1970 - make believe you love me one more time ...

By 1970, The Beatles officially went their separate ways.  The ‘60s were literally over; Vietnam wasn’t, but the damage was done and the left-wing hope that protest could change things was dying out. Culture, of course, doesn’t fit into neat little 10-year bookends, and part of the reason is that things like the country music industry take their sweet time responding to various cultural (pop or otherwise) forces if they ever get around to acknowledging them at all.

Case in point, 1970 was kind of a holding pattern. Some new faces debuted (at least in terms of having a #1 hit) but they weren’t usually entirely new. For the most part it was familiar-by-now faces taking familiar-by-now approaches. Warhorse-by-now David Houston held down most of January with “(Baby Baby) I Know You’re A Lady.” Though he’d broken through with florid ballads, at some point Houston started incorporating bits of swing, R&B, and early rock & roll into his sound, and it sold. The ‘70s was going to be a big era for ‘50s nostalgia so Houston’s kinda-retro approach was at least lucky if not prescient. 

Tom T. Hall scored his first #1 as a performer with “A Week in a County Jail.” As a songwriter, he’d already hit #1 with two lightning rods, “Hello Vietnam” and “Harper Valley PTA,” and though he’d dabble in topical songs through his career usually his sociopolitical points hung out in the margins (at most) of his indelible story songs. Maybe “County Jail” was a subtle dig at the potential phoniness of heartland values, or maybe it was just a more-or-less-true tale that felt worth committing to song. 

If his longtime competitor David Houston was biting some retro sounds, Sonny James was just snatching whole songs from the past, continuing his previous year’s transition into a countrified-cover specialist. Can’t blame him for finding a niche as a rising tide of newer stars started buying up some of his chart real estate, and Brook Benton’s “It’s Just A Matter of Time” proved adaptable enough that Glen Campbell and Randy Travis would eventually have country hits with it too. I’ve never quite gleaned what’s so special about the slow-rolling tune, but maybe it’s also just a matter of time.

Merle Haggard kicked it back down the line with “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” Though he wrote it and presumably meant it, later in life he’d show some ambivalence about how his record label doubled down on the whole ornery-conservative thing just as aggressively as they’d doubled down on the ex-con thing when he first broke through. If “Okie From Muskogee” rolled it’s eyes at the hippies, “Fightin’ Side” stared a damn hole in them and dared them to blink. Nobody was going to mistake this for satire: it was a common viewpoint, and Haggard expressed it with hard-eyed authenticity. It was so tense that someone had to crack a joke.

So we got “Tennessee Bird Walk,” a novelty tune from future trivia questions Jack Blanchard and Misty Morgan, and it actually is a pretty fun listen. Blanchard wrote it, but it sounds like something Roger Miller might’ve scribbled on a napkin a few drinks into the day, catchy and absurdly funny but nicely offset by the kinda-deadpan delivery of the husband-and-wife duo (as opposed to the sort of hammy Ray Stevens bullshit that was lurking moistly just around the corner). It was an amusing opening act for Charley Pride’s evergreen stomp “Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone,” a stoic telling of a breakup so devastating that the protagonist apparently was driven to homeless drifterhood. Usually divorced dudes just get a studio apartment and lease a sports car. This must’ve been bad.

The eternal tragedy-laced love described in Marty Robbins’ even-more-operatic-than-usual “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife” sounds even more stressful. Gorgeous song, with that undeniable voice, but man it is a lot.  The next #1 was a breather, with trucker-song specialist Dave Dudley telling everyone a folksy little hard luck story with the Tom T. Hall-penned “The Pool Shark.” Sonny James scored yet again with “My Love,” which combined his newfound love of cover songs (this one was a 1965 pop hit from Petula Clark) with his recent penchant for letting his sentimental vocals ride atop an incongruously hard-charging beat. It’s pretty good.

But “Hello Darlin’” was even better, of course. Conway Twitty found himself a new peak as a songwriter and singer with a smartly-sketched, mightily-sung tale of wrenchingly affectionate regret. It would’ve been rightly hailed as a masterpiece twenty years prior or twenty years later. Unlike a lot of these songs, there’s never been a particularly well-known cover of it, because it’s absolutely inimitable and it doesn’t need to be tinkered with, ironically juxtaposed, etc. Just embrace the damn thing and preserve it forever. “He Loves Me All the Way” by Tammy Wynette is pretty good too. One of the few vocalists of that day or any that could emote on a Twitty-esque level, her impressively horny pledge to a guy who’s either naturally gifted or at least a devotedly unselfish lover managed to be refreshingly direct without saying anything a censor could reasonably object to. 

Charley Pride had another turn at it next, and “Wonder Could I Live There Anymore” was in its own way as topical as “Okie From Muskogee” or “Stand By Your Man,” if maybe headed in the other direction. “It’s nice to think about it/Maybe even visit,” the narrator says about his rural roots before swinging into the title phrase, and it’s a refreshingly frank take on a modern man’s relationship to his farming forebearers. It’s too bad it’s sort of faded from public memory relative to some of Pride’s other hits; maybe an industry that just started getting comfortable with a black hitmaker still wasn’t ready to part with the idea that rural living deserved only reverent nostalgia.

Speaking of setting aside nostalgia, Sonny James went with a self-penned number instead of another chestnut cover with “Don’t Keep Me Hangin’ On,” a sweetly heartsick waltz with a bit of jangly kick to it. Next, landing his first #1 despite being in the business since childhood, Hank Williams Jr. had some nostalgia to set aside as well. The only son (far as we know) of a doomed music legend that he could scarcely hope to remember in person, Williams Jr. spent a good chunk of his childhood wearing little tailored cowboy suits and singing his dad’s old hits at the behest of his mom and scores of bereaved paying fans. Whatever psychic toll that might’ve taken, he still transitioned in adulthood into a successful artist finding his own voice, going back and forth between songs by/about his father and more original material as he’d continue to do throughout his eventually-iconic career. On “All For the Love of Sunshine,” his first #1 after getting as high as #3 in the previous years, you can hear traces of that wild rock-inflected, nothing-like-his-dad vocal prowess that would eventually take center stage. But you can also hear a man playing it safe with a wholesome string-sweetened song for an industry that wasn’t ready to let him grow all the way up just yet.

It’s successor at #1, Ray Price’s “For the Good Times,” was about as grown as it gets. Its writer, Kris Kristofferson, found that as with Tom T. Hall, the industry was ready for his material before it was ready for his undiluted self. And the venerated singer of this version might’ve been dealing with a bit of frustration himself; Price was a semi-regular chart presence through the 1960s, occasionally getting as high as #2, but hadn’t scored the top spot since 1959. This rapturously tender number was just the tipping point he needed, a mature and rueful farewell that rises well above (or maybe soars partly due to?) its countrypolitan trappings. Another storied music-biz vet, Jerry Lee Lewis, eventually unseated him with his own lovesick “There Must Be More to Love Than This.” It’s not as elegant as “For the Good Times” (what in hell could be?) but it’s a worthy addition to the conflicted-cheating-anthem pantheon.

Kristofferson had another vicarious go at it with Johnny Cash’s booming take on the rueful “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” with the Man In Black lending his lived-in vocal authority to his buddy’s snapshots of dissolute, suddenly-unwanted bachelorhood; two revered outlaws teaming up to let everyone know that maybe happy domesticity is the real prize. Tammy Wynette sure as hell would’ve agreed with them: if you think “Run, Woman, Run” is about seeking justified independence, you have not been paying attention. It’s a soft-spoken, admittedly lovely exhortation to a young woman to hurry back to the man she just ditched and make nice ASAP lest she die alone.

The next two stints belonged to Charley Pride’s “I Can’t Believe That You’ve Stopped Loving Me” and Conway Twitty’s “Fifteen Years Ago,” which we might as well lump together. Both are solid if not-unforgettable honky-tonk weepers about how emotions sometimes grow impervious to time, both reliable entries from guys who were clearly becoming the new guard of consistent hitmakers. Sonny James followed with a three-week run on another Brook Benton song, “Endlessly.” He broke out the whole jittery-beat/sweet-vocal trick again, but to be fair it was not dissimilar to the original. Both are lovely. 

