Received the CD in the mail yesterday and immediately put it in my computer to listen. I was blown away! It is so sharp and clear it is like you are in the front row of the Ryman seeing Jim performing.
We saw Jim perform at a couple of Grand Ole Opry shows but from backstage. He got us back there. One time Patsy Cline was back there with her hair in curlers and a scarf over her head. She did not perform, she was waiting to go on the bus with some star after the show. So this show on the CD where Patsy sang with Jim as the star was not the one we saw.
Thank you for digging up these oldies, Larry. I think Mary stayed home most of the time and recorded the Opry show that Jim was on. Maybe some of these came from her recordings?
It is very nostalgic, if you like to hear Jim live, you need to get this CD!
Doris, I didn't know you were going to post this but I couldn't be more proud to read your compliments. Your remark that listening to the CD was like being in the front row at the Ryman is, ironically, EXACTLY what we were striving for!
I'll let you all in on a little secret: I've had these tracks for years. I remember when a certain foreign website was taunting me for not releasing them and implying there was some big scandal about them that precluded me from making them available to the fans. (More paranoia).
Actually, I sat on them because despite our best efforts, we could never get them sounding as good as I hoped for. That is, until technology improved and we also linked up with an incredibly talented audio restoration engineer named Richard Moore, who does a lot of work for the big EMI label.
We had taken the sound quality a considerable distance from the flawed originals (which, btw, cost me thousands of dollars to acquire), but Richard took us across the finish line. The sound quality truly surprises me because it is -- like you say, Doris -- just like sitting in the Ryman in the front row listening to these performances by the fabulous Jim Reeves and the other stars he hosts.
So glad this brought back memories for you. It did me, too, because one of the occasions on which I visited Mary Reeves as a teenager, I was backstage at the Opry when Elvis was back there too, unobserved by the audience, just watching and enjoying the show. A night to remember!