In my quest to review the top country singles from this week in years past, I realize I've neglected the seventies. Part of the problem lies with the limitations of available data. It seems the charts (the only historical charts I've found) only date back to 1975. Thus, as in previous posts, I will be reviewing the top ten singles as if I've never heard them before. As always, there are some I've never heard before or don't remember, so they will truly be new to me.
Given the fact that these singles are forty-seven years old, actual performance videos will be hit or miss.
Let's find out if today's hit are truly the worst ever created, by comparing them to yesterday's.
#10 ~ City Lights ~ Mickey Gilley
It's a bit unfair to throw a classic song into the mix. Obviously I've heard it before -- by a better singer. Staying objective is impossible when one is familiar with the original. I will say that, for Mickey Gilley the arrangement is fitting, highlighting his honky tonk piano. I'm not a fan of the female background singers. Clearly this is a solid song, written by Bill Anderson. It seems, however, that the singer could have given it the reverence it deserves.
MY RATING: B
#9 ~ Great Expectations ~ Buck Owens
Well, the first line is just ick. It immediately colors my impression of the song. That aside, the lyrics are pedestrian and the melody is overly familiar. I predict this track will be quickly forgotten, obscured by actual good songs recorded by Owens. This seems like more of a deep album cut than a single released to radio.
MY RATING: C-
#8 ~ I Can't Help It (If I'm Still In Love With You) ~ Linda Ronstadt
This is one of those instances in which a classic song can be improved upon. Obviously this is a Hank Williams hit, but I prefer this more updated sound. Ronstadt is a superb singer and she stays true to the country vibe. Great performance, nice harmonies from Emmylou, lovely steel guitar. I only deducted a half letter grade because this is a remake.
MY RATING: A-
#7 ~ Wrong Road Again ~ Crystal Gayle
I like the chorus. Allen Reynolds wrote this song, among many, many other hits. He was also Crystal's producer. The song is solid, the singer's voice still exudes country, without the machinations that will plague her later tracks. Props to the unencumbered arrangement.
MY RATING: B+
#6 ~ The Ties That Bind ~ Don Williams
While this song is not bad, there's something about it that's hard to get hold of. The verse has an elusive melody. This might simply be the way Williams chose to sing it or the simple acoustic arrangement. A drum beat might have helped. I would like the track more if it wasn't so frustrating. That's the drawback of acoustic songs. They allow for a bit too much introspection -- nice for the singer; annoying to the listener.
MY RATING: C
#5 ~ Rainy Day Woman ~ Waylon Jennings
Well. This is destined to be a Jennings classic. He has redefined country to his liking. Ralph Mooney is playing those classic Wynn Stewart steel licks, and the zydeco accordion is a nice touch. Waylon is one of the few artists of any genre who has a presence. He can't be ignored. Solid, classic track, written by the man himself.
MY GRADE: A
#4 ~ I Care ~ Tom T. Hall
What's worse than a recitation? A half recitation. Granted, this is a children's song, which leads me to wonder how it made the country charts, which are not normally determined by children. I forced myself to listen to the entire track, since those are the rules I've imposed. It was, however, nerve-grating. Now I'm a mom, so I know that if I'd ever played this for my kids, they would have retched into the toilet, then wandered away to pursue more mature interests. There's nothing worse than pandering to kids.
MY RATING: D-
#3 ~ It's Time To Pay The Fiddler ~ Cal Smith
Does this have the exact same melody as Country Bumpkin? I guess Cal is very attached to this particular chord progression. I like the singer, but Country Bumpkin has, at least, a more compelling story. This is, honestly, a country song any novice songwriter could pen. Cal can do better.
MY RATING: C-
#2 ~ Devil In The Bottle ~ T.G. Sheppard
There's something about T.G. Sheppard that's kind of insidious. Songs I really shouldn't like (because they're not great songs) I find myself liking. I give the artist credit for mostly choosing compelling songs to record. No, I wouldn't purchase this single, but it's not something I would turn off if it streamed out of my car's speakers. What is the mark of a good song? My theory (as a failed songwriter) is -- a memorable chorus. Other sins can be forgiven. Sheppard doesn't have the country cred that Waylon has, but he's actually pretty good.
MY RATING: B
#1 ~ Then Who Am I ~ Charley Pride
When one records scores of songs, it's inevitable that they all won't be winners. It's not that this song is bad; it's simply forgettable. I've certainly forgotten it. I just played it and it's already erased from my memory. The late great Dallas Frazier and A.L. "Doodle" Owens co-wrote it, but again, they all can't be winners. I would like to give this a better rating, because I don't want to be harsh, but I can't in good conscience elevate it. Thus ~
MY RATING: C-
It's impossible to recognize a classic song in real time. This particular chart wasn't the most brutal, but it was close. However, we found a Waylon track that will be with us forever.
The first time I saw Dallas Frazier's name was in the liner notes of Connie Smith's "The Best Of Connie Smith" album in 1967.
Thereafter, his name kept popping up, like on this one:
Before long his name was everywhere. As one who was coming to country music as a neophyte, I paid attention to "important" names. It seemed this Dallas Frazier guy was important.
