79 year old Porter Wagoner has a fine new album, Wagonmaster. It's produced by Marty Stuart, an excellent new addition to Porter Wagoner's illustrious catalog. Frankly, my expectations for him this late in the game were pretty low, but this is actually, surprisingly enough, an outstanding record. I've been listening to it for a month. It started out good with me, and has only gotten better with repeated listening.

I've got at least four or five favorites here, but I might start with "Satan's River," the closing track. For starters, this moralistic country waltz may be the most purely catchy tune on the album. A lot of these songs have good visual images in the lyrics, and I especially like the "big yachts sailing on the warm smooth tide." I've found myself repeatedly singing this song acapella walking the hills, or doing dishes and such.

I also have to give a good shout out to "Be a Little Quieter." This opening track is a good vintage style Porter jam, with ever lovin' Buck Trent and the boys dressing this up with good old fashioned fiddle and steel, and basic honky-tonk country rhythm. Then there's poor bedeviled Porter himself, still hearing the long gone ex rattling the pots and pans in his imagination.

Most of these songs are quite good, and Porter wrote or co-wrote all but three of the songs, with a couple of instrumental bits credited to Stuart. Also, he performs a couple of Hank Williams songs in the extended bonus track chatting with Stuart. I've been a bit bedeviled figuring out just when he wrote some of these, though.

"Albert Erving" is a haunting song about a lonely old man he knew in childhood. From his description of having written a song about him 25 years later, that would seem to make it a 40 year old song. "My Many Hurried Southern Trips" was co-written with Dolly Parton somewhere in the 1970s. This song details a bus driver's observations of people in trouble, most strikingly an unwed pregnant woman.

Then again though, the details of when these songs were written aren't really that important. I'm a pretty fair Porter fan, and I'd never heard any of these songs. Presumably that Dolly song was recorded and buried on an album in their vast back catalogs. They're new to me though, so they'll likely be new songs to you as well.

One of several centerpieces is "Committed to Parkview." Johnny Cash wrote this song some 25 years ago on learning that he and Porter had both spent time in the same Nashville nuthouse. Cash apparently recorded it with the Highwaymen, but this is Porter's first recording. It's decent as a melody, but it's particularly striking as a lyric, with the catalogue of the torments of the doomed.

Johnny was a legendarily wild character, whereas Porter Wagoner on the other hand was seen more as the glad handing MC with the corny vaudevillian TV show and the infamous gaudy studded nudie suits. However, in retrospect Porter clearly seems the more disturbed. Johnny might get locked up for being too wild, but Porter's the one who sounded like he was really out of his tree. "The Rubber Room" is the obvious example for that, but you could find a number of other recordings that are right out there. Check out "The First Mrs Jones" for another prime example of psycho Porter.