Search - Bill Doggett :: Very Best of

It doesn't get much better than this!

John N. Feehan | All U Need Is Love, USA | 03/20/2006

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Thank you Steve King and Max Armstrong of WGN 720am radio in Chicago for turning me on to Big Bill Doggett. At roughly 4:53am in the morning Max comes on to do the farm report, and if the karma is right, Steve will play "Honky Tonk" (part 1).

With the first notes of the guitar, Max will start drolling, and reminiscing about his youth back in Indiana when the carnivals or fairs would come to his town. Back then every carnival would have that special tent where inside ladies would disrobe, what we would call a "tease show" today. "Honky Tonk" would be one of those songs playing in the background. Doggett's music is what I would call "grunt & grind", perfect mood music (no singing) all instrumentials. If this CD doesn't take you back to the early, early 1950's, nothing will. Thanks again Steve & Max."

Not everything it could have been...

Zub | Forks Twp., PA | 08/05/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"Many of the King label artists are represented on CD but many of those, from the King catalog owners themselves, have been god-awful. Collectables, notable for their very large, yet oftentimes sonically dreadful, catalog of CD reissues has compiled collections of some of the King artists. Thankfully, due in large part to the audio being in the hands of Little Walter DeVenne, these new compilations have been refreshingly stellar-sounding.



Here, the same care is given to the Bill Doggett King catalog and the outcome is the best-sounding collection yet available. With most of the recordings originating from the period before the widespread use of stereo recording techniques, understandably, the majority of these tracks appear in mono. A few (tracks 20-25), from the later 50's, are in stereo. While the sonic improvements are most welcome, there is some disappointment here in that several of Doggett's pop-charting singles inexplicably did not make it into this collection. Granted, two of these, "Blip Blop" and "Smokie - Part 2" (a me-too version of Bill Black's hit) were very minor hits but charted nonetheless. More puzzling is the omission is "Soft", a top-40 hit from 1957 - all the more strange in that its b-side, "Hot Ginger" does appear. Questionable track omissions notwithstanding, this remains the best, quality-wise, if not the most comprehensive, gathering up of Doggett's King recordings.



The first of the 28 tracks included here is "High Heels" from 1954 followed by a few other non-charting sides leading up to Doggett's trademark song, "Honky Tonk". Reaching the top of the r'n'b charts and claiming the number two spot on the pop charts for three weeks with an amazing longevity of 29 weeks in the top-100, "Honky Tonk" defined Doggett's sound thereafter and spawned numerous imitators. A moderately successful follow-up came with "Slow Walk", an also-ran to Sil Austin's own more successful competing version. Subsequent singles had only modest chart action and by 1960 Doggett had moved to Warner Brothers, where he managed to have one more minor hit, "(Let's Do) The Hully Gully Twist".



While the somewhat disappointing exclusion of charting singles warrants a bit of a downgrade, the attention to sound quality here makes this new collection deserving of shelfspace in the collector's music library. Perhaps, as they have done with other King artists, Ace Records of the U.K. may come along to fill the gaps left by this otherwise excellent piece."