So, I met Dallas Frazier via Connie Smith.
Frazier started out as a prodigy vocalist, at age fourteen, then went on to write novelty songs like Alley Oop, recorded by the Hollywood Argyles in 1957. It wasn't until he moved to Nashville that his songwriting career took off -- and boy, did it. Different songwriters dominated the country scene depending upon the era. In the late fifties/early sixties it was Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard. By the mid-sixties/early seventies Dallas Frazier assumed the mantle.
A few examples:
(rendered by the songwriter himself)
Naturally, this is the song that is Dallas Frazier's claim to fame:
(Oh, you like it; admit it.)
I readily admit I don't know every single song Dallas Frazier ever wrote. But this one is probably my favorite:
(sorry, no decent live performance to be found)
In 1976 Dallas Frazier retired from the music business and became an ordained minister, which is sublimely cool. As poetic as his written words were, I bet he gave a helluva sermon.
Dallas Frazier passed away on January 14, 2022, and the country angels cried. I'm sure he saved some souls along the way, whether through his preaching or via my preferred way ~ a crisp, succinct musical message.
I was a newly-minted convert to country music in 1967. Admittedly I had tons of catching up to do, but instead of looking back, I was keen to discover country for myself. Country was uncharted territory for me, and if I was going to embrace it, it had to be on my own terms.
'67 was an odd time to embrace country music. My FM station was in love with Glen Campbell, who wasn't exactly country; but night after night, the disc jockey played Campbell and deep Willie Nelson tracks. Clearly the DJ hated country and was simply trying to make the best of his bad situation until he could move on down the road to something more hip. He exclusively played two albums, rightfully assuming no one was listening anyway. In my tiny tomb of a bedroom the only signal that reached me was the FM channel, and I heard enough of "Me And Paul" to last a lifetime. My country mentor, my friend Alice, patiently steered me away from FM. Country music -- real country -- was exploding on AM radio. A new girl singer named Tammy had a sad track called, "I Don't Wanna Play House"; Connie Smith was singing about Cincinnati, Ohio. A country teenager's swoon, Merle Haggard, had three songs in the top ten. And some new guy who spelled his first name oddly, Charley Pride, was busting the country airwaves. His voice sounded like it belonged to an older guy, yet he was brand new. And he had a killer song:
Alice and I knew nothing about this new artist, except that we liked his songs. The internet was decades away from being invented -- all we had was radio and, to a lesser extent, the three broadcast networks who rarely deigned to showcase country music. When I heard "The Easy Part's Over", I pictured a grizzled cowpoke who'd finally muscled his way onto country radio.
I don't remember who heard it first -- Alice or me -- but one day the local DJ casually mentioned that Charley Pride was a Black artist. What? In country? Had he accidentally stumbled into a Nashville recording studio where George Jones was crooning into the mic in an open-collared shirt and a tumbler of whiskey gripped in his hand, and the producer spied Charley lingering awkwardly and thought, hey, this might be interesting?
No.
Charley Pride had grown up on country and it had seeped inside his bones. He'd listened to the Opry on Saturday nights on his crank-up radio in Sledge, Mississippi, and he was in love with it. And he sang the way he sang.
Rain drippin' off the brim of my hat
Sure feels cold today
Chet Atkins, creator of the notorious "Nashville Sound", produced Charley's first singles. "Just Between You And Me" was the first one that charted, and it was not only a great song but a great track. Atkins managed to tone down his beloved strings and background singers and emphasize the elements that made a country single "country". Alice and I liked great recordings; we had no checklist of required artist attributes. I was partial to the Bakersfield Sound, but I could get on board with Hillbilly, too.
One of the first two LP's I bought as a twelve-year-old was this one:
(I still have it, by the way.)
I was just sifting through my dusty record albums the other day and I discovered that I bought a lot of Charley Pride's albums -- seven, in fact. It's impossible to underestimate the impact he had on country music in the late sixties/early seventies. There was a handful of country superstars -- Merle, possibly George Jones, Loretta Lynn -- and then there was the second tier. Charley was a superstar.
I've written before about the momentous event in my young life when Merle Haggard and his retinue checked into my parents' motel. Alice and I had long before purchased tickets for his live show, but to actually see the man in the flesh (walking his dog!) was earth-shattering. One of the opening acts that night just happened to be Charley Pride. Alice and I already had the inside scoop, but most of the audience was taken aback when a Black man appeared on stage. He made a couple of jokes about having a "permanent tan" and "probably not what you expected", but the fans lapped up his performance and his joy.
And, yes, I got his autograph (still have that, too).
By the mid-seventies Charley's star had begun to fade. Unless you're George Strait, your country shelf life is about ten years, if you're lucky. Charley had taken to recording covers of recent pop hits and I was slowly abandoning country. So he and I finally parted ways.
Oh, did I forget? I didn't, actually, but this was not one of my favorite Pride tracks, even though it was by far the recording that shot him into the stratosphere:
In retrospect and sentimentality, I kind of begrudgingly like it now.
