Well, I gotta say I’m rather disappointed here. The decline that I was afraid might have started with Volume 7 seemed to have been halted in its tracks by the brilliant Volume 8, but with Volume 9, this series of archival recordings from Western Swing pioneer Bob Wills takes a real nose dive. This album isn’t terrible on the whole, but it does have a few tracks that are pretty bad and most of the rest are lackluster. I was very excited for a couple of the tracks here, namely versions of In the Mood & St. Louis Blues. The St. Louis Blues cover was actually a double-sided single, so it was split into two parts that, taken together, were over six minutes long. That sounded pretty amazing. Unfortunately, that cover of St. Louis Blues ended up being my least favorite part of the album; it’s a really lackluster reading and Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan do some of their signature patter, but it’s really not funny and feels very forced. I found this track very annoying actually. The cover of In the Mood is better and when the group is pounding out that central riff, it’s great; but then they get into the solos and the solos are just . . . not really working. It’s strange; I feel like we may be getting to the bottom of the barrel of the Tiffany Transcriptions and that’s not really a slam; the first 8 volumes of this series contained 114 songs and I’d say two to three of them weren’t that great. But I mean every musical artist just has sessions where they don’t quite click and it feels like these tracks were taken from those kinds of sessions. There are a few good tracks here. An up-tempo cover of Cole Porter’s What Is This Thing Called Love is pretty awesome and Tommy Duncan does a great reading of G.I. Blues, a song about a guy in the army who spends all his time wishing he was back home (based around the central joke of him being surrounded by “G.I.” equipment and musing, “Gee, I wish). My Life’s Been a Pleasure is a surprisingly warm-hearted country song and Texas Playboy Rag is a fun instrumental. But even the good stuff here can’t really stand up to the bulk of the series. There’s a song or two here and there through the first 8 volumes that would be down near the bottom, but, honestly, if I did a ranked list of all 128 songs so far, these fourteen would all be in the bottom twenty. Anyway, this one is probably mainly for completists; for the rest of the folks, the first 8 volumes is plenty of a party all on their own. 2 ½ stars.
tl;dr – while not terrible, this album finally gets into the mediocre & lackluster part of the Tiffanys; even the best on this album can’t really stand next to the bulk of the previous volumes. 2 ½ stars.