CARL ’Mr. Country’ SMITH (also known as ’The Gentleman Honky-Tonker’) was one of the genre’s most consistent hitmakers of the 1950s, notching up more than thirty Top 10 C&W records.

Although he’d emerged from a Honky-Tonk background, Smith became one of the first Country singers to experiment with a more ’cosmopolitan’ style, which smoothed out a lot of the rougher edges and took him, musically, away from diehard traditional towards the late 50s Nashville Countrypolitan sound.

His chart success continued well into the late 1970s, when he abruptly retired from singing to raise a family and breed horses, on his 500-acre ranch in Franklin, Tennessee.

This compilation, which includes five #1s and more than a dozen further Top 5 records, features all but two of Carl’s Top 10 Country hits between 1951-62 (we had to omit a couple of top tenners, as they simply wouldn’t all fit).