Don't ever (ever!) forget the impact Charley Pride had on country music. He was a glowing orb that other artists of his time only wished they could be.
Charley lived a long and happy life and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000 (Really? It took that long?)
Charley Pride passed away on December 12, 2020 at the age of 86 from complications of COVID-19 (Thanks, China) shortly after he was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the CMA's. A big chunk of my childhood went along with him.
Kids are very durable. Flexible ~ sort of like Gumby. The first time a bad thing happens, they freak out, but freaking out night after night is exhausting; so intuition eventually kicks in. It's amazing what a kid can disregard while remaining keenly attuned to her surroundings. It becomes a way of life. I'm not certain that my sense of hearing is sharper than most people's, but it's damn good. It's all those years of practice. Inevitably, bad things would happen at night, because that's when a drunk manages to stumble home. Night is when the screaming brawls occur.
There was a time in my life when I could fall asleep easily. That ended around age eleven and I've been cursed with insomnia ever since. Every little floor creak, even with foam plugs shoved inside my ears, startles me. It's the "fight or flight" phenomenon. My dad was a falling-down, albeit happy drunk, while my mom was enraged, spewing sailor's epithets, her fingernails clawing his face. At ten o'clock at night, with an early morning bus to catch,
I essentially ignored the rows and tried to fall back asleep like my younger brother and sister had done quite effortlessly on the bottom bunk. Still, I had to be on guard for that moment when my mom would scream, "Call the sheriff!" and I would have to slide down from my second-story tower and stumble to the telephone and lie that my dad was assaulting my mother, when in fact, he was deliriously content on his makeshift bed on the shag carpet, and she was the one who was dangerously homicidal.
This new reality began right at the time I'd been uprooted from the only home I'd ever known and plopped down in the middle of the parched prairie with no friends and no lifelines ~ because life would be "better" here.
My pop singles soothed me for a time. If I cranked up the volume enough, I could almost drown out the screaming. Then a completely unexpected thing happened ~ I made a friend. When kids meet other kids, the primary topic of conversation (at least then) was music. "Who do you like?" "What's your favorite record?" I expected to hear The Beatles or at the very least The Monkees, but Alice said, "I like country music." Well, this was an unanticipated response. Country music? My parents owned a Ray Price album and a Buck Owens album. I also knew who Bobby Bare was. That, in a nutshell, was my encyclopedic knowledge of country.
Becoming friends with Alice was like jetting across the ocean to a foreign country for the first time. I had to forget everything I'd ever known and take a crash course in Esperanto, otherwise known as twang. I sat cross-legged on the floor of her living room while she spun records by people I'd never heard of once in my life. Granted, she had some very obscure tastes, like Carl Butler and Pearl (as they were booked) and Porter Wagoner, who wasn't at all good until he teamed up with a blonde bee-hived little girl singer.
The most revelatory artist Alice introduced me to was named Merle Haggard, who was brand-spankin' new on the scene, but definitely had a certain something I could get on board with. This Haggard guy's recordings were heavy on Telecaster, bass, and crying steel. His music reminded me a bit of my parents' Buck Owens albums, only with far superior singing and heart-searing harmonies. This was someone I could claim as my own and stamp myself a country fan. Thank God. Because I was worried I wouldn't like anybody and then I'd lose my new friend as quickly as I'd found her (or, more accurately, as she'd found me).
Adaptability is innate. Once you discover something, then you discover other somethings. The first thing I discovered without Alice's help was Waylon Jennings.
There was a new guy who was being played on the radio (I'd since switched my allegiance from KFYR to KBMR) and both Alice and I liked this song. Later we heard rumors about him that couldn't possibly be true, because he was stone country:
As for female singers, there were a few, but she was the ultimate:
Although this new gal was pretty good:
Yep, I'd become immersed. And it didn't take long. Eventually I saved up my pennies and bought that red acoustic guitar in the window at Dahmer's Music and Alice came over and taught me how to form chords. Now I could play along with my favorite Haggard and Pride songs.
I became even better at drowning out the scuffles happening outside my bedroom door. I'd found a reason to soldier on.
Country music turned into everything for me. Until it wasn't. Until it disappointed me.
I was thirteen in 1968, so you do the math. I was at that desperately awkward stage ~ I'd somehow managed to slither through seventh grade with only a moderate amount of embarrassment, but it was a struggle. Thirteen-year-olds are like alien beings who must learn how to simulate the movements of a human without an instruction manual. It's a wonder most of us survive past our first decade of life.
I bought multiple tubes of Maybelline concealer in an attempt to mask my zits. To complete my look, I slathered green eye shadow on my lids and liberally applied Cover Girl ivory-tone liquid makeup not only to my face, but my neck as well, so I had perpetual grease stains on the collars of all my polyester dresses. I thought I looked neat.
