Catalog Number(s):
ACL1-0125 (Stereo LP)

Released: 1973
Peaked: Didn’t Chart.

Recorded: RCA Victor Studio, Nashville, TN
Reissue producer: Ethel Gabriel

* Background Accompaniment: The Jordanaires
** Arranged and Conducted by Don Tweedy
^ Arranged and Conducted by Cam Mullins

Singles Released From Album:
None

Side One

• 1. Would You Hold It Against Me* (Dottie West – Bill West)
• 2. Suffertime* (Dottie West – Bill West)
• 3. I Love You So Much It Hurts** (Floyd Tillman)
• 4. Make The World Go Away** (Hank Cochran)
• 5. Last Word In Lonesome Is Me** (Roger Miller)

Side Two

• 6. Broken Hearted Melody (Hal David – Stoney Edwards)
• 7. Mommy Can I Still Call Him Daddy* (Dottie West – Bill West)
• 8. I’m Sorry (Ronnie Self – Dub Albritten)
• 9. With Pen In Hand (Bobby Goldsboro)

Liner Notes

1966. The year that country music really took its place. In Boston, Chet Atkins was teaching the Boston Pops Orchestra a thing or two about bluegrass melodizing; in Manhattan, Eddy Arnold was turning on the tuxedo crowd at Carnegie Hall. Meanwhile, in Nashville, it was business as usual for country music stars. And honoured among these were Miss Dottie West, who was doing her thing the she’d always done it. Only two years before, the beauteous Miss West, who came to Tennessee by way of Cleveland, had shocked the hit parade with a song-of-the-year in her first serious try. Now two years later, she had earned permanent fame with her performance of her own lovely ballad, Would You Hold It Against Me, the title song of this album. In part, this album is a tribute to the great “basic” love tunes of the Sixties. It was also in 1966 that Eddy Arnold, fresh from his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, warbled The Last Word in Lonesome Is Me, a delightful verbal happening by Roger Miller. Only three years earlier, Ray Price has scored with the now-familiar Make the World Go Away, and two years later John Darrell was to introduce With Pen in Hand, another classic down-tempo lyric. Dottie West appears to have elected spokeswoman for modern Nashville women. Not only has she reaped success as both singer and songwriter, but she is also the first country singer to be heard on a national TV commercial. In her life she epitomizes the paradoxes in farm belle turned city swinger. These two sides of Dottie—one book writer says, “She looks like she’d pass out if somebody took a drink in front of her,” another author says “Her beauty challenges that of a Hollywood movie queen”—make her work especially relevant in this area of changing traditions.

Peter Wolf