1955 Slim Whitman: Rose Marie

Like Tennessee Ernie Ford before him, Slim Whitman was a giant of country music sitting on top of the UK charts with a song not entirely representative of his genre. True, 'Rose Marie' is more of a country tune that , but it still has more than one foot in the mainstream to grease the wheels of the crossover. Ironically, what I like most about 'Rose Marie' is what I like least about most modern country music - its cleanness.

For my palette, country music should come covered in soil or tractor oil with a side order of desperation even when it's dressed in its church going Sunday best, a style epitomised by Hank Williams who always sounded like he was singing alone from the bottom of a well. There's nothing rough about Whitman's voice or the tune born of an inter racial marriage with pop that it's hitched to. Sharp as summer lightning, the slide guitar is kept tasteful, never straying into parody and Whitman's own trademark yodelling never loses control to crash into the corny and instead rides the melody like a fresh breeze on a warm day. Yet despite the shimmer, 'Rose Marie' still manages to grit the surface with a sparse and spooky vibe of a forlorn, ghostly suitor haunted by a love that's just out of reach.

And that's because we never know if this great love is requited or not; "Of all the queens that ever lived I'd choose you, to rule me my Rose Marie". Rose might not want to know and Walt could be wasting his time, but he's too smitten to care and in that respect, I love the audacious way the obsession of the lyric rhymes 'you' five times on the trot. It could have been a disaster, but Whitman's joy in subservience to his dream woman masks the repetition or at least papers over it with a wide eyed happiness that would grate in its smugness if it was directed purely at himself. Whether the record buying public of 1955 who put this at number one for eleven weeks* saw beyond the clean cut boy with the catchy yodel is moot, but to my ears Whitman is forever singing into the void of an empty theatre where nobody is there to listen to him and the aura of isolation gives 'Rose Marie' a depth that's endured.

* An impressive record that would stand until 1991 when it was beaten by Bryan Adams and '(Everything I Do) I Do It For You'