Lorrie Morgan

Lorrie Morgan performing live.

After 30 years of going into the studio to record music, veteran country star Lorrie Morgan decided to take on a challenge she had never attempted. She and the session musicians would sing and play live with no vocal or musical overdubs. That means no tinkering with an individual's part once it's been laid down.

"I was nervous at first," Morgan reflects. "Oh, my God! I put a lot on myself. Did I mean to do this? it was exhilarating for me. It was a high—I love a challenge. Anything that is a challenge I'm going to take it. When the music came in and the strings came in and voices were there, it was like we were all in this huge room together. Nobody was in a booth. The microphone was in the middle of the room. It was like a band. "

In two days Morgan and the musicians recorded 14 songs for her CD of country classics, A Moment in Time (on Country Crossing Records), which was released in late October (2009).

"I didn't want to do the album originally, because it seemed like everybody and their brother was doing cover songs," Morgan said. “Let's do a country album and let's sing ‘Help me Make it Through the Night,’ and I was concerned that my album was just going to get lost in the shuffle."

However, her attitude changed when she and her producer, Wally Wilson, thought about recording the album the old-fashioned way, a method Lorrie says she used to observe back in the golden days of Nashville's music scene.

"We brought in Harold Bradley and Jimmy Capps and some of these guys that were on some of the original records," Morgan said. "They said they hadn't been this excited in the studio in a long time because this is how they used to cut.  It was boom, boom, boom, and you learn the song right then and you were done and moved to the next song. It wasn't so technical. You weren't taking the heart and the soul out of the song, cutting it and cutting it, that you sliced it up so bad it was gone."

Although these sessions were wrapped up within 48 hours, Morgan said overall  it took a couple of years to do the project, including the excruciating choice of which classic selections to record in the first place.

"It was very hard to decide what we wanted to do," Morgan remembers. "These are some of the songs that made me want to fall in love with music and want to do music for my life. We listened to thousands of songs. It was like 'okay, you have to narrow this down to 14 - I don't think so.'  I want to do them all. One would be twin fiddles and the next one would be lushy strings. I love them all. I finally narrowed it down to about 25. I said to my producer Wally, you pick the final 14."

Lorrie Morgan

Making the final cut were masterful songs like "Are You Lonesome Tonight" that Elvis Presley took to the top of the pop charts in 1961, Patsy Cline's 1963 smash "Leavin' on Your Mind," "Break It to Me Gently" (recorded by both Brenda Lee and Juice Newton), "Borrowed Angel" and "Lovin' on Back Streets" (recorded by Mel Street), and Glen Campbell's classic hit, "By the Time I Get to Phoenix."

Morgan and Mavericks former frontman Raul Malo did their own spin of Freddie Hart's 1971 chart-topper, "Easy Loving," and Morgan also shared the microphone with Tracy Lawrence for "After the Fire Is Gone," which Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn originally recorded.

"I like ‘After The Fire Is Gone’, and Loretta told me about a year ago, she said (in Loretta's voice), 'Darlin', why don't you write some good cheating songs? Nobody's writing or singing them good cheating songs anymore.'  I thought when I heard it, I said, well, by God, there it is. I'm just going to re-cut hers," Morgan adds with a laugh.

Morgan also had to do "I'm Always on a Mountain When I Fall." "This is my favorite Merle Haggard song, and I think it's because I'm always on that damn mountain when I fall," Morgan recalls. "There's no small fall for me. There's no scraping my knee. I'm falling off that mountain and really messing myself up. It's kind of like my anthem."

Morgan also re-cut "All Right (I'll Sign the Papers)" that her father, the late Grand Ole Opry legend and Hall of Fame member George Morgan, recorded 45 years ago. The song's writer, Mel Tillis, did his own version of the song four years later in 1968.

Many of the songs on the new album are the standards that Morgan cut her teeth on during her days in the clubs and growing up at the Opry.  Over time, Morgan began developing her own repertoire of hits like "Five Minutes," "A Picture of Me (Without You)," "I Didn't Know My Own Strength," "Dear Me," and "Out of Your Shoes." So, the CMA award-winning singer had less and less time to squeeze in the other classics into her show. With this project, she' s introducing them on tour at her shows to a new generation.

"This is a song that probably some of you have never heard, but maybe, after tonight, it'll be one of your classic favorites," Morgan tells her audiences. " I think just reintroducing some of our great country songs and the way we used to record, that it will excite some of these newer acts too, to get back to the basics of how we used to record them. You'd send [your single] to radio, and you didn't have to go out and beg somebody to play them. They wanted to play them because they were great songs. Hopefully, we're going to move people--not just me but a few of us who are recording this way now--show some people how it's really done and how it was meant to be."

Performing On Broadway Next Year

Besides her new album and tours, Morgan is planning to leave her comfort zone again when she moves to New York City next year to perform the musical Pure Country on Broadway. This time she's reviving the character that Lesley Ann Warren made famous in the film. Morgan will take on the role of Lula, a tough-as-nails manager, to Rusty, the George Strait-like character that hit country artist Joe Nichols will strap on.

" I'm going to love this role, because it's going to bring out the evil side of me," Morgan said with a laugh. "I'm going to get a lot out on stage. She is a toughie, and I can't wait to incorporate a lot of managers I've known and put all their little bad parts altogether and make up Lesley Ann Warren's character, Lula."

Morgan said she has been offered roles on Broadway a couple of times before but didn't accept them because her children were too young. She moves to New York in March for about a year.

"I'm not nervous because I don't think I can do the part," Morgan said. "I'm nervous because it's a change in my environment. I'm moving to New York. My kids said they'd come and be with me some and of course, so will my boyfriend. But Nashville is my home, and this is my safety net. This is my four walls. I'm going to New York to a big room and I'm taking my two dogs with me."

"My dad always told me if you're not a little bit nervous before you go on stage, you've lost your love for what you're doing, and I believe that with all my heart," she adds. "Once I'm on stage I'm okay, but before I go on in the wings, do not talk to me. I can't hear you. I don't want to hear what you're saying, but once I get out there I'm fine."