Despite its kitschy cover art and florid subject matter, a large segment of country music has been largely overlooked by the vinyl sharing crowd. While praise abounds for alt.country and its “roots” progenitors, the ordinary, garden-variety “Nashville” variant pretty much gets the short shrift. Only one site that I’ve found, the ambitious LP Discography offers the kind of obsessive coverage the subject deserves (the kind usually reserved for bad cookbooks or inept Japanese use of the English language).

Lucky for you, we at Bostworld are exactly that obsessive. We’ve spent almost a year sifting through a seemingly endless glut of interchangeable artists and hermetically unfunky material that comprises the vast bulk of America’s most ubiquitous “outsider” genre. Armed with nothing but a sharp ear and a ruthless screening process, we’ve lovingly crafted a small collection of records we consider worth offering up to the listening community at large. Our first sampler celebrates hard labor, simple pleasures and common bonds — songs of work, food, family and recreation.

These days, country music is more of a “lifestyle choice” than a way of life. Having achieved its place in the sun, country clings to its “values” and parades it’s humble origins. But if modern country celebrates its “roots,” classic country wanted nothing more than to escape them. Even the relatively lighthearted songs included here reveal dark themes of instability and isolation lurking just below the surface.

Whether explicitly comic or cornily sentimental, all of these records are haunted by the raw experience of rural subsistence living. And as tempting as it is to dismiss such material with the luxury of ironic distance, I consider their underlying dream of upward mobility to be the spark that goads them on to greatness. Using this theme as as a road map, we should be able to easily chart country music’s progress out of the wilderness and into the mainstream, where it became the comparably shallow and uninteresting genre it is today.

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1. Dear Okie – Doye O’Dell
2. No Help Wanted # 2 – Ernest Tubb & Red Foley
3. Please Pass The Biscuits – Gene Sullivan
4. I Can Do That – Tommy & Wanda Collins
5. We’re Gonna Go Fishing – Hank Locklin
6. Give Me 40 Acres (To Turn This Rig Around) – Willis Brothers
7. Welder’s Test – Big Boy Williams
8. I’m Gonna Feed You Now – Porter Wagoner
9. You Wouldn’t Put the Shuck On Me – Geezinslaw Brothers
10. He Looks A Lot Like You – Harden Trio
11. Cut The Cornbread, Mama – Osborne Brothers
12. Wonder Could I Live There Any More – Charley Pride
13. Chicken On The Ground – Wanda Jackson
14. Sunday In The Country – Jim Ed Brown