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.