The Continuing Story

Dee Mullins kicked around Texan independent labels such as Pappy Daily's D Records before Shelby Singleton signed him to his Nashville independent SSS — later Plantation Records — in 1967, having Mullins sing the answer song "The Continuing Story of Harper Valley P.T.A." to the label's first big hit from Jeannie C. Riley. "The Continuing Story" provides the title for this 2009 compilation from Omni Records, a compilation that rounds up a generous 27 tracks that stretch all the way from 1959 to 1978, but focus on those hippie-era oddities from SSS and Plantation, pushing all 16 of those cuts toward the front. If any country music could be called psychedelic, this is it: Singleton surrounded Mullins with vocal effects, sitars, and fuzz guitars, creating genuinely odd music ranging from the eerie and unsettling ("I Am the Grass") to the absurd ("Beers"). Mullins is game to follow all these weird turns, and sounds as comfortable here as he does on the Texan honky tonk and poppy rockabilly from earlier in his career, or the soft balladeering from later. Mullins isn't necessarily versatile, it's more like he's malleable, ready to fit whatever the times bring him. As it happens, the '60s brought him some strangeness and they're the chief attraction here, not so much because they're terrific on their own merits, but rather because they're great period curious. The rest of the music here is good, generic country of its respective eras, and the whole package would have been slightly easier to appreciate if it was not sequenced seemingly at random.