Western swing, blues, countrypolitan, traditional country, gospel -- if it was music that even brushed the airwaves of a southern state,
Elvis Presley at his best could make it his own, and
Elvis was at his peak when he cut
Elvis Country. Actually,
Elvis Presley was positively on a roll at the time. A decade after the end of what were thought to be his prime years, he was singing an ever-widening repertory of songs with more passion and involvement than he'd shown since the end of the 1950s; he was no longer transforming the nature of popular music with every record and performance, but he was a major concert draw and tickets to his shows were in nearly as much demand as those for the far less accessible
Frank Sinatra. What's more, his voice had achieved a peak of perfection as an instrument, acquiring a depth and richness, a beauty to go with its power at which even his best work of the early years had only hinted. And it all came together on
Elvis Country, his greatest long-player of the 1970s, and one of his three or four best albums ever.
Elvis threw himself into this record with every bit of the passion displayed on its better known, soul-oriented predecessor,
From Elvis in Memphis, and it was even more personal; new or old, these were all songs he cared about. And he's a commanding and charismatic vocal presence, whether he's covering "Snowbird" (a then recent hit for
Anne Murray), redoing a 1940s classic by
Ernest Tubb ("Tomorrow Never Comes") in an arrangement akin to
Roy Orbison's "Runnin' Scared," a
Bill Monroe standard of the same decade ("Little Cabin on the Hill"), reprising
Jerry Lee Lewis's "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On" in a version dominated by the guitar and bass (and with scarcely any piano), or covering
Willie Nelson's "Funny How Time Slips Away" as a slow blues. He doesn't necessarily supplant the originals (except for "Snowbird," where he does make you forget
Anne Murray), but he gives you more than enough reason to listen, again and again, to everything here. And good as he is on the covers, nowhere is
Presley better than on "It's Your Baby, You Rock It," the only new song on the album and as fine a record as he cut during this entire boom period in his career. Producer
Felton Jarvis and a cadre of Nashville sidemen (augmented by
James Burton) provided as good backup as
Presley ever got, including a hard-rocking electric guitar and harmonica sound on
Bob Wills's "Faded Love" and a gospel-style accompaniment to "Funny How Time Slips Away," and giving "Make the World Go Away" a lean, more urgent sound than
Eddy Arnold's original hit. ~ Bruce Eder