Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose

Album review

There were two distinctive phases in Terry Stafford's meteoric decade-long recording career. The first segment was catalyzed by his one dynamite hit single, a 1964 cover of Elvis Presley's "Suspicion." Stafford's early recordings were mostly punctuated by squinky outbursts from a Farfisa or Vox electronic organ. "Suspicion" was a formulaic marvel of great precision, second only to the Elvis original and a spoof version by the Bonzo Dog Band. Stafford's brief second and final period is represented by the album Say, Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose. Recorded for Atlantic in 1973 and reissued on CD by Koch in 2007, this country-pop production album brought him some measure of success but not enough to sustain his flagging career, for after 1974 Stafford appears to have stopped making records altogether. In addition to the title track and "Amarillo by Morning," points of interest are "Big in Vegas" (co-written with Buck Owens), "Shelley's Winter Love" by Merle Haggard, and a countrified third-generation cover of "Suspicion."
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