Lonesome Hound Dogs

BUCK OWENS, MERLE HAGGARD, GEORGE STRAIT, BROOKS AND DUNN, ALAN JACKSON, HAL KETCHUM, KEVINSHARP, HANK WILLIAMS, HANK THOMPSON, HANK SNOW, JOHNNY CASH, DWIGHT YOAKAM, RAY PRICE, JOHNNY HORTON, GARTH BROOKS, JOHN MICHAEL MONTGOMERY, ROLLING STONES, THE BEATLES, FATS DOMINO, THE DRIFTERS, CHUCK BERRY, BUDDY HOLLY, ROY ORBISON, EVERLY BROTHERS, CARL PERKINS, BEN E. KING, ELVIS PRESLY, ROGER MILLER BING CROSBY, DORIS DAY, BILLY ECKSTINE, PATTI PAGE, LOUIS JORDAN, JO STAFFORD, GLEN MILLER, SANTOS AND JOHNNY, BILL DOGGETT, BOB WILLS, FLOYD CRAMER, FREDDIE KING , AND TRADITIONAL SONGS.

I'm not a fan of new-country, hot country, or any of the other video-friendly, characterless slick stuff that's cashing in on country music's original passion and authentic feeling. Like George Jones says, "They've taken the heart and soul out of country music".

....Larry Lawrence and the Lonesome Hound Dogs play real country music...."no hyuphen-falutinated-country", as Lawrence explained early in the band's first set, "just country".

The local trio's Honky Tonk Revue is a celebration of the music that grew out of this continent's working class history. They do it with humour, like country music pioneers Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills, and they do it with sincerity and respect for tradition, too...

...I look around the room and everyone's grinning from ear to ear as the Lonsome Hound Dogs follow up their Heartaches By The Number opener with a driving rendition of Folsum Prison Blues that featured bassist Paul Washington's mellifluous vocal, drummer Bradley Clarke's train track rhythm, and Larry Lawrence's reverb-laced guitar twang.

Lawrence's economical, fluid guitar lines are at the heart of the band's rootsy sound. Following his low-tech heroes by simply running his Fender Stratocaster guitar musings through his amp, (no special effects boxes for this traditionalist), Lawrence conjured up the sounds of country's glory days when the hits come on little records that spun at 45 rpm.

On his instrumental reshaping of the fiddle tune Flowers of Edinburgh, Lawrence linked country's Appalachian roots with traditional folk music from the British Isles. Washington followed by crooning that ol' cowpoke Cole Porter's classic, Don't Fence Me In. His theatrical reading inspired a spontaneous sing-along on the chorus, and Lawrence's guitar lolo was so unhinged that it made me laugh out loud. What a player!

The band's rendition of Chuck Berry's Maybellene underlined the lineage between early country and the blues, the Kansas-bred Lawrence drawling "the thangs you used to do". A request for a rock'n'roll song was answered by a playful countrified arrangement of the Stones' Honky Tonk Woman complete with a clever, harp-like guitar break by Lawrence. On the Lonesome Hound Dogs' version of the Jo Stafford hit You Belong To Me, Washington geared up his vocal with lots of Elvis-like tremelo and a shyly grinning Lawrence uncorked a reverb-drenched guitar solo that took the country waltz through a fully conceptualized, painterly abstraction.

Lawrence introduced the band's set-capping, frenetic instrumental version of Red Wing with a dramatic "To dance is human. To polka is divine"!

Lawrence and his talented bandmates embody an almost lost innocence and integrity that spawned today's jaded, multi-billion dollar country music business. it's very refreshing. Their second set was even more fun, opening with a reverb-soaked insturmental Sleepwalk, and "a song about looking for love at the cattle auction". The Hound Dogs howled out a pair of Everly Brothers-inspired, vocal harmony-driven versions of Claudette and I'll Do My Crying In The Rain, and the crowd sang along as Larry Lawrence clowned his way through a version of Hank William's Hey Good Lookin'.

Then the boyish guitarist grinned and picked a tasty, twanging instrumental reading of Arkansas Traveller, a song from his childhood that he dedicated to his two-month-old son.

The Lonesome Hound Dogs' music is steeped in that kind of soulful, historic resonance. Like the country music it celebrates, it taps into the little things that give life meaning.
Highly recommended.