- Woody Guthrie Dust Bowl Ballads, 1940 - public domain
The concept album is unlike most collections of music which showcase the newest offerings from a band or singer/songwriter, or the greatest hits from a long career. A concept album has a unified theme. Although the songs could stand alone, they tell a story or evoke a meaningful experience when listened to as a whole.
Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads Is An Early Example
Released in 1940, in America's slow recovery from the Great Depression, Guthrie's very first album contains 15 songs evoking the era of giant dust storms, Pretty Boy Floyd, the first wave of American homelessness, Steinbeck's Tom Joad character from The Grapes of Wrath (which would later help to inspire Bruce Springsteen's concept album The Ghost of Tom Joad) and three or four numbers Pete Seeger would carry in his own songbag for a lifetime, including his signature "Do Re Mi."
Students of 20th century American history will be thrilled to hear it told Guthrie-style. The original titles of familiar songs are instructive - suffice to say there is no shortage of dust.
- "So Long, It's Been Good To Know You" was originally "Dusty Old Dust"
- "I Ain't Gonna Be Treated This Way" was originally "Blowin' Down This Road"
Old Blue Eyes Did a Number of Concept Albums
Frank Sinatra's most successful concept album was his 1955 In the Wee Small Hours, which tells a story of nocturnal loneliness and unrequited love. It consists of sixteen unremittingly lovelorn songs, starting with the title track and "Mood Indigo," most notably. Guess he figured out that Ava Gardner wasn't coming back.
Country crooner Marty Robbins followed in 1959 with his Western-flavored Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, which at least has some upbeat tunes, including the intricate gunfighter ode, "El Paso," and the optimistic trail ballad, "Cool Water."
Ray Charles did the first concept album by an African American in 1960, with The Genius Hits the Road, a fascinating collection of nineteen tracks, including generic travel tunes, such as the Beatles’ classic, “The Long and Winding Road” and Rosemary Clooney’s “Sentimental Journey.” Fifteen are specific to cities or states, with two sharing moon themes (“Moon Over Miami” and “Moonlight in Vermont”) and three, count them, THREE songs about his home state of Georgia.
Johnny Cash did two famous concept albums focused on prison life, recorded live at San Quentin and Folsum Prison, and also a great train album, Ride This Train.
One of Johnny Cash’s most eloquent, if little-known, concept albums came about because of his Cherokee blood. Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian (1964) tried the patience of the commercially-driven music industry, early in his career.
The Beatles and the Beach Boys Also Got Into the Mix
The Little Deuce Coupe (1963), according to amazon.com's reviewer, was "a 'theme' album focusing on Southern California's burgeoning car culture." It took the Beach Boys from surfer dude albums into the vroom-vroom era of America's love affair with the automobile, which had begun in earnest around 1955, with the advent of the Ford Thunderbird.
Then came Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band (1967), with which the Beatles elevated the concept album to an art form of fantasy and creativity that will never be equaled. It was made into a movie, as were two other classic concept albums: Tommy, by the Who, and Red-Headed Stranger, by Willie Nelson.
With Tommy (1969), a whole new genre of rock opera was born, evolving naturally from the concept album format. Pete Townsend's compositions around the story of a "deaf, dumb, and blind kid" evolved into one of the longest-touring musicals in history and one of the biggest hit singles, "Pinball Wizard." Most would agree that it's more of a song cycle than an true opera, but concept albums, at their best, are also song cycles.
Willie Nelson Changed Concept Albums Forever with His 1975 Classic
Whereas most earlier concept albums had themes borne out in their song lists, Nelson put a dramatic narrative into Red-Headed Stranger that was different from anything that had been done before. Instead of just songs related by a theme, Red-Headed Stranger wove a story of tragic betrayal in love which developed quite a cult following, especially when it was made into a movie in 1986, starring Willie Nelson and Morgan Fairchild.
Willie got one of his biggest hit songs out of it, too: Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,
2010 Concept Albums by Women Break New Ground in Story Cycles
Female singers/composers of concept albums go deeply into their own stories, if Mary Gathier's The Foundling and Natalie Merchant's Leave Your Sleep are any indication.
According to Mary Gauthier's artist notes about her new album, the heart-wrenching story of "Mama Here, Mama Gone" was directly inspired by Willie Nelson's narrative of a preacher who kills his cheating wife.
Natallie Merchant's new concept album, which is accompanied by a 40-page book of notes, had to be a double CD from the sheer volume of ground it covers.
According to Merchant, it was five years in the making, based on staggering amounts of research behind the favorite songs, poems and stories of Merchant's six-year-old daughter.
The song sources range from Christina Rossetti to Ogden Nash. Beth Kephart calls it "Art born of a mother's love."
Just as male songwriters from Woody Guthrie to Johnny Cash to Pete Townsend to Willie Nelson have sought to record the stories that haunt them, from dust bowl to faith healing to murder, female songwriters use their concept albums to weave tales of motherhood, lost and found.
This is only a small sampling of concept albums over the years. There are also punk rock and heavy metal concept albums that should not be listened to by the over-50 grandmotherly crowd, hence they are not included here,
For more information on the sedate samplings here, see amazon.com reviews for each artist and album.