Loretta Lynn stepped away from her established role as potential-adultress-confronter and found a whole new signature song with “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which in retrospect is weird to think only spent a week at #1. It would eventually be revived, of course, a decade later for the hit movie about Lynn’s life.  Affectionate nostalgia was just as good a fit for her as righteous hostility. Despite the song’s immortality, it would be shuffled off the chart by the also-undeniable “Rose Garden,” but since that one only grabbed the last week of 1970 before extending its run well into 1971, we’ll save it for next time.

THE TREND?

Despite the retro trappings offered up by David Houston and Sonny James, the snapshots of rustic childhoods in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and elsewhere, and the career revivals of already-warhorses like Ray Price and Jerry Lee Lewis, the #1 rundown for 1970 gives you at least a whiff of hunger for new perspectives to match a new decade. Kris Kristofferson and Tom T. Hall, two writers who’d help redefine Nashville for a while, scored two #1’s apiece. Country music had a long history of mostly straightforward songs where the meaning often had to be enhanced in the delivery; guys like Hall and Kristofferson could write something that was almost as impressive on the page as it was to the ear. Alongside statements both bold (“Fightin’ Side of Me”) and relatively subtle (“Wonder Could I Live There Anymore”), Nashville remained a pretty solid home for singers with something to say. Statement-averse artists like Buck Owens might’ve had more of an uphill climb all the sudden.

THE RANKING

1. For the Good Times (Ray Price)
2. Hello Darlin’ (Conway Twitty)
3. Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down (Johnny Cash)
4. The Fightin’ Side of Me (Merle Haggard)
5. Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone (Charley Pride)
6. A Week in a County Jail (Tom T. Hall)
7. Wonder Could I Live There Anymore (Charley Pride)
8. Baby Baby (I Know You’re A Lady) (David Houston)
9. Coal Miner’s Daughter (Loretta Lynn)
10. My Woman, My Woman, My Wife (Marty Robbins)
11. Don’t Keep Me Hangin’ On (Sonny James)
12. Fifteen Years Ago (Conway Twitty)
13. Endlessly (Sonny James)
14. He Loves Me All the Way (Tammy Wynette)
15. There Must Be More to Love Than This (Jerry Lee Lewis)
16. My Love (Sonny James)
17. I Can’t Believe That You’ve Stopped Loving Me (Charley Pride)
18. Tennessee Bird Walk (Jack Blanchard & Misty Morgan)
19. All For the Love of Sunshine (Hank Williams Jr.)
20. It’s Just A Matter of Time (Sonny James)
21. The Pool Shark (Dave Dudley)
22. Run, Woman, Run (Tammy Wynette) 

DOWN THE ROAD ...

Texas musician Doug Sahm was a onetime childhood fiddle prodigy who grew into even greater talents as a restlessly creative and wildly versatile singer/songwriter/musician respected by everyone from psychedelic hippies to honky-tonk true-believers to blues diehards to the cross-cultural Tex-Mex music community. Famously, the San Antone native had named his breakout '60s band the Sir Douglas Quintet just in case they could fool the record-buying public into thinking their hits like "She's About a Mover" were real-deal British Invasion pop that just happened to sound like Tex-Mex honky-tonk psychedelic blues. Sahm cycled through various bands and genres and record labels, snowballing his legend through the decades until 1990 when he and his similarly legendary buddies Freddy Fender, Augie Meyers, and Flaco Jimenez formed a supergroup called The Texas Tornados. They didn't have the marquee value of the Highwaymen or Traveling Wilburys, but they had better chemistry than any of them and attacked the Charley Pride classic "Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone" like it was their birthright. Good thing ol' CP had over two dozen other #1s to fall back on, because he wasn't ever getting this one back.

1969 - okie dokie

 Maybe 1968 was peak relevance for mainstream country music.  It was such a banger of a year, exciting artists coming into their own and releasing Hall of Fame-worthy material, 1969 had a tough act to follow.  And it seemed like the chart mellowed out at least a little, like everyone needed to catch a breather.  No less a barnstormer than Johnny Cash held down #1 for the first six weeks, but it was with the wholesome, sentimental, family-friendly “Daddy Sang Bass.”  It was penned by his longtime buddy and onetime fellow Sun Records hellraiser Carl Perkins; a couple weeks later (after another brief Jack Greene run with “Until My Dreams Come True”) their maybe-even-wilder cohort Jerry Lee Lewis would jumpstart the country-gold phase of his career with “To Make Love Sweeter For You,” a song of mature devotion and fidelity that was nice but kind of off-brand. Speaking of Sun Records, next up was a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Only The Lonely” by Sonny James; not a half-bad version, and there’s some cool organ work in there, but Orbison was such a singular artist as to be nearly cover-proof. Plus his original was less than ten years old at the time.

Buck Owens had established himself as not only a heavyweight hitmaker but also possibly the hippest of his contemporaries, with rock heavyweights like the Beatles and the Byrds avowing his influence, and maybe some of that influence boomeranged back. “Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass” was as playful sonically as it was lyrically, with fuzzy, chunky guitars pushing along a cool, off-kilter dynamic. Loretta Lynn broke out the poison pen for some other hussy trying to ply her man with “Woman of the World (Leave My World Alone),” which was sweeter in tone than “Fist City” but still carried the same message, kind of like how “bless your heart” can more or less mean “fuck you” in certain southern ladies’ delivery. Like the former Sun Records guys, Lynn seemed to be dialing it down a bit for 1969.

Hell, the next #1 was also a #1 on the Easy Listening chart. And Glen Campbell’s “Galveston” is easy to listen to, because it’s really good. Warm, even a bit opulent in its orchestration, but grounded in a soldier’s story that was relevant in the Vietnam era without making any sort of larger point about it. Merle Haggard snatched up the mantle a few weeks later with “Hungry Eyes,” which has got to be just about the most morose #1 hit of its time. It’s a thing of weary beauty, specific and lived-in, but damn buddy. Great Depression indeed. Bill Anderson’s “My Life (Throw It Away If I Want To)” was depressing too, mostly just because of how clunky the phrasing and backing track were. Tammy Wynette broke its short reign with “Singing My Song,” another honeyed missive from the POV of an endlessly devoted housewife; also notably in 1969, she’d marry George Jones, which is probably as good a way as any to test one’s capacity for wifely devotion. 

Speaking of decisions that look questionable in retrospect, Sonny James’ cover of the former pop #1 “Running Bear” took over the country #1 for three weeks, and I think “questionable” is a good way to put it. I don’t blame somebody who thinks a white guy singing a song about Native Americans while “hoy-ya-hoy-ya” chants pulsate in the background is pretty insensitive. But you could also say that it’s a Romeo & Juliet riff that just happens to be about natives and borrows a few motifs but there’s nothing inherently disrespectful about their depiction here. I grew up hearing and liking this one and I’m not gonna pretend I retroactively hate it; it’s way better than Johnny Preston’s pop/swing version of it, if nothing else. Jack Greene stepped up his game too with his next #1, “Statue of a Fool.” After a few decent but forgettable tunes that still managed to hit #1, this time he earned the hell out of it with a bravura performance of an imagery-rich ballad.

Conway Twitty kept up his newfound habit of topping the chart with “I Love You More Today,” a slightly clunky tune that’s redeemed by the sincerity and sheer firepower in his vocals; it’s no “Hello Darlin’” but it’s worth rediscovery. Less compelling was Buck Owens next #1, a kind-of-half-assed live cover of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” where they don’t even bother nailing that signature opening guitar lick even though it was likely well within the Buckaroos’ talents. If racial considerations weren’t a thing, the stylings and lyrics of the Berry original probably would have fit just fine on country radio. Or maybe his timing was just wrong, because Charley Pride was up next with the first #1 of a career that was remarkable on several levels.

If you didn’t already know these things: Charley Pride was black, and successful country music artists were overwhelmingly not, and in the country music industry of the day even the most blatant racism was unlikely to be confronted. One can assume that the late Pride’s talent must have been matched by his capacity for patience and quiet courage, not to mention a healthy dose of intelligence and intuition. A single like “All I Have To Offer You (Is Me),” with its humble lyrics and wholesome affection, was a wise way to get a foot in the door, versus some horndog swagger that would’ve scared or pissed off most of the folks who were in a key position to help. Maybe I’m overthinking this more than they did: it’s a solid song, but it also sounds like something you’d release if you were concerned that your very presence might be a threat to some listeners.

