Wesley Tuttle – Detour: Wesley Tuttle
Consisting of 121 recordings on four CDs, plus eleven bonus tracks on DVD, Detour presents practically all of Wesley Tuttle’s commercial and transcribed corpus, belying the adjective “minor” that one is tempted to apply to the noun “career” in his case.
Though occasionally Bear Family’s choice of artists to reissue is bizarre, Tuttle is an eminently defensible and welcome choice. His career spanned what many consider country music’s golden age, intertwining in many forms (radio, recording, touring, barn dance shows, film, television) with California’s vibrant country scene from the 1930s through the 1950s.
His hits may have been few (and most of them cover versions of popular mid-1940s country tunes), but he and his singing partner/wife Marilyn were widely known and beloved in their heyday. Their current obscurity is traceable to an early retirement (1957, when Wesley was 40) to go into evangelistic work, plus the simple fact that they have now outlived practically all of their famous contemporaries and friends (Tex Ritter, Johnny Bond, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, Hank Penny, et al.), as well as the generation of fans who knew them best.
The set’s 84-page booklet, with notes by Packy Smith, is easily the most comprehensive account to date of Tuttle’s career. Spicing Smith’s prose are wonderful direct quotes from Tuttle: The fact that he’s still alive and has such a detailed memory is a major plus.
Tuttle stayed so busy and had so many irons in the fire at any one time — among them radio, touring, recording, movies, DJ work, script writing — that sometimes the sequence of events is hard to follow; but Smith, to his credit, includes it all.
The wonderful photographs and illustrations, a hallmark of these great Bear Family boxes, are so numerous and well-chosen that they could almost tell the story by themselves. We see Tuttle in his boyhood, during his days on radio with Stuart Hamblen, and at his summer in Yosemite National Park (where he sang for President and Mrs. Franklin Roosevelt). There are many from the recording studio, including several of a publicity stunt in which Tuttle rode his horse into the Radio Recorders studio, where Jerry Colona and all the Capitol Records brass (including Johnny Mercer) met him decked out in cowboy attire. We see Tuttle briefly working as a DJ from his own home (“Tuttle Time”), and there are many photos with Marilyn, his wife and duet partner. A plethora of movie posters and sheet music covers adds color to the basic b&w photos.
The full discography by Russ Wapensky and Bear Family boss Richard Weize is flawless, thanks to the complete session data from Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians and from Capitol Records. The discography is indeed so complete that it carries within it the seeds of its own discontent: It shows that the set is almost complete, but not quite. With only 38 more songs, which could have been added by squeezing more cuts onto the first two CDs and adding a fifth one, the box would have given us all of Tuttle’s recordings, commercial and transcribed.
The set includes all 65 of Tuttle’s Capitol transcriptions (1945-1947), but there is very spotty coverage of Tuttle’s second stint with Capitol, 1951-1955, with a full 20 songs absent. Reasons for these omissions, whether they were due licensing or space or aesthetic judgment calls or lost recordings, should have been included in the notes.
The sound quality of the CDs is flawless, a factor Bear Family trumpets on all of its boxes. (I am reminded of the comment my brother heard in Germany when a fellow tourist praised a clockmaker for the long life and accuracy of one of his cuckoo clocks: “Eet vass made to voork.”) Those with DVD players will enjoy the eleven bonus tracks, seven of which come from the soundtrack of one of the B-Westerns Tuttle appeared in, Song Of The Sierras, starring Jimmy Wakely.