I pulled on pantyhose each morning and a pair of plastic kitten-heel pumps. I hiked up my half-slip to ensure it didn't peek below my thigh-high skirt. My hair was a disaster. I hadn't yet grown it out and thus was yet to endure the nightly torture of brush rollers with plastic pins jabbed into my scalp. I didn't know how to style hair, so I essentially let my mop do whatever it deigned to do. I did have long bangs that unfortunately obscured my carefully-applied lime eye shadow, but had the fortuitous benefit of camouflaging my forehead pimples.
I grabbed my geography and math textbooks and my spiral notebooks and Bic pen and padded out to await the bus. I was never cool and I painfully knew it. All I could pray for was to be was unnoticed. I think I actually prayed for that.
My only savior was music.
Musically, I was still torn between the pop songs played on KFYR AM and the chosen genre of my new best friend, Alice. Alice was unapologetically a country fan and didn't give a damn who knew it. Unlike me. I did my best to cloak my country proclivities by pressing my transistor up against the bus window and flooding the column of cocoa bench seats with Judy In Disguise. I didn't talk to anyone on the bus and certainly no one talked to me, but John Fred and the Playboys conveyed the desired message.
I had dipped my toe into albums in '67 and by 1968 had garnered quite the collection ~ if twenty is a collection. Granted, I had no means of income other than birthday money, and albums cost a whole three dollars and forty-nine cents. But I did my best.
Historically, few of the 1968 albums I owned have made any "best" lists, but you know, it was country. Country albums weren't exactly concept-driven. I feel a need to explain why none of Merle Haggard's '68 LP's made a home in my row of cardboard treasures. I already owned a tri-fold "Best of Merle Haggard" disc that contained all one could wish for, plus I didn't wait for new albums to be released ~ I needed those '45 singles immediately. So if I had a couple of dollars for an album, I wasn't going to waste it on something for which I already owned the prime track.
Critics (and you know how smart they are) will say that "Live At Folsom Prison" by Johnny Cash is one of the very best country albums of all time. Well, I never was a Cash fan. I found his music simplistic and monotonous. Rolling Stone Magazine loves the Johnny Cash mystique; the hell with the actual music. If I never hear Folsom Prison Blues again, my life will be a success.
Here's what I did buy:
How could one go wrong? "Best Of's" were a poor girl's dream. I knew all the songs were good, and as a bonus, the album included "Buckaroo", which was the only song I ever learned how to pick on a guitar.
Okay, this is performed by Marty Stuart and his Fabulous Superlatives, because I can't find a decent video of Don Rich:
Like almost all country albums of that era, this album was filled to the brim with covers. So, I'm just going to go with the big daddy of songs:
This was the second duet album by Porter and Dolly, but not their best. "Porter Wayne and Dolly Rebecca" far outshines it. There was a fascination with this new girl singer in '68 ~ we hadn't seen or heard anyone like her before.
There was not one original song on this album! Not even one hit single. I don't know what the people at RCA records were thinking, but if you're going to release an LP, you might want to have one original song on it. With that in mind, I'm just going to cheat and show a video of one of Pride's actual hits:
I don't think I actually owned this album, but Alice did and we played it at her house over and over. Again, we didn't know what to make of this brash young blonde, but we knew she had something goin' on.
Again, "greatest hits" ~ how can one go wrong? I was always equivocal about Loretta Lynn. She'd been around since I was a tyke and saw her perform at Panther Hall in Fort Worth, Texas. I truthfully still haven't made my mind up about Loretta. I wouldn't go out of my way to play any of her tracks, but she paved the way for other, better female country singers, so...
That about sums up my album purchases from 1968. Not really a "classic" among them, but nobody knows at the time or even gives a damn what will endure.
In 1970 I was fifteen and carving out my own, independent life. Things had been bad at home for about four years, and I was frankly tired of it -- tired of being mired in the constant physical and verbal battles between my mom and dad. Too, by fifteen I'd acquired the best thing that ever happened in my life -- my own room. My mom and dad owned a motel, which was the thing that started our lives on the unremitting slide off a slippery cliff. On the plus side, a motel in the sixties meant a ready supply of unoccupied rooms; a fact that I seized upon in order to whine and cajole my mom into finally giving in and agreeing to let me move out of the closet-sized room I shared with my little brother and sister and the bunk bed shoved up against the wall, and into Room Number One, which was a bit further than hollering distance away from our tiny "living quarters" behind the sliding door of the motel office.
My new living arrangements were sublime. I didn't eat, so I was able to avoid family dinners, if we actually had them. What I actually remember is my brother and sister being fed once we'd arrived home from school and my mom grazing throughout the evening. Dad wasn't around. He was busy working on his hobby -- getting drunk out of his skull and passing out anywhere he could find a safe place to land.
I had a best friend and hobbies of my own -- music! And smoking. I'd learned how to chord on a guitar a few years before and by now I was pretty proficient at the basics -- A, D, G, E, and sometimes B (if needed). The callouses on my fingertips were well-developed. If there was such a thing as tuners back then, I was unaware of them. I'd bought a '45 record Buck Owens had issued (I think with one of his songbooks), "How To Tune Your Guitar". That record was my "guitar tuner". I locked myself behind the locked and chained door of my room and listened to country records and strummed along with them...and sang. Nobody could hear me anyway, so what the heck? I became pretty good at singing harmony, as long as I had the record to prompt me.