Merle Haggard, on the other hand, could get ornery and prideful if the song called for it (and more and more, they would). “Workin’ Man Blues” marked the first time in a while that a song that spelled out the connection between blue-collar values and country music would hit #1, and the trend dug in so hard it’s more or less still in force today. While Hag was undeniably a very hard-working musician, it’s still a little weird to hear a man once sent up the river for petty theft thumbing his nose at welfare. It’d get more complicated soon though.

Haggard’s tune only punched the #1 clock one week, and then Johnny Cash and “A Boy Named Sue” made a five-week stay out of it. A genuinely funny story song penned by generational polymath Shel Silverstein, it was the perfect match for Cash’s blend of macho deadpan and incongruous goofiness, a filial grudge match that’s both a bit absurd and strikingly easy to picture. “Tall Dark Stranger” by Buck Owens was similarly cinematic but without the laughs, and it only stood its tallest for a week. He wouldn’t hit #1 at all again until 1972, and after that never again as a solo artist. There was more to it than just his approach going out of style or the field getting too crowded, but we’ll get to it when we get to it.

Longtime chart warhorse Sonny James scored his third #1 of the year with “Since I Met You Baby,” and like the others it was a cover of a non-country tune from about a decade prior. R&B journeyman Ivory Joe Hunter, the song’s originator, would cross over into country a little himself in the ‘70s (perhaps emboldened by Charley Pride?), scoring no major hits but notching a few Grand Ole Opry performances. James’ version was faithful to the original, they’re both sweet little time capsules. Tammy Wynette took on dutiful-woman duty again with “The Ways to Love a Man,” a bit more breathlessly sexy than her other recent hits, and Conway Twitty scored his best #1 since his late-‘50s breakthrough with the near-raging pathos of “To See My Angel Cry.” 

And then Merle Haggard came back in, all hard twang and even harder sneer, with the self-penned country music landmark “Okie From Muskogee.” Much discussion has been made over whether he was dead serious, satirical, or somewhere in between when he wrote and recorded this declaration of Middle America pride, lauding the good ol’ boys pitchin’ woo at their wholesome hometown gals but spending even more time basically telling the hippies, draft dodgers, and other ungrateful malcontents they could stick it. If he meant it, you can hardly call the man out-of-touch: it was a confrontational time, and folks with a sincere belief in American exceptionalism had every right to stand up for themselves verbally. On the off chance he was totally (or just mostly) joking, the joke was largely on him, because the fans singing along sure as hell embraced it at face value. 

Charley Pride wrapped up the year on a more melancholy note with “(I’m So) Afraid of Losing You Again,” which, aside from those extraneous parentheses and a whole industry full of Okies-in-spirit reckoning with their first homegrown black star, was a pretty straightforward country weeper that again foregrounded a sort of low-key humility to help ease audiences into the idea. And while there’s something to be said for playing the long game, maybe it’s too bad they didn’t just have Charley Pride sing “Okie From Muskogee” and somehow manage to piss everyone off at once.

THE TREND?

If you could somehow conclusively prove that Merle Haggard was being satirical instead of sincere on “Okie From Muskogee” (he was coy about it later in life) then maybe you could argue country music was getting a bit progressive in 1969. Breakthrough black artist scoring two #1s, stalwarts Buck Owens and Sonny James covering hits by black artists they admire, Owens toying with psychedelic sounds, aging rock stars welcomed into the fold, a whole song (however iffy) about Native American romance … hell, maybe even “A Boy Named Sue” was sort of an olive branch to folks who don’t conform to traditional gender norms (it probably was not). They didn’t call it “woke” back then and you probably wouldn’t today, even with that term at your disposal. But it wasn’t stodgy, and that’s something.

THE RANKING:

1. Okie From Muskogee (Merle Haggard)
2. A Boy Named Sue (Johnny Cash)
3. Galveston (Glen Campbell)
4. Daddy Sang Bass (Johnny Cash)
5. Statue of a Fool (Jack Greene)
6. Hungry Eyes (Merle Haggard)
7. To See My Angel Cry (Conway Twitty)
8. Running Bear (Sonny James)
9. (I’m So) Afraid of Losing You Again (Charley Pride)
10. Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass (Buck Owens)
11. All I Have to Offer You (Is Me) (Charley Pride)
12. Workin’ Man Blues (Merle Haggard)
13. Singing My Song (Tammy Wynette)
14. To Make Love Sweeter For You (Jerry Lee Lewis)
15. Only the Lonely (Sonny James)
16. Tall Dark Stranger (Buck Owens)
17. Since I Met You Baby (Sonny James)
18. I Love You More Today (Conway Twitty)
19. Woman of the World (Leave My Man Alone) (Loretta Lynn)
20. Until My Dreams Come True (Jack Greene)
21. Johnny B. Goode (Buck Owens) (the original would’ve been #1)       
22. My Life (Throw It Away If I Want To) (Bill Anderson)

DOWN THE ROAD ...

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that sludge-rock legends The Melvins approached Hag's "Okie From Muskogee" at an ironic arm's length, unless some sort of punk contempt for hippies made them unlikely allies. But it's still fun to hear some noisy rockers appropriate a little twang here and there. This wasn't just a live lark, the prolific band included a version on their 2000 album The Crybaby.

  

1968 - what a good year for the relevance

It’s hard to parse out a whole “sneaky little mammals versus doomed lumbering dinosaurs” metaphor for 1967 and 1968.  It’s not exactly Pearl Jam kicking Poison’s ass into the instant-nostalgia bin here. There’s not a massive gulf of distance between the sound and approach of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard; to non-country listeners, there’s probably even less. Sonny James didn’t have to change a thing and he wasn’t done by a damn sight. Some of the guys on the more easy-listening end of the spectrum were on their way out: to be fair, in Jim Reeves case, he was several years deceased, but Eddy Arnold didn’t have that excuse. In country music, change tends to be gradual, and we were years away from any extinction-level events. Bill Anderson, for one, was still at #1 going into January 1968 with the risibly corny “For Loving You.” But then it was young-upstart time again: Merle Haggard had yet another prison song in the barrel, “Sing Me Back Home,” and this one was even more heart-wrenchingly memorable. The tale of a doomed, repentant convict’s last requests touched hearts in a way cautionary-tale prison songs don’t always. It didn’t plead for sympathy, but it sure earned it.

Even more daring was Henson Cargill’s “Skip A Rope,” which somehow scored a five-week run despite unmistakably railing against modern parents setting lousy examples for their kids by being quarrelsome, hypocritical racists. It’s ballsy that he gave it a shot and it’s wild that it worked; this was the only time Cargill got anywhere close to number one, before or since, so it’s not like he was a big shot leveraging his clout into an artistic gamble. He didn’t write the tune but he thought it needed to be heard and he made it happen. If it gave some bigots a second thought it was more than worth it.

The ascension of Tammy Wynette continued with “Take Me To Your World,” which has been overshadowed by her subsequent hits and that’s too bad because it’s a shimmering thing of barroom beauty, an embittered honky tonk angel playing damsel in distress, and Wynette absolutely emotes the paint off the walls singing it. Sonny James sweetened up his game a bit with “A World of Our Own” (which would’ve made a fine sequel or prequel to the Wynette tune), framing his usual mellow vocal with a jittery train beat and some nimble picking that seemed like it was from some other song entirely, but it still worked somehow.  Buck Owens, instead of his usual stampede over the chart, kinda winsomely slipped in for a week with “How Long Will My Baby Be Gone.” All nifty handclaps and sunny acoustic strumming, it was a subtle tweak of his usual style, but still good stuff.  Jack Greene chased it off with the pleasant-enough “You Are My Treasure,” which even as country love songs go maybe lays it on a little too thick.

The already-feisty young Loretta Lynn came bustling back onto the charts with another song about chasing skanky would-be paramours away from her not-especially-blameless husband; full of piss, vinegar, and folksy wordplay, “Fist City” must’ve sounded like the punk rock of its day. Merle Haggard swung back in with “The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde,” a fine enough song and well-timed with (if unrelated to) the well-known movie about the bank-robbing lovers, but it didn’t hit as hard as Hag’s own outlaw story.

