1961 - come back to the five & dime Jimmy Dean ...

 If Ferlin Husky’s “Wings of A Dove” closed out 1960 on a Christmas-friendly gospel note, Johnny Horton’s “North To Alaska” might’ve served as good company for listeners once the celebration was over and everyone noticed it was just too damn cold.  A catchy little Gold Rush ballad buoyed by what sounds like a pickaxe riff and background singers chanting “mush!”, it’s more artifact than classic, and “Wings” nabbed its #1 spot back for a couple weeks on the tail end of February.

Already-dependable hitmaker Marty Robbins must have fired up the last snowplow before spring hit; “Don’t Worry” rocketed up the charts as March came in, and perched there for ten weeks.  Sixty years later it’s not hard to see why.  For a lovesick lament it’s got no lack of swagger; if they’d somehow missed it in the lyrics, that echo-drenched baritone guitar solo would’ve given it all it needed.  But those lyrics!  “Don’t pity me, cause I’m feelin’ blue/Don’t be ashamed, it might have been you” is about as fatalistic and resilient as a breakup song is bound to get while still stopping just shy of a kiss-off anthem.  Robbins, as gifted a tenor vocalist as country music knew then or now, brings an almost operatic drama to bittersweet lines that still hold up great.

When that one finally let up a bit, “Hello Walls” by Faron Young swooped in with another stoicly clever lament; it’s not as impressive as “Don’t Worry” but only in the sense that Peyton Manning maybe isn’t quite as good as Tom Brady.  For one, it’s Willie Nelson’s first #1 as a songwriter, and though Young’s a distinctive vocalist himself you can feel him digging in to the literally-offbeat rhythm baked into your standard (meaning: classic) Nelson tune.

Next up was “Heartbreak USA” by Kitty Wells, who’d seen her biggest success pre-modern-chart but scored a nice little comeback of sorts.  A lament from the POV of someone whose sweetheart has shipped off to the military, it might have struck a particular chord in the year of America’s first official troop deployment in Vietnam.  Granted, she’s more vigilant about the chance that some “geisha girl” or “fraulein” might steal his heart than that he’ll succumb to a violent and possibly needless death, so maybe this was pretty dated within a year or so.  Much more enduring was Patsy Cline’s first #1, “I Fall to Pieces” which took over for (surprisingly only) a couple of weeks in August; it must have sounded haunted even to fresh ears, Cline’s soulful yet note-perfect hurt and indignation spilling out of the speakers like bitter honey, but of course it’d take on more resonance in just a few years.  “Tender Years,” by George Jones at his most wistful and empathetic, briefly took hold in its wake and traded the top spot throughout the rest of the year with Leroy Van Dyke’s catchy little infidelity instructional “Walk On By” and an extended stretch of Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John.”  Solid and memorable tunes all, “Walk On By” would in 1994 be recognized in Billboard’s 100^th anniversary issue as the biggest country hit of the modern era with a combined 19 weeks at #1, which is weird considering how much Van Dyke’s contemporaries came to overshadow him in the years since.  “Big Bad John,” for its part, would cross over to #1 on the pop charts; somewhere between a murder ballad, a novelty song, and a heroic anthem, it was at least one of the era’s most distinct country songs if not necessarily its most timeless.

THE TREND?:

It was a little harder to parse an obvious through-line in 1961, except maybe to note that the #1 spot was passed around considerably more (not even counting the multiple times it boomeranged back to “Walk On By”) and, unlike ’59 and ’60, solo female artists actually got a turn at it.  And just one years’ worth of recency bias revealed more names that still hold some reverent sway, with Patsy Cline and George Jones and arguably Marty Robbins (and can we start counting Willie Nelson now too?) hanging in there as household names today.  Jimmy Dean too, if your household digs breakfast sausage.

THE RANKING

1. Don’t Worry - Marty Robbins
2. I Fall to Pieces - Patsy Cline
3. Big Bad John - Jimmy Dean
4. Tender Years - George Jones
5. Hello Walls - Faron Young
6. Walk On By - Leroy Van Dyke
7. North to Alaska - Johnny Horton
8. Heartbreak USA - Kitty Wells

DOWN THE ROAD ...

The 1994 one-off project Rhythm, Country & Blues was probably the best out of the various cover-oriented projects that had a little mini-boom inside the bigger boom of '90s mainstream country. Pairing up various combos of classic R&B/soul artists with country artists of varying vintage, it strikes gold or at least some sort of interesting alchemy more often than not ... Marty Stuart and the Staple Singers covering The Band, Conway Twitty and Sam Moore tag-teaming "Rainy Night in Georgia," etc. Probably the album's most meditative piece was Aaron Neville and Trisha Yearwood (who we'll be discussing eventually) blending soulful harmonies on a cover of Patsy Cline's "I Fall to Pieces."