Showing posts with label johnny paycheck. Show all posts
Showing posts with label johnny paycheck. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 12, 2022

Jody Miller


"Who's Jody Miller?"

Seriously? And you call yourself a country fan.

If all was right with the world, and had her Capitol producer chose better songs for her, Jody Miller would be enthroned in the annals of country music. 

Here's something -- she could sing like nobody's business.

I've always admired women who could really belt it out -- Connie Smith comes to mind; Patsy Cline definitely, and of course our dearly departed Loretta. Jody Miller could also really belt it out.

Jody first became known for her "answer song" to Roger Miller's King Of The Road, although I don't exactly get how this track answers anything Roger put forward in his hit. The character in Roger's song is a hobo, so unless he's left Jody behind at the bungalow to forge his new lifestyle, describing her life as a housewife isn't exactly the antithesis of a down-and-out vagrant. Nevertheless, the song shot Jody to (short-lived) fame.

(What kind of house was this??)

Jody's next release (that same year, 1965) made the top thirty. This was during my kid rock era (no, not that Kid Rock) and Shindig was my Wednesday night show, but still the dancers doing The Jerk to this seems oddly out of place.


Jody subsequently recorded a string of cover songs, which is unfortunate, because she had so much more to offer.


Although I like her version of this:


When she moved to Epic Records in 1970 Producer Billy Sherrill at last broke the mold (after a couple more covers), and this is my favorite Jody Miller track:


To understand Jody, what could be better than her own words? She had a young life not unlike mine, minus the fame part. 🙄 She became a born-again Christian in 1993, long after a wildly successful string of TV appearances with the likes of The Rolling Stones and The Righteous Brothers, and long after touring with The Beach Boys. Long after her foray into country with Billy Sherrill helming the Epic ship.

In 1972 Jody recorded a duet with Johnny Paycheck of Let's All Go Down To The River. Unfortunately, no live performance video can be found, if there ever was one, but I do chuckle at the pairing. That said, this is another one I like:

Jody left the world on October 6, in Blanchard, Oklahoma; a mom and a grandmom, which is no doubt how she'd want to be remembered.

I will remember her as one helluva singer.

Jody's website



Saturday, August 15, 2015

Billy Sherrill, Epic Producer


As a kid just getting into country music, I didn't know what a record producer was. I had a vague notion that he was kind of an "overseer", making sure that everything synched up okay; and that the studio musicians rather went their own way, and the singer went his/her own way; and the producer? Well, he sat in the booth and every once in awhile spoke, "One more take" into the mic. Reading my album liners, I was more interested in who wrote the songs, because I figured if I liked one song by somebody, I might want to check out some others. Therefore, I read, "B. Thimble - S. Sanitary" (they never put the first names of the writers on the liner, so I didn't know who these guys - and they were mostly guys - were. And unless he was a songwriting phenom, it was always co-writes - much like now). So I didn't pay much heed to who the producer was; just like I also didn't understand that a movie director was some big deal.

But I always knew the name Billy Sherrill. First of all, Billy Sherrill was also part of a songwriting team - with Glenn Sutton (he, the ex-husband of Lynn Anderson, who didn't apparently grasp Lynn's appeal to country music purists. See this.)

So when Billy's name started showing up on Tammy Wynette albums, I noticed. For example, there was this (sorry, no live performance video, naturally). This song, by the by, was written by Johnny Paycheck:


Billy was David Houston's producer, too. Everybody has forgotten David Houston - he died young - but he had monster hits in the sixties. Unfortunately (or fortunately) I can't embed a performance of his song that made the charts cringe in 1967, "Almost Persuaded", which was a really maudlin dirge only rescued by the tinkling piano riff that caused drunks across the USA to drop a tear into their beer mugs. However, so as to not forget David Houston, here's a song he did with Barbara Mandrell:


Billy Sherrill's obituaries pounced on his embrace of the "countrypolitan" sound, but I disagree. Countrypolitan, to me, was Chet Atkins adding the Anita Kerr Singers to every recording that might have been country had it not been for the Anita Kerr Singers. As if Bobby Bare was going to take this group out on the road with him. He had, I'm sure, enough trouble just making the payroll for the actual players in the Bare band.

No, Billy Sherrill didn't forgo the steel guitar. Not at all. And he didn't add a bunch of chipmunks behind the vocalist to "smooth out" the sound. He was too smart for that. Yes, he liked the piano, and he was right. Get a load of this:


Billy also produced Tanya Tucker, who I hated because she was thirteen and I was thirteen, but she could actually sing, whereas I couldn't (I love Tanya Tucker, actually.)


And this, I don't think, is any kind of "politan":


I'm not gonna say that Billy "inherited" George Jones, but I will point out that George had a different producer before he hooked up with Tammy. George was, no doubt, grateful for serendipity.


There are, of course, two recordings that will forever cement Billy Sherrill in the annals of country music. The first one he co-wrote with Tammy:


Historians will debate for eons the cultural impact of "Stand By Your Man". It was a song of its time, and that time was 1968 - 47 years ago! Calm down, everyone! Claudette Colbert is no longer hitching up her skirt and thumbing a ride on a country road with Clark Gable, either! Yes, Tammy divorced George. How dare she, when she sang like an angel about how she'd forgive every one of his transgressions?

Here's the deal - it was a song! I was around and listening to country radio when that song hit the airwaves. Know what I like about it? I like the last chorus, where Tammy slides up the scale full throttle and sells it. The secret about good music is, the lyrics don't mean a fig. That's why they call it music. It's melodic. And if you've got a great singer, the lyrics don't matter. Just ask Sinatra and his dooby-dooby-do's.

And that song will last centuries longer than Rose Garden or Achy Breaky Heart or any other song one can name that wriggled its way into becoming an ear worm.

The other song that Billy Sherrill will be remembered for is one that, in a poll of folks who mimic what everybody else says, is the greatest country song of all time. Ahh, contraire! But I'm not here tonight to argue. This recording was done piecemeal, because George was rather - battered - and couldn't make it through a three-minute song if his life depended on it. Heck, he often couldn't even show up for his own concerts. George was down and almost out before Billy Sherrill saved his career with his patience and persistence.

The key to this song, in my opinion, is the key change, which naturally builds tension. Secondly, the twin fiddle glissando that stabs you in the gut. The recitation? I'm thinking that was George just not being able to sing. A good song is sound. That's what a good producer creates.


Billy Sherrill was a good, nay, a great producer. Now I know what producers do - they create. Create glory. It doesn't matter if the words are a fairy tale; it doesn't matter if the singer had to come back to the studio fifty times in order to splice it together just right. It's the sound that comes out of our radio, or our turntable, or our computer that matters. We don't care how much peptic distress the creation caused. We care about what our ears, what our heart, hears.

Good job, Billy Sherrill.

And thanks for the magic.






























Friday, January 13, 2012

Making Life Simpler


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?

I think that's about it.