David Houston had another run at it with the swing-inflected “Have A Little Faith” (NOTE: avoid the tinny re-recordings of Houston tunes from this era, the originals are on YouTube), a charming bounce with lots of meaty baritone guitar. Eventual legend Glen Campbell would score his first solo country #1 next with “I Wanna Live,” a lovely string-buoyed waltz with a powerful chorus and some weird verses that would eventually be overshadowed by his much bigger hits. Nudging the chart in an easy-listening direction unfortunately paved the way for Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey.” Much has been said about just how treacly, condescending, and maudlin “Honey” comes off in retrospect, but it was a huge crossover, hitting #1 on the pop charts as well. And much of the rancor is fair, but I do like the first couple lines and how they repeat at the end over a fadeout, like we’re listening to a bereaved out-of-touch old man ramble until he repeats himself. Most of the middle sounds like an emotionally oblivious clod passively watching his wife succumb to depression, which is one hell of a dark character study if that’s how they meant it to come across, but with the chorus and arrangement it sounds like they thought they were being sweet. “I Wanna Live” thankfully took the spot back after three weeks.

Speaking of dark character studies, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” continued Tammy Wynette’s newfound hot streak (and would go on to be probably her second-best-known song).  I know there are some people who look at this song as a maudlin cornball remnant. I do not. I think the juxtaposition of childhood scenes with adult heartbreak hit just the right wrenching balance, although it might not have worked without Wynette’s delivery, sounding for all the world like she’s on the verge of a sob. You can just picture the happily oblivious kid playing in the shadows of his parents’ doomed marriage, and somehow the cutesy spelling gimmick just underlines it instead of distracting from it. Yet another stone classic.

Which, speaking of, Johnny Cash is back. The barnstorming live version of “Folsom Prison Blues” was his first #1 in a few years; given his towering status as a country legend, you might wonder why he’s barely been mentioned here. It’s just a timing thing: his first handful of big hits (“I Walk the Line,” “Big River” etc.) predated the consolidated Billboard country music chart. Modern fans might mentally associate him with outlaw acts like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, but he had a pretty hearty head start on both of them. His “live from prisons” performances were a bit of a comeback in the late ‘60s; his craggy baritone had taken on even more gravity, and the live recordings brought out even more fire, personality, and authority than the studio did. Between his stentorian delivery and preference for stripped-down backing, he arguably just wasn’t a good fit for contemporary country radio after his first creative peak passed. But Live From Folsom Prison Johnny Cash was just undeniable. 

Things get considerably lighter for a bit with Sonny James’ winsomely grateful “Heaven Says Hello” and David Houston’s wholesomely lovestruck “Already It’s Heaven.” Both decent, both kind of sound like they were knocked out in the same day in a Nashville songwriting office by people who kept overhearing each other. Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” was another thing entirely. Maybe him making the #1 spot safe for prison songs again had inadvertently spurred the Johnny Cash comeback. Whatever its other effects, from that first tumbling guitar line into that stabbing six-note intro lick, it’s a rueful and heartsick ramble through hard-bitten regret and too-late gratitude. The stoicism of a doomed convict owning up to his mistakes sounded downright prophetic coming from a man who’d lived the life to some extent and spent some time surrounded by men who’d gone even more wrong. It’s a landmark in American music and songwriting if there ever was one.

And hot damn, then we get “Harper Valley PTA”! If it’s not as eternal as “Mama Tried” it had even more impact in the moment, inspiring a movie and a TV show and some much-needed discussions about small-town sanctimony and hypocrisy. Another songwriting triumph for a young Tom T. Hall that found the perfect mouthpiece in foxy newcomer Jeannie C. Riley, it’s got a bit of ‘60s pop-rock bounce to it and plenty of punch in the head-held-high vocal delivery and lyrics that (despite references to Peyton Place and “sock it to me”) still glow with ornery relevance today. Like “Skip A Rope,” it did so well that you’ve got to assume even the people it was lyrically targeting couldn’t resist it. It did eventually give way to Eddy Arnold’s suave “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye,” which neither attempts nor achieves social relevance but it’s really damn pretty.

Conway Twitty, kind of like Johnny Cash, had straddled country and rock early in his career. His evergreen “It’s Only Make Believe” was an all-genre #1 in 1958; adjusting his approach for a run at the country music market in the mid-‘60s, he struggled a bit before hitting his stride at the end of the decade. “Next In Line” wasn’t his biggest or best, but it was his first country #1.  He was quickly displaced by the still-cresting Marty Robbins with the sublime “I’ll Walk Alone,” a heady mix of bluesy guitars and near-operatic vocals, manly resolve and withering regret. But it was a cultural-touchstone kind of year, and Tammy Wynette was lying in wait with “Stand By Your Man.” 

Again, it’s a towering gush of a Tammy Wynette performance, tender and nuanced when it needs to be and soaring when it’s soar time. I remember hearing this one as a child and assuming the sort of husband fuckups that Wynette is beseeching the women of the world to forgive were the kind of low-stakes blunders you’d see TV sitcom dads do week after week. And standing by that if you’re already married to it sounds reasonable; I thought it was a sweet song. But to adult ears, and in the context of burgeoning feminism and increasing distrust of the American patriarchy, it turns out it hit really different.  The vague lines about “doing things that you don’t understand” seems kind of condescending anyway, and kind of worse if those things might include adultery, addiction, abuse … I know you can’t cover every specificity in a three-minute song, but where’s the guardrail here? It’s not “Stand By Your Man Unless…,” it’s just “Stand By Your Man.” And it might be good advice to some eye-rolling scold who doesn’t appreciate a well-intentioned husband, but there’s a world of women out there who shouldn’t have taken it to heart even if, like most folks, they still think it’s a pretty compelling song.   

Sonny James had another good one with “Born to Be With You,” which like his first hit of the year “A World of Our Own” matched up a mellow vocal and sweet sentiment against a jittery, fast-shuffling backbeat and lots of hot picking, like the whole band split a big bag of coke in the studio while James stepped out for a sandwich and then banged it out immediately upon his return. Speaking of recording studios, already-legendary guitarist Glen Campbell, who’d played on countless pop and rock albums as a member of LA’s go-to session players The Wrecking Crew, scored his second country (and first pop) #1 with “Wichita Lineman,” a melancholy but compelling mash-up of country, folk, and shimmery pop that closed out an exhaustingly relevant year for the Billboard country charts.

THE TREND?

1968 was a pretty huge year for relevance in country music. The genre already had baked-in relevance as the go-to music for middle-America white folks who could claim the idea of “country” as their lifestyle and/or their roots, and perhaps won over a sizeable chunk of fans who didn’t care to follow pop music trends that were leaning to brash young rockers, protest-minded songwriters, international wonders and a general if erratic push-away from the status quo. But more and more, country artists weren’t settling for being sentimental comfort food or good-time background music: the songs were about something, reasserting old values or occasionally pointedly questioning them.  Even the artists were about something in some cases: Haggard, Wynette, Lynn, and the resurgent Cash had distinctive points of view and themes they’d revisit often. Once upon a time country music and folk music were lumped together. But as contemporary folk music had come to mean something else, country music wasn’t far behind it in terms of being populated by artists and songs who really had something to say.

THE RANKING:

1. Mama Tried (Merle Haggard)
2. Sing Me Back Home (Merle Haggard)
3. Folsom Prison Blues (Johnny Cash)
4. Harper Valley PTA (Jeannie C. Riley)
5. D-I-V-O-R-C-E (Tammy Wynette)
6. Skip A Rope (Henson Cargill)
7. Take Me To Your World (Tammy Wynette)
8. I Walk Alone (Marty Robbins)
9. Stand By Your Man (Tammy Wynette)
10. How Long Will My Baby Be Gone (Buck Owens)
11. Fist City (Loretta Lynn)
12. Wichita Lineman (Glen Campbell)
13. The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde (Merle Haggard)
14. Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye (Eddy Arnold)
15. Have A Little Faith (David Houston)
16. Born to Be With You (Sonny James)
17. I Wanna Live (Glen Campbell)
18. Next In Line (Conway Twitty)
19. Heaven Says Hello (Sonny James)
20. Already It’s Heaven (David Houston)
21. A World of Our Own (Sonny James)
22. Honey (Bobby Goldsboro)  
23. You Are My Treasure (Jack Greene) 

DOWN THE ROAD ... 

{Editor's Note: I'm going back and adding this feature in on the older entries too, but I thought it'd be nice to corral some notable cover versions of at least one of the #1s for every year.}

One of the more fun left-field success stories of late-century country music was the Kentucky Headhunters, an unglamorous crew of shaggy backwoods weirdos that briefly struck gold. With a solid well of original tunes while it lasted, they weren't just a cover band but doing loud & proud electrified renditions of revered oldies was kind of their foot in the door for national attention. Admirably, they used some of that cachet to include a cover of Henson Cargill's unfortunately-still-relevant "Skip a Rope" on their 1989 breakthrough album Electric Barnyard.

