This Is Faron Young!

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This Is Faron Young!'s opening track is one of the great unsung anthems of rock & roll. "Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young" may have been adapted later for use by the wild generation as "Live fast, die young, leave a pretty corpse," but the sentiments are all here. But this 1959 album has much more to offer than this. "Tattletale Tears" is a slippery two-step ballad in the grand Ernest Tubb style of honky tonk, "Goin' Steady," the album's first single, features Young sounding like Hank Williams come back from the dead to sing teen love songs, and the blues and Western swing blend with honky tonk in "It's a Great Life (If You Don't Weaken)," which has the tag "but who wants to be strong?" Young wrote the vast majority of the material here and the steel guitar and fiddle are up front in the mix, lending the raw country sound its credence, but Young's voice and lyrical content are strictly modern. "Sweet Dreams" is closely identified with Patsy Cline, but Young's version is a close second to her version, if not its equal. And his evocation of the blues in "For the Love of a Woman Like You" is nothing short of remarkable given the context of Nash Vegas in those days. Like Hello Walls, which is available with This Is Faron Young! together on an single-disc import, this album is a well-rounded portrait not only of Young's "now," but of his future as well.

© Thom Jurek /TiVo