Best of Lefty Frizzell
Perhaps because his personal life so sabotaged his career, Frizzell has not always gotten his due as a country stylist. Yet he was one of the music's true originals, with a bottomless arsenal of slurs, slides, swoops, tears, moans, modulations, vibrato, glissando, and more. This covers the first two phases of his career, as an early-'50s honky-tonker and as a '60s Nashville Sound singer, with the emphasis rightly on the former. With 18 tracks, from "If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time" to "Saginaw, Michigan," it's the best single-CD sampler on the market.--John Morthland