    

1967 - Tammy, Loretta, and Merle (aka the new kids)

So Jack Greene’s heart-wrenching ballad “There Goes My Everything” carried over at #1 from 1966 and camped out another five weeks. Pretty much swept the CMAs. It’s one of the defining songs of its era and will probably always be in the mix on classic-country radio stations and Spotify playlists. But Jack Greene isn’t one of the defining artists of his era, in retrospect. He’d score a couple more #1s, tour his ass off, make dozens if not hundreds of Grand Ole Opry appearances throughout his long life. I don’t know why, exactly, some artists in any genre are more or less in the nostalgia bin a half-decade after their breakthrough and some are relevant for decades. But I bet Jack Greene wondered, more than once. I bet David Houston and Sonny James and Bill Anderson, who all managed at least one more #1 in 1967, wondered too.

Maybe this just happens to be around the time the baby boomers started paying more attention to country music and wanted to repopulate the charts with something that felt a little more like their own, and then stuck with those artists throughout their adulthood and loyally boosted their prominence well into the ‘80s and occasionally beyond. Because next up is Loretta Lynn with “Don’t Come Home A’Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind),” and not only is she undoubtedly one of the genre-definers of her era, from that first #1 she was already dabbling in what might amount to proto-feminism just by writing songs where a strong woman told some hard-partying dude what’s what. For what it’s worth, a solo female hadn’t hit #1 since 1964, and Connie Smith was the only one to snag one in that year. Prior to her it had only been Patsy Cline for a few years, and some of that was posthumous. Maybe the industry was less scared of a deceased woman.

Buck Owens took it back for a stretch (as Buck does) with “Where Does the Good Times Go,” perhaps proving the industry was so rattled by insurgent females that they were losing touch with grammar. His career would stall out a few years later for reasons he couldn’t have predicted at the time, but his latest’s run was briefly interrupted by the worthiest of Bakersfield Sound successors: Merle Haggard had his first #1 in the first week of March 1967 with “I’m A Lonesome Fugitive.” It’s hard to imagine it jumping out of the fray without the benefit of hindsight: did the listeners and DJs know they were reckoning with a marathon hitmaker and era-transcending singer-songwriter? Or did they think it was just a cool ballad with some cinematic sweep and rode-hard personality to it? It’s almost too late to ask anybody about it.

The always-mellow ghost of Jim Reeves got another crack at #1 with “I Won’t Come In While He’s There,” sadly elegant but not quite a classic, although his line about how a confrontation might lead him to do something he’d be sorry for later is intriguing.  I’m betting on uncharacteristic use of impolite language. The incomparable George Jones, who’d already made a couple trips to the top but was still more or less a young buck in the game, took over with “Walk Through This World With Me,” lyrically a love song but in that classic Jones delivery you can’t help but hear it as an anguished, unrequited plea to a woman who’s on her way out. I’m sure some of the folks who had to do the offstage handling of Jones didn’t think he’d stick around long enough to define the genre alongside Lynn, Haggard, and another one we’ll get to soon, but in between blackouts he damn sure did.

Eddy Arnold continued to dominate the intersection of country music and easy listening, especially without Jim Reeves around to compete in the flesh and blood, and “Lonely Again” is one of his prettiest. Sonny James kept riding his peak with the mournful “Need You,” which is kind of drearily catchy without any retrospectively obvious justification for its dominance. “Sam’s Place,” Buck Owens next chart-topping go-round, has some nice drive to it and some fun lyrics about old “hoochie-coochie Hattie” that must’ve hit a nerve for a young Alan Jackson somewhere. The much-welcome upbeat streak got even more wholesome with Bakersfield stalwart Wynn Stewart’s only #1 hit, “It’s Such A Pretty World Today,” an enduringly charming tune which a lot of people probably thought was still Buck Owens.

Jack Greene’s breakthrough year wasn’t over, obviously; his follow-up “All the Time” sat on top for over a month with its overly optimistic title and its sweetly devotional lyrics riding atop a tricky but sparse drum arrangement and tinkling pianos. It’s at least as good as his signature hit, with some added freshness from being less prevalent to modern ears. David Houston’s “With One Exception” was similarly devotional but from a different angle: it’s very similar to his monumental “Almost Persuaded,” with him telling some nigh-irresistible nightclub temptress that she’s pretty much the most awesome thing ever except for his beloved wife. Gotta wonder if the wife was especially impressed upon the re-telling.

Speaking of complicated relationship dynamics, chart warhorse Marty Robbins’ big hit of the year “Tonight Carmen” might, in its own subtle way, be one of the weirdest country songs to ever hit #1. It’s a sweet and swoony Latin-tinged ballad (pretty on-brand so far) but despite the song’s high-for-its-time word count it feels like there’s some scary obsession around the edges going unsaid, with lyrics that hint at a love so intense it borders on violent. Maybe most folks didn’t notice. Or maybe they started noticing when it hit #1-level rotation and that’s why it was only there for one week. Sonny James took over for a month and some change with the decidedly less-layered “I’ll Never Find Another You.” Merle Haggard repeated in more ways than one with the relatively bracing “Branded Man,” a virtual rewrite/soundalike to his breakthrough hit, just a little lyrically sharper and more world-weary as if “Lonesome Fugitive” was his first draft or something. Notably, his history of imprisonment was being steered into for its exoticism, not buried to make nice with presumably-wholesome radio listeners (fair enough, it was just for petty theft … he didn’t kill anyone). Buck Owens swooped in again with “Your Tender Loving Care,” but only for a week. As per usual, his slower numbers just didn’t have quite the same grip.

Next up, though, was “My Elusive Dreams,” with newfangled chart-topped David Houston bringing in a young gal named Tammy Wynette for one of the first male/female duets to fly that high in a while. Houston was no emotional lightweight as a vocalist, but every time Wynette grabs the mic it’s like you can hear his stock slip a little. It’s a restlessly, heavily sad song of repeated failure and profound grief, but it really soars, and it soars a shade higher when her voice chimes in. They’d be back for separate victory laps soon enough.

Hard to imagine that the one to unseat them was scrappy indie footnote Leon Ashley with “Laura (What’s He Got That I Ain’t Got).”  At least Marty Robbins’ aforementioned dark little number had his indelible vocal and some genuine romantic fire to it; “Laura” doesn’t have that and it’s even creepier. Ashley basically lists off all the shit he bought for Laura, most of which she’s packing up to leave his petty ass for some other dude, and then concludes with a deadpan-scary scene in which he picks up a pistol and it’s not clear whether he’s about to murder her, off himself as one last guilt-trip for the ages, or both. Aside from the willingness to leave a little room for narrative speculation, there’s really nothing redeeming about it aside from historical curiosity. Eddy Arnold’s kindly apologetic “Turn the World Around” couldn’t have been more welcome, musically or thematically.

Things got dark again when Tammy Wynette scored her first solo #1, “I Don’t Wanna Play House,” a tear-jerking little vignette about a little girls’ interpretation of her parents’ soured relationship that turns downright operatic with her signature rich, honeyed, full-bodied delivery. Her extremely-recent duet partner David Houston nudged past her with “You Mean the World To Me,” a swinging little upbeat number and a good place to alert folks who are listening as they read: sometimes the only surviving version of these songs on Spotify/Apple/etc. are lame re-recordings from decades later. With some artists like David Houston it’s notable how diminished the vocal prowess was at the time of the ill-advised cash-in, and the chintzy recording quality further damages the legacy. Even bigger icons like Cash and Haggard weren’t immune to this sort of cynical label opportunism, but at least in their case the original recordings are usually the ones that pop up in a search and are still readily available on CD or download. Mishaps of various magnitudes (including the 2008 backlot fire at Universal Studios) have led to the master recordings of some artists being mostly lost to time. Friendly advice: there are some YouTube channels devoted to playing old vinyl albums and 45s that can fill the gaps on some of this stuff if you’re not inclined to go crate-digging down at the dirt mall in a modern era that’s unfortunately light on record stores. 

