Leland Jones - Everybody's Doing Their Thing flac album

Delightfully twangy hard-country-meets-Nashville material from an energetic second-stringer who started his professional career around 1968. Leland Jones found modest success as a songwriter and performer by the time this album came out... He'd played on the Opry and the Louisiana Hayride, and co-wrote some songs with Nashville star Carl Smith, including "Little Boy Blue," which is on this album, and was also released as a single. The title track, "Everybody's Doing Their Thing," is a shameless ripoff of Joe South's "Games People Play," with Jones trying to sculpt a hip-sounding crossover hit; the rest of the record is more engaging, mostly all originals written by Jones, though he also covers tunes like Wynn Stewart's "Another Day, Another Dollar" and Harlan Howard's "I Don't Believe I'll Fall In Love Today," giving a sense of Jones' jovial, Top Forty-friendly sensibilities. I think this was early 'Seventies outing his only full album, although Jones also released a handful of singles on Redcrest, mostly made up from cuts from this LP. A later 45 from '74 included some later material, "Take Flowers To Mama"/"You Can't Reach Me Anymore" and was plugged in Billboard -- at the time Jones was working shows near Kansas City. He and his wife Carole later opened their own "opry" in 1982, a modest, weekly variety show called the Country Pickin' Opry Show, held on Saturdays in a barn on their land in nearby Richmond, Missouri. Jones also landed a TV gig on TNN, where he performed with a string of touring stars and Nashville regulars. www.slipcue.com