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.