Sonny James took another run at #1 with the similarly devoted but not-half-as-catchy “It’s The Little Things,” with an eye for lyrical detail that doesn’t quite wash out the cloying aftertaste. It’s still better than the year-closing “For Loving You,” a Bill Anderson/Jan Howard duet where she joins him on his spoken-word schtick while a bunch of anonymous backup singers do the heavy lifting. The Chipmunks’ Christmas song probably started to sound like a pretty solid alternative. But better things were on the way.

THE TREND?

Future icons laying groundwork.  Any snapshot of country music as the ‘60s turned into the ‘70s and beyond is incomplete without Loretta Lynn, Merle Haggard, and Tammy Wynette (George Jones too, on a not-unrelated note, although he’d already been up and down the ladder a couple times by then).  Aside from Jones they’d all hit the top spot the next year too, with a handful of new powerhouses-in-the-making alongside them.  Granted, folks like David Houston and Sonny James and (less than you’d think) Buck Owens would be coming back too.  Maybe it wasn’t too obvious, given the old-school sound that the new kids trafficked in, but something like a generational shift was underway.

THE RANKING

1. Branded Man (Merle Haggard)
2. Don’t Come Home A’Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind) (Loretta Lynn)
3. I’m A Lonesome Fugitive (Merle Haggard)
4. Walk Through This World With Me (George Jones)
5. There Goes My Everything (Jack Greene)
6. It’s Such A Pretty World Today (Wynn Stewart)
7. All the Time (Jack Greene)
8. My Elusive Dreams (David Houston & Tammy Wynette)
9. Tonight Carmen (Marty Robbins)
10. I Don’t Wanna Play House (Tammy Wynette)
11. Lonely Again (Eddy Arnold)
12. Sam’s Place (Buck Owens)
13. You Mean the World To Me (David Houston)
14. Where Does the Good Times Go (Buck Owens)
15. Turn the World Around (Eddy Arnold)
16. With One Exception (David Houston)
17. I Won’t Come In While He’s There (Jim Reeves)
18. I’ll Never Find Another You (Sonny James) 
19. Need You (Sonny James)
20. It’s the Little Things (Sonny James)
21. For Loving You (Bill Anderson & Jim Howard)
22. Laura (What’s He Got That I Ain’t Got) (Leon Ashley)

DOWN THE ROAD ...

One of the most respected singer-songwriters in Texas for the past few decades, Walt Wilkins will occasionally take a well-considered step outside of his own compositions. He's not as twangy as George Jones (who could be?) but his earthy plea for love doesn't sound an ounce less sincere. His cover of "Walk Through This World With Me" can be found on his 2006 album Hopewell.

Walk Through This World With Me — Walt Wilkins | Last.fm

1966 - feelers of feelings

The chiming guitars of Buck Owens’ instrumental “Buckaroo” rang in the new year, hanging on to #1 for one last week before trucker-song stalwart Red Sovine started a six-week reign with “Giddyup-Go.” Like many trucker hits, it’s more narration than song, and while it’s not the only highly-sentimental entry in the genre it’s pretty damn notable for Sovine’s vocal delivery.  Without ever quite breaking into song, the presumably-tough old dude sounds like he’s on the verge of a sob throughout the (admittedly poignant) tale of a grizzled trucker who finally runs into a younger trucker who’s the beloved, long-lost son that his estranged wife disappeared with a decade and a half ago. It’s either maudlin or bittersweet, depending on your patience with these sorts of things. I like it, and I’m not immune to its emotional targeting, but it’s still odd to me when a spoken-word story goes to #1. It’s worth hearing, but how many times a week do you want to hear it? 

But it was thematically consistent for a year in which the #1s indicate that people were just feeling the hell out of their feelings.  Grief, anxiety, and patriotism were running high in 1966.  Vietnam, civil rights, assassinations. Whether or not you were on what folks nowadays would consider the “right side of history” you were probably in need of a little catharsis, and country radio was happy to provide it with a slew of emotionally fraught ballads. Only the king-of-the-moment Buck Owens seemed to be keeping things light: “Waitin’ In Your Welfare Line” knocked “Giddyup-Go” off the top and hung out there for seven weeks. And the title’s just country songwriting figurativeness, it’s an upbeat tune that has nothing to do with actual social services.

From there it’s a few weeks apiece for Eddy Arnold’s lovelorn “I Want to Go With You,” Jim Reeves’ tense-for-him “Distant Drums” and “Take Good Care of Her,” where Sonny James scores better than the previous year’s work as an emotive, compelling vocalist. Of the three, “Distant Drums” comes closest by far to meeting the moment topically: it’s more or less about hurrying along a marriage (and all that entails) before answering a vaguely Celtic call to war. Songwriter Cindy Walker was probably thinking “Danny Boy” much more so than Vietnam, but the parallel’s hard to miss, then as now.

Buck Owens took back over, as Buck does, from early July through early August with the winsome, limber-sounding “Think Of Me,” one of those sly breakup tunes where the dumped individual is still pretty sure they’ve got the upper hand. When it finally ran out of steam David Houston – having his first hit of many, even though he’s probably been even more consigned to history than Sonny James – came gushing right outta the gate with his rendition of the stone classic “Almost Persuaded.”  Possibly the greatest entry ever in the almost-cheating-but-managed-to-restrain-myself subgenre, you can feel every little itch of lust and conflict in Houston’s almost-too-much vocal. Nine straight weeks at #1, a record which wouldn’t be broken til 2012.

From there, Jim Reeves’ re-haunted the charts with maybe his best posthumous hit (“Blue Side of Lonesome”) and Buck Owens deigned to reclaim it with the bouncy, charming “Open Up Your Heart.”  Bill Anderson cruised back in with “I Get The Fever”; it’s a solid song that he wrote himself, with a nice little kick to it and some deft lines about wanderlust, but he wasn’t willing (or able?) to set aside the whole “Whisperin’ Bill” gimmick so it’s an odd juxtaposition of theme and delivery that could’ve used a Waylon or Conway or something to really let it rip.  Eddy Arnold suavely swooped back in with the mournful “Somebody Like Me” before Jack Greene closed out the year with the near-apocalyptic heartbreak of “There Goes My Everything,” as good a wallow in hurt and loss as any in a genre that lives and dies by that kind of thing.  It would take up even more real estate in 1967 (that’s where it’ll be ranked) but it sure fit the psyche-challenging framework of ’66.

THE TREND?

Nobody except Buck Owens and, less inevitably, Bill Anderson could hit #1 with something that wasn’t sad as all hell, somewhere between restrained melancholy and outright psychic implosion. A lot of folks might just chalk it up to “hey that’s country music for ya” but maybe catharsis was the order of the day. Or maybe even the saddest of country songs still felt like a low-stakes distraction in a world that must have seemed to a lot of folks like it was turning upside down. There goes my everything, indeed.

THE RANKING:

1. Almost Persuaded (David Houston)
2. Open Up Your Heart (Buck Owens)
3. Take Good Care of Her (Sonny James)
4. Giddyup Go (Red Sovine)
5. Blue Side of Lonesome (Jim Reeves)
6. Distant Drums (Jim Reeves)
7. Think of Me (Buck Owens)
8. Somebody Like Me (Eddy Arnold)
9. Waitin’ In Your Welfare Line (Buck Owens)
10. I Want to Go With You (Eddy Arnold)
11. I Get the Fever (Bill Anderson)

DOWN THE ROAD ...

Tex-Mex accordion legend Flaco Jimenez has long had at least a tangential relationship to country music, collaborating with folks like Dwight Yoakam and The Mavericks and co-starring in the genre-blurring supergroup The Texas Tornadoes with #1 country hitmaker Freddy Fender and Texas rock legends Doug Sahm and Augie Meyers. And occasionally he just straight-up covers a fellow legend like Buck Owens ... here's his take on 1966 #1 hit "Open Up Your Heart." The studio version's on his 1994 self-titled album.

1965 - the mysterious Sonny James

One of the challenges of writing about antique tunes is trying to imagine how they might have sounded to fresh ears. One of the downsides of an enduring classic is that, for huge chunks of listeners, they lose their opportunity to surprise. A classic country song you’ve heard a hundred times may sound welcoming to your ears, but on that hundredth listen are you really paying attention anymore? Or are you just acknowledging recognition like a bad Family Guy joke?

