Raven [Australia]
2006
The Ways To Love A Man / Tammy's Touch
About This Album
Raven's 2006 two-fer combines the first two albums Tammy Wynette released after her 1969 Greatest Hits LP: 1969's The Ways to Love a Man and 1970's Tammy's Touch. Although neither of these are quite as iconic in their titles (and title songs) as Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad or D-I-V-O-R-C-E or Stand by Your Man, these are excellent records in their own right and can be seen as portraits of the queen at the peak of her reign.

The Ways to Love a Man found her and producer Billy Sherrill at cruising altitude, delivering an album that easily replicated the sound and feel of Stand by Your Man. If anything, the album felt a bit too easy, as Sherrill began making his productions smoother and silkier, sanding away any of the lingering rough country edges that were on Stand by Your Man, giving Tammy's impeccably luxurious surroundings. It's an appropriate setting for the First Lady of Country Music even if it ironically feels a bit more pop than country, but the key to Sherrill's productions was how he made them so grand and then singers like Tammy or her husband George Jones grounded them. More than any of Sherrill's other vocalists, Tammy seemed to slide into the soft textures of his productions, and nowhere was that sound softer than it was on The Ways to Love a Man, where Tammy comfortably covered Johnny Mathis' "The Twelfth of Never.
Track List (try tracks 1,2,3,4,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,18,19,20 and 21)

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