Posted by Lyle Johnston on September 16, 2017, 4:31 pm
Hi Larry,
I'm still amazed at the new Jim Reeves music you continue to find. Since releasing the Patsy Cline CD that includes Have You Ever Been Lonely, I Fall to Pieces and You Belong to Me, three of the 5 songs Jim and Patsy recorded separately. I know you have Jim's versions of I Fall to Pieces and Have You Ever Been Lonely. Any thought of trying to work up duets?
There is a lot of tape hiss on Jim's vocal track that was clearly evident when RCA released those two "duets" with Patsy years ago, and as far as I know, no label that has re-released these has bothered to clean them up, even though the technology now exists to do so. Very puzzling.
Although for their time, this cut-and-paste job of manipulating tapes to try to synchronize the two singers, who recorded those songs separately, was an inspired idea, I don't actually think they work well.
I did experiment with combining Jim and Patsy on one of the other songs that they both recorded, but their deliveries and tempos were too dissimilar to make them work without intruding significantly on their phrasing, which I did not want to do.
You may have seen me mention here that my good friend Bill Larson, who was one of Jim's charter pilots, recalls Jim and Patsy actually singing duets on stage together during shows that he flew them to. "Imagine That"! :)