The Best of Ed Bruce
Today Ed Bruce is better known as the author of "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys" and as James Garner's sidekick inBret Maverickthan as an artist himself. There's a reason for that--he was a mediocre singer. His baritone suffered from a cramped range, a thin tone, and a mumbled delivery. That didn't stop him from having half a dozen Top-10 country hits, however, for he was a skillful songwriter with a knack for coming across as a gruff, grizzled cowboy even as he was being unabashedly sentimental. Between 1980 and '86, Bruce scored 16 Top-25 country singles for MCA and RCA, and all of them can be found onThe Best of Ed Bruce, a single-CD anthology filled out by "Theme fromBret Maverick" and Bruce's original '75 version of "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys." As a summary of his career,The Best of Ed Brucehas several limitations. It includes none of his early rockabilly and hard-country singles for Sun, RCA, Wand, Monument, and Epic. It also omits his own versions of the big hits he wrote for other singers: "See the Big Man Cry" (Charlie Louvin), "Restless" (Crystal Gayle), and "The Man That Turned My Mama On" (Tanya Tucker). Moreover, the brief liner notes make no mention of the musicians who played on his hits or of his ex-wife Patsy Bruce who co-wrote many of them.--Geoffrey Himes