Don Gibson - Don Rocks (2008)

Never deliberately flashy, Don Gibson had an unerring ability to take complex emotions and turn them into deceptively simple-sounding songs, and as any songwriter knows, that's far from an easy trick to pull off, but Gibson did it time and time again. Unassuming to a fault, his best songs like "Sweet Dreams" (a hit initially for Faron Young in 1955 but ultimately defined a few years later by Patsy Cline's version), "Oh Lonesome Me" (slowed down, a key track on Neil Young's After the Gold Rush album), and "I Can't Stop Loving You" (covered by countless artists, but most notably by Ray Charles) are models of graceful construction (amazingly, the latter two songs were written by Gibson in a trailer park on the exact same afternoon). Of these, only "Oh Lonesome Me" from 1958 is included in this 33-track set drawn from Gibson's second tenure with RCA Victor (he had been signed to the label in 1950 but was let go, only to resign in 1957), but there are several other fine Gibson-penned songs here, including 1958's "If You Don't Know It," 1960's "What About Me," and 1961's "Lonesome Number One," among others, and if this isn't exactly the ideal introduction to Gibson (it leans toward his more uptempo material), it does spotlight his unique rhythm guitar style, which always had more to do with Django Reinhardt than it did Maybelle Carter. Gibson's second stint with RCA lasted until 1969, after which he signed with Wesley Rose's Hickory Records and remained there from 1969 until 1980, when he left Hickory and promptly re-recorded his hits for K-Tel Records before leaving the music business for good, remaining relatively reclusive between 1980 and his death in 2003. Again, this set is skewed toward his uptempo side, so it isn't a complete portrait of this fine singer, guitarist, and songwriter, but it is certainly revealing in its own right.