I'd latched onto country music because Alice (my best friend) was a die-hard country fan who was also the featured vocalist in a local country band. By 1970 rock was a faint memory and I knew all the top country artists and had developed my own tastes, rather than simply mimicking what Alice liked. I'd discovered all-night country radio, WHO in Des Moines, Iowa, with DJ Mike Hoyer. WHO had the strongest signal. I loved Bill Mack from WBAP, too, but a Fort Worth signal was only audible in the wee small hours. Ralph Emery? Forget it. The night had to be crystal clear and the moon full before I could ever get WSM to be more than a crackle on my radio. Mike Hoyer was my guy. He also played full albums, around two in the morning. (Yea, in the summer, I stayed up and waited for them).
In 1970 we country fans were still worshiping the old guard. It would take about three years before new acts would arrive on the scene and take over. Country music moved at a slow pace.
Don't get me wrong; the old guard was excellent -- Merle, Ray Price,Tammy, Marty. If one was to name the greatest country artists of all time, these four would make the top five...or at least top ten. Merle was hitting his stride in 1970, becoming recognized as a musical phenomenon. If one were to scan his career, however, Merle's best recordings came before '70. The same with Ray and Tammy and Marty Robbins. They were all "mid-career" by that time. But there were other artists, too.
David Houston first hit it big with a song that in 1967 made me cringe. I was twelve and at that awkward stage at which my dad had the car radio tuned to country music and I was held hostage if I ever needed him to traverse me anywhere. David Houston sang about being "almost persuaded" and I knew it was kind of dirty, but I wasn't sure why. Hearing a song about s-e-x at age twelve with your dad in the car is the ultimate nightmare. Nevertheless, David Houston went on to record several tracks that became hits, and by fifteen, I was okay with the story lines.
David Houston lived a short life. He suffered an aneurysm in 1993 and passed away. He was a huge star in the late sixties/early seventies, an artist who would have continued to carry on.
Here is his 1970 hit (very few live performance videos exist of David, mainly those in which he performed duets with Barbara Mandrell, so appreciate this for its music):
And then, of course, there was Merle:
My memories of Ray Price will always be tied up with my dad. There was a time when my dad was my hero, back before the "bad things" happened. Childhood memories are like a hand print on one's brain. They're stamped there for perpetuity. "My" Ray Price was a singer of three-part harmony songs and twin fiddles. The Ray of 1970 was a sort of a betrayal.
I didn't like this song. I do now. I like it "sort of". It's a Kris Kristofferson song. Kris Kristofferson, at one time, was the most prodigious songwriter in country music. He's no Merle, but he's different. Kris said things that nobody else said in quite the same way. If I was to emulate anyone, as an amateur songwriter, Kris would be the one.
For The Good Times:
Charley Pride is an artist who appeared seemingly out of nowhere. I first became aware of him in 1967 (?) with "Just Between You and Me", which is one of the most excellent country songs ever written. He was just a guy on the radio who sang good songs. By the time Alice and I attended the immortal Merle Haggard concert in 1968, we'd learned that Charley was Black, so we weren't shell shocked when he took the stage as Merle's opening act. Granted, it was odd for a Black man to sing country music, but if he was country, we were okay with that.
By 1970 we'd settled into a state of comfort with Charley. The production values on his recordings could have used some improvement, but he was still recording good songs:
Johnny Cash had a network TV show on ABC, and Alice and I watched it with religious fervor. I wasn't even a Johnny Cash fan. I was more fascinated by the Statlers. who sang harmony and by Carl Perkins who, by then, was relegated to a backup player in Cash's band. The most memorable thing I remember from Johnny's show was a song called, "I Was There" that featured the Carter Sisters and the Statler Brothers; a gospel song that those in the know label "call and response".
"Sunday Morning Coming Down" was yet another Kristofferson song. I was in my second year of Spanish, so I actually translated this song into the Spanish language as an exercise. I can't listen to this song without hearing, "no fue mal".
I love Marty Robbins. The first concert I ever attended, when I was five, was a Marty Robbins concert. My mom took me. I have no recollection of how that came to be. I didn't even know my mom liked music. I'm guessing the concert venue was the Grand Forks Armory. I have a vague memory, like a dream, of Marty strumming a teeny guitar. That's all I remember, except for after the show, when Mom tried to cajole me to go up and get Marty's autograph. I was mortified at the prospect and I flatly refused. I note that she didn't get an autograph, either.
I got the opportunity to see Marty again, sometime around 1980, this time in Duluth, Minnesota. We were on vacation, with -- what do you know? -- Mom and Dad. I also had two tiny boys by that time. Not as tiny as the guitar Marty liked to play, however. By then, I wouldn't have been too embarrassed to get Marty's autograph. I would have been sort of embarrassed, but I still would have done it, had we not been perched in the nosebleed section of the auditorium. By the time all of us made our way down to the floor, Marty was no doubt back on the bus, zooming down I35 on his way to the next stop on his tour schedule.
