Alabama
My Home's In Alabama

THE REVIEW

Representatives of the so-called "Bakersfield Sound", the three cousins Jeff Cook, Randy Owen, and Tedd Gentry have emerged from three virtually unnoticed recording efforts, but they finally achieve compositional clarity and notoriety with "My Home’s in Alabama", a best seller in the country scene in 1980.

With the support of drummer Mark Hernond, they consistently express a tribute to their origins and customs, balancing between faith and youthful stubbornness, and musically, they take an established country sound and dilute it with large doses of easy listening. Driven by the radio escapades of the hit singles "Tennessee River" and "Why Lady Why" (both number one on the country chart), the album contains other tracks with less immediate appeal but are ultimately very well-crafted. First of all, the slow and genuine "My Home’s in Alabama" (a respectable seventeenth place on the charts), a tribute to the South with a well-executed alternation of winks to the mellifluous John Denver post-‘74 and artisanal country turns, which feels somewhat overused in "Hanging Up my Travelin’ Shoes". A series of catchy ballads follow for sensitive hearts such as "I Wanna Come Over" and "Some Other Place, Some Other Time" and "Can’t Forget About You", up to a slightly more masculine approach, seasoned with the usual good country, in "Get It While It’s Hot" and "Keep on Dreamin’".

The declared Southern tendencies and a musical genre aimed at a well-defined target do not allow for other, perhaps not even desired, objectives. Alabama consistently reside in the upper positions of the country charts throughout the Eighties, until the inevitable decline of the Nineties.