paying homage to western swing crooner Tommy Duncan, a pleasant if unsurprising set, easy on the ears, though it never really catches fire. Billy Mize is backed by a latter-day lineup of Bob Wills's old band, The Texas Playboys, a bunch of old-timers that included fiddler Johnny Gimble, steel whiz Herb Remington, Tiny Moore on mandolin, guitarist Eldon Shamblin, and a slew of less well-known sidemen with careers dating back to the 1940s and '50s. This is pretty much in keeping with other western swing revival records of the era, particularly the long string of LPs recorded by various lineups of the Playboys band. The liner notes include testimonials from producer Tommy Allsup and Merle Haggard, who both tip their hats towards Mr. Mize, as well as the late Tommy Duncan, who passed away in 1967.
Billy Mize "Make It Rain" (Sharecropper Records, 2006) (CD)
Picker-singer Billy Mize (1929-2017) was a real country music plugger, a pioneer of the West Coast country scene whose career dated back to the early 1950s, when he starred on Herb Henson's TV show, Cousin Herb's Trading Post, beaming out of Bakersfield. This was one of several country music variety shows he performed on, a list that also includes The Cal Worthington Show, the fabled Town Hall Party broadcast, and finally Gene Autry's television version of the Melody Ranch program, which Mize joined in 1966, when he was finally beginning to gain some traction as a songwriter and solo artist. Though born in Kansas, Mize came out West as a kid and was something of an under-appreciated icon of the California country scene, a back-forty chart artist who took every opportunity he could, but never quite grabbed the big brass ring. Here's a quick look at his work...