Marty Robbins was a helluva entertainer. I, as a rule, don't like a lot of goofing around by the artist I've paid dollars to see. But Marty was funny. Not in a "canned jokes" kind of way, but in the way he interacted with his audience. He was one of the few artists I've seen (and I've seen many) who seemed to actually enjoy performing. Most of those I've seen treat a live performance like a paycheck they're begrudgingly obliged to dance for. (Randy Travis is an exception to that rule.)
This is, by far, not one of my favorite Marty Robbins songs, but heck...it's Marty:
On the other hand, there are a handful of artists I never connected with. I never could quite figure out Conway Twitty. The blue-haired ladies loved Conway. Of course, they also loved Elvis. Maybe when I'm eighty I will grow an appreciation for Conway Twitty. I'm keeping an open mind. I can't put my finger on what it was -- he did have some good songs. And his early recordings with Loretta Lynn were damn good.
I attended a concert in my hometown around 1992 - 1993. It was a three-fer: Vince Gill was the main act, for me at least. Also on the bill was George Jones. And then there was Conway. I'd seen George Jones and Tammy Wynette in 1968 when they were still flirting and hadn't yet left their respective spouses. Strangely, Tammy's then-husband played backup for her on that show. Well, it was country music...
So, after Vince did his set and George did his, I decided it was time to leave. I didn't stay to see Conway. Shortly thereafter, Conway died. I kind of regretted I hadn't hung around long enough to see him perform. I felt a tiny bit guilty, disrespectful.
Conway (nee Harold Jenkins) had his biggest, bestest, hit in 1970. This song defined his career:
Speaking of career-defining songs, I guess 1970 was the year for that. I could recount my attendance at a Loretta Lynn concert...okay, I will.
I was, I will guess, nine years old. My sister was getting married. She'd moved to Fort Worth, Texas, to be near her fiance, who was a Texan. Dad, Mom, my little brother and little sister and I had taken the long car trip from Minnesota to Texas in our trusty Ford Galaxie, the car Dad was so proud of. Amidst all the wedding festivities, we all attended a concert at Panther Hall. Panther Hall was distinctly Texan. Long, long dining tables, where one was seated next to complete strangers. The entree was steak. Just steak. One did not get a choice in the matter. It was steak. Waiters hovered about. Our waiter asked me what kind of dressing I wanted on my salad, and I said, "none". "No salad?" he asked. "No, no dressing.". Yes, I ate my lettuce plain. I did not like foods then. I might have liked toast.
Panther Hall was "dry", or something. One had to bring in their own booze. The waiters would serve "mix", and patrons would mix their own drinks with the whiskey they'd brought in with them.
The featured act was Loretta Lynn and her band. I hazily remember hearing, "You Ain't Woman Enough", but I frankly was too focused on my lettuce to pay much attention. Somebody in our party went up after the concert and got Loretta's autograph. I remarked, upon spying the signed photo that it looked like it said, "Buffalo Lynn". Loretta apparently did not have good handwriting.
In 1970 Loretta released her autobiographical single. I had some issues with the song, such as how she sang "borned" instead of "born". Additionally, the song was rather tedious. It was essentially a recitation of everything that had happened to her in her life, with no chorus. Also, she sang that at night they'd sleep cuz they were "tarred". Regardless, eventually a movie was made of the song and the book that followed, which began my longstanding infatuation with Tommy Lee Jones.
Coal Miner's Daughter:
These songs were not number one hits, but they bear mentioning, because, well, I like these guys...
Jerry Lee Lewis:
Buck Owens and Susan Raye:
Sorry, no live video, but I really, really liked this song...
Del Reeves and Penny DeHaven:
Here's David Houston with Barbara Mandrell, before Barbara became the precursor to Reba McEntire in the desperate claw to become relevant in the world of pop. Barbara Mandrell was so cute then. I wanted to be her:
No one should doubt how iconic and influential this duo was in the late sixties/early seventies. They were the golden fleece all duos yearned to snatch.
Porter and Dolly:
The first time I heard this next song on the radio, on a staticky signal out of Iowa, I fell in love. It was the perfect country song, sung by the best country singer in the world. I didn't know Tom T. Hall had written it, and I was surprised. Tom T. was the Harper Valley PTA guy, the guy who never felt a chorus was necessary to a song. I really, really loved Faron Young, but he was a troubled soul. I talked my dad into driving us up to the State Fair to see Faron in person, and I felt ashamed I'd forced him to make the trip. Faron was possibly drunk; or if not drunk, simply a bad performer. The concert was disillusioning. I didn't know then that Faron had problems and that it took him a while to get a good recording. I only knew the records themselves. I still love him, though. I don't care how many takes he had to do to get it right. I only care that I am in love with Faron's songs.
Sorry (or maybe not sorry) that there is no live performance video of this track:
This post has gone on forever, and it could go on for miles more, because 1970 is perpetually stamped on my brain.
I will end with this....
