(Rockabilly / Rock'n'Roll) Ricky Nelson - Ricky Sings Again - 1959, FLAC (image+.cue) lossless

Rick Nelson was one of the very biggest of the '50s teen idols, so it took awhile for him to attain the same level of critical respectability as other early rock greats. Yet now the consensus is that he made some of the finest pop/rock recordings of his era. Sure, he had more promotional push than any other rock musician of the '50s; no, he wasn't the greatest singer; and yes, Elvis, Gene Vincent, Carl Perkins, and others rocked harder. But Nelson was extraordinarily consistent during the first five years of his recording career, crafting pleasant pop-rockabilly hybrids with ace session players and projecting an archetype of the sensitive, reticent young adult with his accomplished vocals. He also played a somewhat underestimated role in rock & roll's absorption into mainstream America -- how bad could rock be if it was featured on one of America's favorite family situation comedies on a weekly basis?
Nelson entered professional entertainment before his tenth birthday, when he appeared with father Ozzie (once a jazz musician), mother Harriet, and brother David on a radio comedy series based around the family. By the early '50s, the series was on television, and Ricky grew into a teenager in public. He was just the right age to have his life turned around by rock & roll in 1956 and started his recording career almost accidentally the following year. The story's sometimes been told that he had no professional singing ambitions until he recorded his debut single to impress a girlfriend. The single, a cover of Fats Domino's "I'm Walkin'" that went to number four, was helped immensely (as all of his early singles would be) by plugs on the Ozzie & Harriet TV show.
So far the script was adhering to the Pat Boone teen idol prototype -- a whitewash of an R&B hit stealing the thunder from the pop audience, sung by a young, good-looking fella with barely any musical experience to speak of. What happened next was easy to predict commercially but surprisingly satisfying musically as well. Nelson was a fairly hip kid who preferred the rockabilly of Carl Perkins and Elvis Presley to the fodder dished out for teen idols, and over the next five years he would offer his own brand of rockabilly music, albeit one with some smooth Hollywood production touches and occasional pure pop ballads. Nelson recruited one of the greatest early rock guitarists, James Burton, to supply authentic licks (another great guitarist, Joe Maphis, played on some early sides). Some of his best and toughest songs ("Believe What You Say," "It's Late") were written by Johnny and/or Dorsey Burnette, who had previously been in one of the best rockabilly combos, the Johnny Burnette Rock 'n Roll Trio. Ricky could rock pretty hard when he wanted to, as on "Be-Bop Baby" and "Stood Up," though in a polished fashion that wasn't quite as wild and threatening as rockabilly's Southern originators.

By the time of his third album, most of which was recorded when he was 18 years old, Ricky Nelson had lots of performing under his belt, and the roadwork showed in his much more confident vocals. Also, as a major recording artist, he was having material written for him instead of having to fill up his LPs with covers of other people's hits. In those songs and in the covers he still did, he hewed to the rockabilly sound developed by Elvis Presley and others in and around Memphis, TN. In particular, he had become a follower of Dorsey Burnette, who co-wrote his 1958 hit "Believe What You Say" with his brother Johnny and took sole writing credit on the album's first two tracks, "It's Late" (soon to be a Top Ten hit) and "One of These Mornings." Such songs were tailored for Nelson, but they were very much in the style of what was currently popular; "It's Late," for example, in sound and subject matter, bore similarities to the Everly Brothers' 1957 hit "Wake Up Little Susie." Thus, even on his own songs, Nelson still sounded like a carbon copy of his betters, and when he tackled a classic like "Trying to Get to You," an Elvis Presley Sun sessions song, or Hank Williams' "I Can't Help It," his inadequacies were accentuated. In a sense, Nelson was a victim of his own success; he was still a promising, developing artist in terms of his abilities and experience, but he was also the second most successful pop singles artist of 1958, right behind Presley, which raised the bar of expectations. Ricky Sings Again found him branching out toward country music and anticipating the rise of teen pop, but it did not live up to his star status.