The Mickey Newbury Collection

The Mickey Newbury Collection Review by William Ruhlmann

The Mickey Newbury Collection is an eight-CD box set containing ten albums originally released between 1969 and 1981. (The first six discs contain one album each, while the last two each combine two albums.) They are: Looks Like Rain (1969), 'Frisco Mabel Joy (1971), Heaven Help the Child (1973), Live at Montezuma Hall (1973), I Came to Hear the Music (1974), Lovers (1975), Rusty Tracks (1977), His Eye Is on the Sparrow (1978), The Sailor (1979), and After All These Years (1981). While this is not a complete set of Newbury's recordings, it constitutes the bulk of his work as a recording artist, tracing the most productive periods of one of popular music's most impressive, if least known, singer-songwriters. The Mickey Newbury Collection uses transfers from vinyl records, the master tapes having long-since disappeared. (The resulting sound quality is good, though the occasional click can be heard in quiet passages.) At his best, Mickey Newbury is an original, compelling singer-songwriter who ranks with the best to come out of Nashville; at his worst, he is a highly competent writer of generic country songs. He may have been too well compensated for the latter to feel challenged sufficiently to be the former with any consistency, but one hears many examples of his great and only good work in this lengthy collection.