(Country Boogie / Western Swing / Honky Tonk) Bill Nettles and His Dixie Blue Boys - Shake It And Take It - 2004, MP3 (tracks), 320 kbps

Bill Nettles put his name in the record books with "Hadacol Boogie," a celebration of the notorious patent medicine that was popular in Southern "dry" counties because of its 12-percent alcohol content. "Hadacol Boogie" reached the country Top Ten in 1949 and inspired a sequel, "Hadacol Bounce," that failed to repeat its predecessor's success. The anthology Hadacol Boogie collects two-dozen of Nettles' Mercury, Imperial, and Bullet sides from the late '40s and early '50s, most of which are novelty boogies and hokum blues numbers similar to the music of Leon Chappel (whose song "Do Right Daddy" Nettles covers.) Boogies were still commercially viable circa 1949, but Nettles' preoccupation with high-falutin' mamas and the like was a bit of a throwback. In pursuit of a follow-up hit to "Hadacol Boogie," Nettles not only issued an inferior competing version of Wayne Raney's "Why Don't You Haul Off and Love Me" in 1949, but composed the answer song "I Hauled Off and Loved Her." He never recaptured the momentum of his lone novelty hit, though, and retired in the late '50s. Hadacol Boogie also includes several recordings by Danny Dedman, the guitarist in Nettles' Dixie Blue Boys, on which Nettles and the band provide instrumental support. Jasmine Records often drains the life out of their vinyl transfers with CEDAR noise reduction tools, which is occasionally an issue with Hadacol Boogie. The disc's sound quality is more than acceptable overall, but the surface noise on some tracks was digitally scrubbed at the expense of high-end frequencies, resulting in a muffled, flat sound. Nevertheless, the appearance of a Bill Nettles anthology of any sort is to be applauded.