Lynn Anderson showed up on my adolescent radar by way of Lawrence Welk. My folks watched that ABC show religiously. I was beguiled by Lawrence's accordion player, who I thought was in the navy, because the V that crossed his chest looked like a navy uniform. I hadn't yet begun my accordion lessons, so I apparently thought Myron Floren somehow balanced that behemoth instrument between his hands; an unsuspecting strongman. (Yup, the V was the accordion straps, I, a short while later learned.)
Lynn was from North Dakota -- Grand Forks, to be exact -- just like me! In truth, she was born in North Dakota, but raised in California. However, that minuscule connection convinced Lawrence to hire her for his show. Lynn possessed the sweet voice of an angel. Truly. I loved Lynn's voice. Unlike the country fan latecomers, I knew Lynn Anderson before she moved to Columbia, when she was but a wannabe star contracted to Chart Records.
To me, the move to Columbia spelled the downfall of her career, but of course, others would say, what in the world are you talking about? She had her biggest, career-defining hit at Columbia!
Yea, she did; that's true. But tell me; how many times are you willing to listen to this song?
Nevertheless, it was the giant song of 1970. Thank you, Joe South. I guess.
Lynn Anderson:
I'm guessing this has been the longest post I've ever written. I have lots to share about 1970. It was kind of a watershed year for me in many ways; ways I don't necessarily like to recall.
I gave the year short shrift, though. It was pretty awesome -- at least in the annals of country music.
From the age of thirteen, when I took the deep dive into country music; which, honestly, I never would have done if not for my new best friend, I faced the quizzical, derisive expressions of anyone who ever asked me what kind of music I listened to -- if I chose to respond honestly. The truth was, I was kind of embarrassed, too. If I replied "country", the other person would say, "You mean like 'Folsom Prison Blues'?" Okay, yea, "Folsom Prison Blues", because that's the only country song the other person had ever heard of. Truthfully, I never liked that song. More truthfully, I never liked Johnny Cash, except for "I Still Miss Someone" and "Ring Of Fire". But the general (ignorant) wisdom was that anyone who listened to country music must love the brum brubb-a brum brum of Johnny Cash and his three-piece band. Because country fans were steeped in corn.
Or they'd say, "I really like that song, 'By The Time I Get To Phoenix'." Okay. That's another track on my mental list of songs I never, ever wanted to hear again. That was not country music.
If I'd taken the time to tick off the list of artists I listened to, nobody would have known who they were, so I instead let people think I was a die-hard Johnny Cash fan. Nobody'd ever heard of Merle Haggard, Faron Young, Tammy Wynette, Lynn Anderson, Mel Tillis, Dolly Parton, Ray Price, Charley Pride, or Marty Robbins.
The truth, though I never shared it with anyone, was that I had excellent taste in country music. I understood it was an acquired taste -- shoot, even I had to acquire a taste for it. On first listen, yes, it was corny. The thing about country, though, was that it wasn't the crossover hits that defined it. The crossover hits were watered down to appeal to a wide audience. Thus, they weren't real country. The crossovers were an amalgam of treacly strings combined with a southern accent. The worst of two worlds.
Being a country fan was like being a rock fan in the sixties. You didn't want to claim songs like "Yummy Yummy Yummy" or "I'm Henry VIII, I Am", but they were part of your posse, so if you liked "Strawberry Fields", you were thus tarnished with the stench of "Young Girl" by Gary Puckett and the Union Gap. It came with the territory. It didn't matter how much you protested, if you were a rock fan, you liked "Honey" by Bobby Goldsboro. If you were a country fan...well...you liked "Honey" by Bobby Goldsboro (trust me, nobodyever anywhere liked that song).
I included a pic of Loretta Lynn in this post for a reason. She was (is) a really talented artist and certainly knew how to write hits, but her songs were the epitome of corn. And in them she always wanted to start a fight with someone. Loretta Lynn was another of the country stars, like Johnny Cash, that I didn't bond with.
When I was about eight years old, I went with my parents to see Loretta Lynn at Panther Hall in Fort Worth, Texas. It was an odd scene -- folks had to bring their own booze in with them -- the hall only served "mix" (7-UP or whatever other accompaniment one wanted with their cocktail). Dinner was served at long tables with white tablecloths. Patrons shared a table with approximately thirty strangers. The waiters came by to take our orders -- I probably ordered a hot dog or fish sticks -- if they were on the menu. I remember the waiter asking me what kind of dressing I wanted on my salad and I replied, "none". He asked, "No salad?" and I said, "No, no dressing.". Yes, I ate bare lettuce mingled with carrot slivers and radish slices. I was a pathologically picky eater.
Be that as it may, we saw Loretta Lynn and her band perform, I guess in between the garlic bread and the baked potato. Someone in our party (which consisted of my parents and my sister and brother-in-law) went up and got Loretta's autograph. They brought the signed photo back to the table and I remarked, "It looks like it says 'Buffalo Lynn'." Henceforth, Loretta would always be known as Buffalo Lynn to me.
