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 50th
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
- King of the Road (Roger Miller)
- I’ve Got A Tiger By the Tail (Buck Owens)
- Ribbon of Darkness (Marty Robbins)
- Make The World Go Away (Eddy Arnold)
- The Girl On The Billboard (Del Reeves)
- Only You (Can Break My Heart) (Buck Owens)
- Is It Really Over? (Jim Reeves)
- Buckaroo (Buck Owens)
- Before You Go (Buck Owens)
- May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose (Little Jimmy Dickens)
- Hello Vietnam (Johnnie Wright)
- This Is It (Jim Reeves)
- Behind The Tear (Sonny James)
- The Bridge Washed Out (Warner Mack)
- The First Thing Ev’ry Morning And The Last Thing Ev’ry Night (Jimmy Dean)
- What’s He Doing In My World (Eddy Arnold)
- You’re the Only World I Know (Sonny James)
- Yes Mr. Peters (Roy Drusky & Priscilla Mitchell)
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