Homer and Jethro were a country duo, real names Henry Haynes and Kenneth Burns, with their musical roots in hillbilly and bluegrass, who worked together on radio in the 1930s and reunited after service in WWII to perform again on radio, developing an act which featured exaggerated hillbilly comedic routines. After signing to RCA in 1949, their producer suggested developing their style by recording parodies of well-known pop and country hits, and they immediately struck a chord with their re-working of composer Frank Loesser’s “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”. Over the next dozen years or so they remained consistently popular on radio and TV with this approach, and focused much of their recorded output in this direction. This great-value 58-track 2-CD set brings together selected A & B sides of their releases on RCA from this era, mostly comprising their trademark parody and comic performances. It features all their country and pop chart entries on RCA from these years, including the Top 10 hits “Baby It’s Cold Outside” and “How Much Is That Hound Dog In The Window”, and the Top 20 hits “Hernando’s Hideaway” and “The Battle Of Kookamunga”. They represented a highly individual and idiosyncratic strand of country music, cornering the market as just about the only practitioners of this particular art, and this collection offers a showcase not only for their unusual material but also for their finely-honed skills as instrumentalists and harmony vocalists.
