Legendary Performances

"Patrick Milligan and LeAnn Bennett were the production supervisors on Legendary Performances:Tammy Wynette as they are on this excellent archival retrospective on another country music icon, Marty Robbins. Country Music Hall Of Fame and Museum curator Mick Buck writes three pages of liner notes on the slick six-page insert and, as with the Wynette collection, the attention to detail is flawless with dates and credits giving the true fan a wonderful bookshelf collection of performances and a lengthy - forty minute - interview with Robbins conducted on March 8, 1982, nine months to the day prior to his untimely passing. Both Robbins and Wynette passed on in their mid-50s but, unlike Wynette, at least Marty Robbins got to witness and appreciate his own induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame on October 11, 1982. As also with the Wynette collection, there are 15 performances here, beginning with the singer in his early thirties performing a black and white ""Knee Deep in The Blues"". The first fourteen minutes are not in color, these early tapes displaying surprisingly fine audio which give the proceedings a vintage feel. As enlightening as the vocalist's musical maturity is to watch on the screen - from a non-cowboy-ish suit and tie in the 50's to glittering John Travolta 70s garb (on the Pop Goes The Country program which concludes the DVD) - so too are the technical advances in television from the 1950s to the 1970s for capturing country music on audio and video. This is a wonderful time capsule with definitive performances and an historical interview featuring another artist whose contributions were, and still are, invaluable."