ABSTRACT
Jim Reeves was a paradox. Not an especially intriguing one to most people perhaps, but one that tells us how country music came out the other side of rock ‘n’ roll. You’ll usually find Reeves bracketed with Slim Whitman (without even Whitman’s kooky appeal), but Reeves had a vision and the cussedness to stick with it when everyone was telling him to do something different. He grew up in Texas in the 1920s and ’30s, but he didn’t sing Western Swing or Texas beer-joint music; instead, he sang country music for people who didn’t like country music—or didn’t even know what it was. When nearly all his contemporaries were trying to rock and roll, Jim Reeves went low and slow. “Four Walls” was not only a great record, but a groundbreaking one. Most of what happened in country music in the late 1950s and ’60s took its cue from that one record.