Well, 1965 is solving this problem for me.  Unlike any other year I’ve covered so far, this one sent me scurrying to the internet for songs that, if I’ve ever heard them before, I didn’t hear them often enough to register.  Who the hell even are Sonny James and Warner Mack and Roy Drusky?  Am I looking at the Canadian chart by mistake?  I mean, there’s Buck Owens and Roger Miller, but they’d cross over right?

Giving just a cursory closer look, Sonny James had bigger hits (the pre-consolidated-chart “Young Love,” most notably) that I and most of us would recognize even if we couldn’t name the singer; that being said, he’s also been in the Country Music Hall of Fame for over a decade now, and his name is going to be hard to forget by the time we get through this parade of #1s. It’s just another reminder of how hard actual immortality is to achieve in art: one year, you’re neck-and-neck with Buck Owens, and less than 50 years later some wannabe journalist who’s listened to classic country his whole life is struggling to place you.

Anyhow, Connie Smith’s “Once A Day” blithely carried over from 1964, and then Sonny James unseated her with the kinda-upbeat devotional “You’re the Only World I Know.” James has a sturdy voice and it’s kind of a pleasant song if you can get past those busy background vocals that grate like an adult take on “It’s A Small World After All.” Buck Owens, thankfully, cleaned house with “I’ve Got A Tiger By the Tail,” which didn’t switch his winning formula up all that much but lucked upon a particularly memorable hook; don’t know whether all the clever ways they rhyme their way back to that distinct title phrase are more credited to Owens or first-round-draft-pick co-writer Harlan Howard, but either way they’re the bee’s knees.

Even better, somehow, was its successor: Roger Miller’s absolutely unimpeachable “King of the Road.”  The title sounds like it’d be a rockabilly or even heavy-metal ode to self-proclaimed badassery, but instead it’s a first-person ode to a hard-luck hobo whose status in life is never gonna match his wisdom hard-earned by doing menial jobs to sleep in shitty rooms in between hopping trains and foraging for used cigars. There’s not an unmemorable rhyme in the bunch, and the ironically swanky-sounding backing track swings timelessly. It’s the signature song in one of the greatest songwriter catalogs in country music history. It rules.

The buttoned-down Jim Reeves wasn’t going to beat that on its own terms but, fairly enough, “This Is It” is downright lovely, his voice as measured yet soulful as always. The chart took a hard left to make room for “Girl On The Billboard” by Del Reeves, a catchy, funny, and propulsive ramble that was an early peak for the trucker-song subgenre; Reeves politely snatched the mantle back after a couple of weeks and then passed it on to the similarly stately Eddy Arnold. “What’s He Doing In My World” came off like a less-memorable rewrite of Reeves’ signature “He’ll Have To Go,” a firm but oddly gentle request that one’s beloved tell her other boyfriend to kindly hit the bricks or else I’m going to politely saunter on out of here, my love. Maybe back when dating was called “courting” these kinds of rivalries played out way differently. Nowadays the song would be about kicking some pretty-boy’s ass in a parking lot somewhere.

Already-veteran Marty Robbins wrapped up Arnold’s short reign with one of his own. Maybe his last couple of self-penned #1s even left him kind of bored; it’s not like the guy who wrote “El Paso” and “Devil Woman” didn’t know what a great song was, so he nabbed a solid one from up-and-coming Canadian folkie Gordon Lightfoot (fun fact: awesomely made-up as it sounds, that’s not only his real name, he’s actually a “Jr.” so there’s at least TWO Gordon Lightfoots (Lightfeet?) and both of them have the middle name Meredith).  Between the cool whistling intro and that tumbling acoustic finger-picking, it really freshened up the Marty Robbins catalog and probably deserved a longer run.

But mid-‘60s Buck Owens doesn’t give a shit what you deserve; the #1 spot is his to take back, and he did with “Before You Go.”  It’s probably not in his top twenty or so most-remembered songs but it stayed on top for six weeks, and the fast-verse/slow-chorus thing was both unique and a nicely compact example of how hot-pickin’ Buck was also as solid and sympathetic a balladeer as anyone around. Jimmy Dean (yes, the breakfast sausage guy) jumped in when Buck was busy on a phone call or something and scored #1 with “The First Thing Every Morning (And The Last Thing Every Night),” a theme that would be better-essayed by John Schneider from The Dukes of Hazzard a couple decades later. 

“Yes Mr. Peters,” the next #1, was an odd one. Duet partners Roy Drusky and Priscilla Mitchell are largely forgotten to history; Mitchell was married to emerging star Jerry Reed, from around the time she recorded this until he eventually passed just short of their 50^th wedding anniversary. The song itself plays out like a scene from a movie musical (which were big business at the time), with a man’s mistress calling him at home and him doing his best to pretend it’s his boss calling him in to work late, hoping his presumably-gullible (or at least in-denial) wife doesn’t catch on. Like the megahit from the similarly unremembered Leroy Van Dyke, “Walk On By,” it’s catchy but a bit icky in how it seems to be an instruction manual for stealthy infidelity. Plus Drusky repeatedly calling his side piece “Mr. Peters” gets off-putting after the third or fourth time.

In September, journeyman singer Warner Mack took over with a kind-of-fluke hit, “The Bridge Washed Out,” about an unfortunate groom-to-be who can’t get across the river to his own wedding.  Jim Reeves politely took back over with “Is It Really Over?” Perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier, but both this and the aforementioned “This Is It” were posthumous releases after Reeves’ tragic death in a July 1964 air crash.  So fan bereavement might have had more to do with their success than the songs themselves, and even the song titles seem to hint at some sort of record-company opportunism to milk that pathos for all it was worth. When he sadly intones “it’s really over for me” at the end, the real-life circumstances make it hit different; to be fair, though, unearthed Jim Reeves tunes were charting as recently as 1980.

Buck Owens predictably took back the mantle in October with the weeper “Only You (Can Break My Heart),” but unpredictably only held it for a week before upstart Sonny James took it back with another sincere weeper “Behind The Tear.”  It craftily piles on the misery of what else is exactly behind said tear, but yet again those background singers overplay their hand annoyingly.  A few weeks of standard-issue country heartbreak gave way to one of the rarer-at-the-time occurrences in country music: a topical number about a hot-button issue.  “Hello Vietnam” followed a mournfully twangy lope from lyrics bemoaning leaving a sweetheart behind to more principled-in-theory lines like “we must stop communism in that land/or freedom will start slipping through our hands.”  It was sung by Johnnie Wright, sort-of-best-known as one half of the duo Johnnie & Jack as well as the husband of country star Kitty Wells; future legend Tom T. Hall actually wrote it, but perhaps it was by design that the actual record hinged on a more-anonymous singer that wouldn’t have to reckon with its legacy down the line.  Wright sounds so weary singing the lines of justification that (and this was probably accidental, given the industry’s right-wing bent) it’s like he’s not sure he believes them himself.

“Behind the Tear” took back the top spot after three weeks and immediately ceded it to Little Jimmy Dickens’ gloriously ridiculous “May The Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose,” which must have come off like a massive palate cleanser after weeks of heartbroken laments followed by a song about a divisive ongoing war.  It’s so specifically goofy yet catchy, it’s a little surprising Roger Miller didn’t have anything to do with it.  And the genuinely lovely next in line, Eddy Arnold’s “Make The World Go Away,” was a slow-dance classic with a chorus that might’ve resonated beyond romance in a time when the Vietnam War and all the turmoil that came with it was at such a fever pitch that even the country music charts couldn’t ignore it.  Interestingly, the last #1 of 1965 was Buck Owens again, but this time with “Buckaroo.”  One of the very-rare instrumentals to hit #1. In a time where folkies and rockers were protesting amidst occasional bursts of country-music pushback, I bet it was nice to just kick back for a moment and listen to guitars doing the singing.

THE TREND?

Whatever else was going on in the outside world, on country radio 1965 looks like a bit of a Jim Reeves tribute year, with proper acknowledgement of Buck Owens’ world-beating commercial peak and Roger Miller’s left-field smash also standing out among a field of relative non-entities grabbing a moment in the sun with just-ok songs.  “Hello Vietnam” was more anomaly than trend, nothing like that would come close to #1 for quite some time, and it didn’t particularly spur Johnnie Wright into becoming the Toby Keith of his day (but the Darryl Worley, maybe).  ’65 could also be remembered, fairly enough, as the year where Sonny James really broke through.  But first – and I don’t know why exactly this is hard – you gotta remember Sonny James.

