Friday, August 13, 2010

Molly O`Day - The Living Legend Of Country Music



We are overdue for a posting of the great Molly O`Day! Sorry, I don`t know a whole lot about her.
First I`ll talk a little about the voice of Molly O`Day. She has an unusually strong voice for a woman. She sings in the mountain style, but not at all with a nasal voice as many home recordings of mountain women had. Molly really belts it out there, sort of makes me think of the pop star Kate Smith. Some people called her the female Roy Acuff. I don`t know if Molly tried to pattern her vocals after Roy or not, but you can`t help but think of Roy when you hear Molly sing. Although this LP is all gospel music, she recorded many Roy Acuff songs in the 40`s. The blog Visit Me In Music City (which is listed on the left side of my blog page) has two downloads of Molly`s earlier country & gospel material. It`s ALL great, I highly recommend downloading it.
Now a little about her banjo pickin`. She had a great, driving, rhythmic style. She could really beat the fire out of the old 5 string. She was just a great artist all around.
As she got older, she became highly religious and mostly abandoned country music for a ministry of gospel music with her husband. I read a story once that she became really insecure about her voice (which is crazy!) as she grew older. The article said in the late 70`s or early 80`s she had a recording session set up and when the dat came she kept putting it off. Turns out she would get so worked up and nervous about the session she would lose her voice by the time the date came around. Too bad we couldn`t hear more of her, there really isn`t all that many recordings of her. I do have a couple of other LP`s of radio broadcasts I will post sometime.
Happy listening!




Click here to download Molly O`Day - The Living Legend Of Country Music

1 comment:

  1. Thanks a lot for posting. This is something useful to me and my friends in the school newsletter and this kind of news helps a lot in the production. I also need a lot of clips as references.

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