[78-L] Bear family JR box

[DAVID BURNHAM]

For the most part the JSP JR is better than the Bear Family.  No constant 
peak distortion.  At least that's what I remember.

Martin Fisher

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I haven't heard the Bear Family box but having listened to all except the last few cuts of disc 5 of the JSP box, I am really impressed with the remastering.  Particularly starting with 1931, the sound is very clean, sibilants are clear and surface noise is minimal.  I've also noticed that the quality of the music improved significantly in 1931.  

If anyone's interested in my very subjective mini review, compared with Wilf Carter, Hank Snow and other "singing comboys" of the era, few of Jimmie Rodgers' tunes are really cowboy songs at all.  There's a lot of being hurt by women but very rarely is anything cowboyish mentioned.  Take away the guitar and the yodelling and it would just sound like ballads or blues.  I found the missed or added beats a little irritating at times but since these tempo aberrations happen at the same place in every chorus, I assume they are done as intended.  When he is singing with a band the rhythms are clear.  His yodelling is always accurately in pitch, as opposed to Wilf Carter who has a problem with pitch in the falsetto range but Carter has a lot more acrobatic yodelling, (fast triple metered yodelling).  For my taste, Rodgers' tunes are very repetitive - listening to the sessions chronologically, many times the last line of one cut is identical to the first
 line of the next cut, (even in the same key) but this was less noticeable after 1931.  By comparison, I feel that Hank Snow is the best tune smith of the three, Wilf Carter had some real inspired tunes but many more are a little pedestrian.  And where Jimmie Rodgers has rhythm problems, Carter has rhyming problems - in "Old Shep", "roam" is supposed to rhyme with "way", (that one has bugged me since I was a child); in the original, "roam" should be "stray".  If I remember correctly, "Moonlight and Skies" is the same tune as "On Top of Old Smokey".  "The One Rose" is taken from a disc in very poor condition so if it's the same on the Bear Family box, I guess some piracy has occured.

db