Tracy Nelson

“You’ll Never Be a Stranger at My Door”

Memphis International

Is it any surprise that one of the country’s greatest blues singers can wrap herself so perfectly around an album’s worth of country standards, thereby making them her own?

Not when it’s the remarkable, and criminally underrated in my book, Tracy Nelson.

Actually, this strong record is a return of sorts to a genre that Nelson explored back in the Sixties, when she fronted the excellent, yet woefully commercially unappreciated “Mother Earth.”

In her notes accompanying the album, Nelson writes that over 20 years ago, she began to make a list of country songs that she’d like to record. For one reason or another, perhaps mostly because her career took her in a more blues-based vein, they remained just that, a list, until she took another long at them. And, thankfully for her fans, she went into the studio and recorded them.

The songs she has chosen typify her talent, and her taste. They include a wonderful reading of the standard “Cow Cow Boogie;” the Johnny Cash-penned weeper “I Still Miss Someone;” Ernest Tubb’s classic “”Thanks a Lot;” Don Gibson’s “Oh Lonesome Me;” and the Everly Brothers’ “I Wonder If I Care As Much.” Nelson also performs “Salt of The Earth,” an original she co-wrote with Guy Clark and Alice Newman Vestal.

It took more than two decades to get these wonderful performances recorded and released, but Tracy Nelson made it more than worth the wait.

- Mark T. Gould

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