THE RANKING

1. King of the Road (Roger Miller)
2. I’ve Got A Tiger By the Tail (Buck Owens)
3. Ribbon of Darkness (Marty Robbins)
4. Make The World Go Away (Eddy Arnold)
5. The Girl On The Billboard (Del Reeves)
6. Only You (Can Break My Heart) (Buck Owens)
7. Is It Really Over? (Jim Reeves)
8. Buckaroo (Buck Owens)
9. Before You Go (Buck Owens)
10. May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose (Little Jimmy Dickens)
11. Hello Vietnam (Johnnie Wright)
12. This Is It (Jim Reeves)
13. Behind The Tear (Sonny James)
14. The Bridge Washed Out (Warner Mack)
15. The First Thing Ev’ry Morning And The Last Thing Ev’ry Night (Jimmy Dean)
16. What’s He Doing In My World (Eddy Arnold)
17. You’re the Only World I Know (Sonny James)  
18. Yes Mr. Peters (Roy Drusky & Priscilla Mitchell) 

DOWN THE ROAD ...

Folk-rock scions Teddy Thompson and Rufus Wainwright added themselves to the fairly long list of folks who've covered Roger Miller's "King of the Road." It was probably both elevated and overshadowed by the fact that it was for the Brokeback Mountain soundtrack back in 2005 - the soundtrack was hardly central to most contemporary discussion about the film - but it's got plenty of mandolin-driven charm without the weight of context, subtext, and whatever other text you get out of a movie about a tragic gay sort-of-romance in the mid-century rural American west.

THE BIG IDEA

As both an artist and a competitive person, I’m usually a little ambivalent about anything that makes something as subjective as art into something as objective as a horse race. Or for that matter when subjective criteria are applied to a subjective medium … you end up with things like Grammys or Oscars that designate certain things as greater than others in the ultimately random frame of a year, and a lot of those judgments end up aging poorly.

And I know that even the semi-concrete nature of reaching #1 on a chart based on sales and airplay is less airtight than the aforementioned horse race. How much industry lobbing and biased reporting and solicited scale-tipping goes into a #1 hit, whether we’re talking about 60 years ago or today? Plus over the years, with more promoters and label big shots and international media conglomerates like Clear Channel in the mix, the general public’s influence on things in terms of record sales and radio request lines dwindled down to not a hell of a lot. Even before unpaid file piracy and shitty-royalty streaming came along to wreck the boat, it had already been pretty rocked by the gradual death of vinyl. Cassette and CD singles never really caught on (probably not a bad thing, environmental-wise) so once the radio DJs aren’t taking requests anymore, doesn’t that kind of seem like the hits are whatever the industry decides are going to be hits?

I don’t know when or where exactly we hit the difference between “we must play all the time this because it’s popular” and “this must be popular because we play it all the time.” I do know that sticking to a discussion of #1s is going to inherently minimize some really important artists (Dwight Yoakam and Roger Miller come to mind) or leave them out entirely. I see plenty of flaws in what I’m doing here, but I get a lot of enjoyment out of it too. I like lists and rundowns and countdowns and what-have-ya. I like talking about music and pop culture in general not only on its own merits but also in how it reflects the time in which it was made and the context in which it managed to catch on and possibly even endure. It’ll be obvious that I don’t love every country song or artist that ever broke through but the great outweighs the bad by so much that I think it at least averages out to me being able to say I love country music. And I love writing about it, so if you’ll humor me on this I guarantee you I’ll give you plenty to read.

1964 - nineteen-sixty-buckaroo

Just call it nineteen-sixty-Buckaroo, folks. 

Well, let’s not oversimplify.  Taking a look at the rundown, it was just generally a good year for country music, and a banner year in particular for one of its new favorite sons and innovators.  “Love’s Gonna Love Here” kept the top spot clamped down from mid-October 1963 to early February of 1964 after a tumultuous supercollider of a chart year.  He must’ve stepped out for a smoke break, because Marty Robbins swung in and grabbed it with a sonorous lament called “Begging to You,” a nice vocal showcase as usual but not on the level of his past chart-grabbers.  Stonewall Jackson, faded but resilient, jumped back into the fray with the story song “B.J. the D.J.” that probably did a little better at radio than it deserved thanks to making a disc jockey the protagonist instead of just a means to an end.  #1 was still kicked back to Robbins after a week though.

Speaking of slightly-faded, Lefty Frizzell – already a bit of an august presence, having scored most of his hits in the pre-chart-consolidation days – made a comeback with the rustic loveliness of “Saginaw, Michigan,” a solid-enough story song that gets extra points for not only being Lefty’s actual first #1, but also repeatedly rhyming Michigan with fisherman.  Having finally grabbed that brass ring, the honky-tonk innovator held it for all of March before Johnny Cash’s hilariously ornery “Understand Your Man” kicked down the door, put its dirty boots up on the kitchen table, and hung out throwing cigarette butts on the floor and stealing Bob Dylan melodies for a month and half before sauntering off into the late-spring heat for another case of beer.

And somebody had to clear that table, because it was Buck Owens time again.  Already firmly established as a chart presence, Buck was probably just showing off by hitting #1 with the spry, swinging “My Heart Skips A Beat” for a few weeks before slowing things down a bit by charting #1 with the heart-rending “Together Again” and, lest he leave a crowd unhappy, just sticking “My Heart Skips A Beat” back up there for a four-week encore.  The implication that the slower song’s run in the middle was analogous to, say, a heart skipping a beat?  Too damn cute, Buck.  Settle the hell down.

If he had to step aside for someone it might as well have been Roger Miller, just a wild young pup at the time, grinning and scatting his way through the unforgettable “Dang Me” for his first #1.  Anyone who might’ve filed him away prematurely under Sheb Wooley-esque novelty songs had another thing coming; they’d know that in time, but it was already a good sign that “Dang Me” dug its heels in for six weeks, the rare novelty song that everyone still wanted to hear repeatedly a month later.  “Roses are red and violets are purple/sugar’s sweet and so’s maple syrup-pull …”  Yeah that holds up.  Holds up real nice.

At some point Jim Reeves called seniority on these rowdy kids; “I Guess I’m Crazy” hit number one and leisurely camped there with its unintentionally ironic title for seven weeks, an autumnal audio companion to falling leaves I suppose.  It’s a bit tepid, but even great Jim Reeves songs are kind of on the tepid side … the pervasive baritone guitar notes distinguish it a bit, though.  If it was making you sleepy, Buck Owens was charging right back in with “I Don’t Care (Just As Long As You Love Me),” which might sound tame to kids these days but could rock a house from Bakersfield to Nashville back then.  When it finally took a breather around Thanksgiving, Connie Smith slipped in for her first #1 hit “Once A Day.”  Clever and sorrowful, lilting and punchy, it struck a few nice balances to close out the year and gave the future Mrs. Marty Stuart a signature song that could last the rest of her career.

THE TREND?

Well, the trend is that Buck Owens & His Buckaroos were hot-shit chart-dominators that only left a little room to breathe.  Other titans like Marty Robbins, Jim Reeves, and Lefty Frizzell (despite his notable milestone) were seeming a little tame by comparison: to truly hang, you had to bring some heat, whether it was Johnny Cash’s hyper-masculine swagger or Roger Miller’s reckless, kinda-daft originality.  Owens might not have re-invented fire with the Bakersfield sound, but he certainly had a spark that not everyone was capturing, and he was richly rewarded in the moment.

THE RANKING

1. Understand Your Man - Johnny Cash
2. Together Again - Buck Owens
3. Dang Me - Roger Miller
4. My Heart Skips a Beat - Buck Owens
5. Saginaw, Michigan - Lefty Frizzell
6. I Don't Care (Just As Long As You Love Me) - Buck Owens
7. Begging to You - Marty Robbins
8. Once a Day - Connie Smith
9. I Guess I'm Crazy - Jim Reeves
10. B.J. the D.J. - Stonewall Jackson

DOWN THE LINE ...

As an off-and-on barroom singer for many years, I can attest that it's hard to cover Johnny Cash without doing some sort of how-can-you-possibly impression of his big craggy baritone voice. So kudos to Austin psych-rockers Leopold and his Fiction for taking things in a decidedly different direction on their 2006 self-titled debut with a shaggy, shifty Bo Diddley beat and a gnarly gravel drawl worthy of Deer Tick.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8l1tjqRjo9U

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