“Groovey” Joe Poovey – “Groovey” Joe Poovey’s Greatest Grooves
He opened for Elvis in Dallas in 1955 and in the ’70s he was a staff chauffeur for the TV show “Dallas”, with a passenger list including Priscilla Presley. That pretty much sums up the wheel-spinning rock ‘n’ roll singing career of “Groovey” Joe Poovey, whose passing last October registered barely a hiccup on the History of Rock Stat Sheet. Heralded a hero by rockabilly diehards (especially overseas), Poovey was ready for the Big Memory Purge of Life — until along comes a career-retrospective CD to remind us how much talent is squandered in the machinery of the music industry.
“Groovey” Joe Poovey’s Greatest Grooves is the third in the “Legends of the Big ‘D’ Jamboree” series issued by Dragon Street, which last year released impressively polished discs featuring Gene Vincent and Johnny Dollar. The liner notes tell Poovey’s story from his days as a preteen lap steel phenom to his final years as a lost-now-found source of celebration for hep cats around the world, copiously illustrated with pics from Poovey’s archives.
As the disc reveals, Poovey was no raw rockabilly shouter, although he could cut loose in the best Jerry Lee vein; give a listen to his biggest near-miss, “Ten Long Fingers” (’58), for evidence. On songs such as “Move Around” (’58), he displays a sincere, controlled country tenor swimming amid a wild tide of boogie piano and honky-tonk guitar. By the time he recorded “Deep Ellum Rock” in 1997, he had developed the confident vocal aura of Carl Perkins.
The Big ‘D’ Jamboree was a weekly country music show held in the Sportatorium wrestling arena on the outskirts of downtown Dallas, and anyone who aspired to be anyone clamored to get on the bill. Poovey was a regular before he could drive, playing first honky-tonk and then rockabilly, all of it documented on this disc’s 24 tracks. Only one is a live cut from the Jamboree; the rest were assembled from restored masters recorded at a number of Texas studios over nearly half a decade. Not only is the disc a definitive snapshot of Poovey’s artistic development, it also parallels the evolution of country and rock in America.