Country Great Bill Anderson’s Compilation To Include New Dolly Parton Duet
The collection has the same title as the current exhibition on his celebrated career at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Country giant Bill Anderson will have the retrospective As Far As I Can See: The Best Of Bill Anderson released on June 10. The 16-track collection has the same title as the current exhibition on his celebrated career at the Country Music Hall of Fame, and features many of his best-loved hits, as well as a new collaboration with Dolly Parton, their first ever, titled “Someday It’ll All Make Sense.”
The title of the album and exhibition quotes the first line of “City Lights,” the country classic he wrote for Ray Price, for whom it spent 13 weeks atop the country chart in 1958. That song is featured alongside other favorites from Anderson’s massive catalog of his own hits such as “Po’ Folks,” The Tip Of My Fingers,” and such No.1s as “Sometimes,” “Still,” and “My Life (Throw It Away If I Want To).”
The singer-writer from Columbia, South Carolina has an incredible record of success spanning country generations, from his first chart appearance in late 1958 to his last in 1991. The Country Music Hall of Fame inductee and Grand Ole Opry member has continued to release albums regularly in the 21st century.
Other highlights of the new retrospective include an extremely rare demo of “If It’s All The Same To You,” the song recorded in 1964 that became a duet with Jan Howard on their 1970 LP of the same name. The new album is released by MCA Nashville/UMe, Anderson’s label home for most of his seven-decade career. It’s augmented by the first-ever digital release of seven of his 1960s albums.
“Needless to say I am thrilled over my new association with UMG,” says Anderson, now aged 84. “Not only do they have 23 years’ worth of my back catalog ready to introduce to the digital world, but I am reuniting with Dolly Parton on this project.
“Dolly sang some demos for me (and with me) back in the early sixties when she was new in town,” he goes on. “One was a duet called, ‘If It’s All The Same To You,’ which had gone missing for years. UMG has recovered it and included it along with my and Dolly’s new duet in this package. That’s called connecting the dots across more than fifty years. How cool is that?”
Pre-order As Far As I Can See: The Best Of Bill Anderson, which is released on June 10.
