Goldmine COUNTRY & WESTERN Record Price Guide (2nd Edition) I was hoping that this long awaited new book would fill up some of the gaps in previous similar works, or at least that it could be a new interesting tool for better investigating the "big sea" of country music recordings. I've always bought Price Guides primarily for their amount of information on old recordings, useful for oldies fans and collectors too. Well, although I knew by experience that compiling a thorough conprehensive records guide avoiding at the same time any mistake is a very difficult(if not impossible) task, I could have never imagined that I would find such an inaccurate work, at least for what concerns the LPs part. As Mr. Neely says in his introduction, 75% of this new edition is dedicated to 45s(and this is good), but why should he neglect so badly the LPs section? It took me less than 30 minutes to find out, for instance, that Dave Dudley's listed LPs are only the Mercury cuts, and that there's no mention at all of the United Artists recordings.,Sun,? , furthermore: Johnny Dollar has only a Date LP listed; what about the others on Chart ?, Johnny Bond's Lamb and Lion LP is not included, Don Bowman's LPs list does not include "Support Your Local Prison", "Wispering Country", "The All New D.B."(?), Owen Bradley is entitled to a long list while Harold Bradley is totally ignored (!?), Jethro Burns, Jenks "Tex" Carman, Thumb Carllile, Fred Carter Jr.,etc. have no LPs on the list while other significant singers (dozens) have an LP dicography clearly uncomplete, ?.The famous "Red and Ernie" duet LP by Red Foley and Ernest Tubb is impossible to find under both Foley or Tubb. And this are only a few example.
I really can't understand why Mr.Neely came up with such a poor work. Yet he was responsible for previous good ones such as the Goldmine STANDARD CATALOG OF AMERICAN RECORDS, etc. One could guess he didn't pay much attention on how F.Heggeness had conceived his previous(and controversial) COUNTRY & WESTERN PRICE GUIDE from which this second one has originated. Mr. Heggeness started in late 80s publishing a CD/Record Price Guide titled RAREST OF THE RARE which listed only recordings of a certain value. In 1990 he published the RAREST OF THE RARE version for Country & Western fans/collectors. There, only the most rare and valuable recordings were listed. Later on, in 1996, he published a new big volume: GOLDMINE COUNTRY WESTERN RECORD & CD PRICE GUIDE which was nothing more than an expanded version of his previous work and included many more recordings(78,45,LP,promos,...). Even though he was still focusing on the most valuable releases, he didn't forget to mention all others by listing (only under the artist's name) at least the labels on which they were issued, with their approximate prices. So has maybe Neely ,in his most recent book, considered only the full LP listing data from the previous Heggenes guide and forgotten the rest ??? It seems absurd anyway. But then, if it works for Dudley 's discography, certainly it doesn't (for example) for Pete Drake's whose LPs full list appeared on the Heggeness guide, while Neely had completly ignored them.
However, though disappointing , yet this new price guide is something any collector should add to his library for the updated information it contains as well as useful extra cross reference tool. For the newcomers it could just be the first step into records collecting research, but only as long as they are fully aware that this work is widely incomplete.