At the risk of destroying my trad reputation as a folk curmudgeon, I want to talk about the singing cowboy, Jimmy Wakely. He had an uptown voice something like Bing Crosby, but I find his renditions of the Hollywood pseudo Western songs some of the mellowest stuff in my collection. I've no idea if he's still around, but I just wanted to say that the LP I'm listening to right now---an old Decca record called JIMMY WAKELY---SANTA FE TRAIL is what I put on sometimes just to mellow out.

Art Thieme