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ALBUM REVIEW | HARD COUNTRY

Vince Gill & Paul Franklin, ‘Bakersfield’

Vince Gill and veteran steel guitar ace Paul Franklin have produced this tribute to Bakersfield country by focusing on its two most famous practitioners: Buck Owens and Merle Haggard. They’ve chosen five songs from the catalogs of each. Most are familiar hits — “The Bottle Let Me Down,” “Foolin’ Around,” “Together Again,” “The Fightin’ Side of Me” — but Gill and Franklin have complemented those classics nicely with a few deep-catalog selections. Gill wields his Telecaster throughout, and there are splashes of the high harmony (courtesy of longtime Gill backup singer Dawn Sears) so characteristic of the music of both Owens and the Hag. But the dominant sound here is the combination of Gill’s remarkable, soulful singing and Franklin’s fluid, piercing steel playing, and while Gill bends toward the vocal styles of his two honky-tonk predecessors, on songs such as “Together Again” the quavering ache of his tenor can’t help but assert itself. “Bakersfield” gives us two current masters paying homage, not through note-for-note reproduction, but by putting their own reverential take on the music of two country music titans. (Out Tuesday) Stuart Munro

ESSENTIAL “Together Again”


Stuart Munro can be reached at sj.munro@verizon.net