Later I would discover "Blue Kentucky Girl" and wonder why Loretta never sang more songs like that; songs that were plaintive and not pugilistic.
The pugilistic side was what country fans had to try to (or try not to) explain to rubes who scratched their heads when we admitted that we listened to country music.
So, let's rip off the Band-Aid:
I wonder whatever happened to old Henson Cargill:
I really can't convey the number of times this next song was played on the radio. Somewhere in the dark recesses of the stratosphere, there is a little satellite bouncing around, streaming this track. And little aliens are exclaiming, "If I have to hear this song one more time, I'm going to slit the sinewed tendons that attach my arm to my hand".
I give Bobby Goldsboro a lot of (deserved) grief for his 1968 hit, but really, is it any worse than this?
Well, that's rather a misnomer, isn't it? Life is never simple.
I am of a mind, though, that life would be simpler without so much "stuff" to clutter it up.
I'm not certain, but the evidence tells me that, when I was in my twenties, I pretty much saved everything. That was brought home to me recently when my oldest son delivered about six or seven boxes of junk, once belonging to me, that he had been storing in his garage. Yes, junk.
I've been on a remodeling kick of late, so in conjunction with that, I needed to go through those boxes, to see if per chance there might be something I'd actually want.
Well, here's what was in those boxes of "treasures". About 50 picture frames of various sizes (I've always been a sucker for picture frames; don't ask me why); some random photos of people I couldn't pick out of a lineup if my life depended on it; a copy of Life Magazine, "The Year In Pictures, 1986"; three sizes of embroidery hoops, along with a couple packages of unfinished cross-stitch projects; a few of those cheesy CD's ~ you know, "The Best Of...", which were actually re-recordings of songs that you really loved in their original form, but you don't so much love the re-doing of them, twenty years after the fact. A copy of National Geographic from March, 1987; the cover story titled, "North Dakota ~ Tough Times on the Prairie". Guess we can't say that now, can we??
A microphone that I think was part of my reel-to-reel tape recorder, which I haven't a clue where that is, but I would kind of like to have that. A super-8 movie camera and projector. That's cool and all, but what I am really searching for are the actual super-8 films that I shot of my kids when they were little. A movie projector without movies is sort of worthless. I will find those movies; I think they're in the back of our closet somewhere. I'll be transferring those to DVD, just as soon as I can pinpoint their location; I'm thinking in two to three years, at the most.
An instamatic camera inside its very own faux-leather carrying case with the initials CJL pasted on the back of it. AND with a film still inside it! I'm giving that back to my son, and I hope he gets the film developed. That sort of mystery is just the kind of thing that I find ultimately cool.
Some sleeves of baseball cards, all from the Minnesota Twins, circa 1987 (their championship year). I'm sincerely hoping that these belong to my son, because I don't remember being dorky enough to collect baseball cards back then, even though I was sort of a Twins fanatic in those years.
Record albums. A whole lot of record albums. I thought my son had given me all of them awhile back. Apparently not.
That's the one thing that brought a lump to my throat. Why? Well, the thing is, when I was about 16 or 17 years old, I couldn't just buy a record album on my Visa card (cuz, you know, I didn't have one, and frankly, in 1971 - 1972, Visa cards didn't actually exist).
No, I had to save up my pennies to buy an album, and I was only making seventy-five cents an hour, so you do the math.
So, I pretty much wore out those albums. I'd study the covers. In fact, I drew facsimiles of some of them (I was into drawing back then; a hobby I abandoned shortly thereafter).
So, those albums, when I saw them again, brought back a ton of memories for me. They took me back to that room, that component stereo system that I saved and saved to buy. The fact that I couldn't really sing along with the songs on those albums without disturbing whoever might be lodging in the room next door. But I really, really wanted to sing along, so it was a conundrum.
It wasn't even so much the songs on those albums. It was the albums themselves.
So, I thought I would post some pictures of those albums. Just because. The flash sort of obscures some of the pictures, but I still like them. And these, by the way, are Part II. I got the first box of albums awhile back, and I think I will post pictures of those later.
These are some that hold a whole bunch of memories for me..
It seems from these photos that I was a huge Dolly Parton fan. Not necessarily. But it was the late sixties/early seventies, and you couldn't turn around without bumping into Porter and Dolly. Seriously. Porter by himself. Dolly on her own. Porter and Dolly, singing some of Dolly's scribbles. We were all sort of relieved, frankly, in 1973, when Conway and Loretta decided to get together, just for the variety, if nothing else.
It was basically Porter & Dolly, or the Statler Brothers. That was 1970 through 1972, in a nutshell.
I can't explain it, but seeing those album covers kind of stabs at my heart. I guess you had to be there.
So, simplifying my life involves purging superfluous stuff, and stuff that at one time meant something to me, but just doesn't anymore.
The things I have on display in my computer room now are, pictures of family, my dad's AA book and his watch, a letter from my mom, pictures of people and things that hold a special place in my heart, and some funny stuff ~ cartoons ~ because we need to remember that life, and we, are sort of ridiculous.
And what do we need, other than the people we love, and the music we love?