An Unlikely Tribute: Jamey Johnson Covers Hank Cochran

Jamey Johnson, one of the most popular country singers of recent years, has just released an album titled Living for a Song: A Tribute to Hank Cochran. Cochran, who died in 2010 at age 74, wrote hits for singers such as Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Ray Price and Loretta Lynn. Johnson has enlisted some of these performers, plus artists like Merle Haggard and Elvis Costello, to salute Cochran’s work.

The lead-off track, “Make the World Go Away,” is sung here by Jamey Johnson and Alison Krauss; the Cochran composition was a multimillion-selling hit for Eddy Arnold and Ray Price in the 1960s, and was recorded by everyone from Elvis Presley to Dean Martin. It’s typical of Cochran’s songwriting in a few ways. It’s downbeat verging on despairing, and features a simple but striking central image — “make the world go away” is a phrase inviting intense isolation, even obliteration. Yet the song also possesses a beautiful lilt.

Jamey Johnson isn’t the most likely country artist to record a Hank Cochran tribute album. Johnson’s rumbling, burly vocal sound and his own songwriting tends to be more rousing and less subtle than Cochran’s — to take just one example, Johnson is the co-author of “Honky Tonk Badonkadonk,” a novelty hit for Trace Adkins in 2005. Yet Johnson gives many effective performances on this album, including a duet with Ray Price, who is now in his 80s, in one of Cochran’s most devastating yet beautiful songs, “You Wouldn’t Know Love.”