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