I happened on Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper's LP "Sacred Songs" at a garage sale and a great melancholy welled up in me ("so sad, the birds stopped their singing") to find that on this otherwise quite good record (with, for example, the great "Too much sinning, not enough praying" on it) they re-recorded "Walking My Lord Up Calvary's Hill sans-recitation call and response (where that "so sad..." line comes from).

Now that I write that it occurs to me that I am not sure if it counts as a full recitation actually, given the response, but definitely it exists on the same plane.

There might be better records, but there are few better fully realized records than this one, with the real version:



The spring is the season when morons dump their record collections. I picked up more than I could carry for 20 bucks for the lot of them from some guy selling off his father-in-laws possessions. Being selective from that stack (in technical terms, a shitload) I ended up with 79 keepers (George Jones, Ernest Tubb, much Merle Haggard, Buck Owens of course, and speaking of the all-time recitation king, quite a few Porter Wagoners, Cash, etc), and an equal amount of shit in good shape to sell on ebay. Plus perhaps the largest stack of Charlie Pride I have ever seen (saying a lot, since back when I packed up things to go to Korea I got of an equally large stack of Charlie Pride plus a five LP set, he is like a boomerang, refusing to leave you be. There was a goodly pile of true shit as well, of course, but this is in the nature of things.