By
1970, The Beatles officially went their separate ways. The ‘60s were literally over; Vietnam wasn’t,
but the damage was done and the left-wing hope that protest could change things
was dying out. Culture, of course, doesn’t fit into neat little 10-year
bookends, and part of the reason is that things like the country music industry
take their sweet time responding to various cultural (pop or otherwise) forces
if they ever get around to acknowledging them at all.
Case
in point, 1970 was kind of a holding pattern. Some new faces debuted (at least
in terms of having a #1 hit) but they weren’t usually entirely new. For the
most part it was familiar-by-now faces taking familiar-by-now approaches. Warhorse-by-now
David Houston held down most of January with “(Baby Baby) I Know You’re A
Lady.” Though he’d broken through with florid ballads, at some point Houston
started incorporating bits of swing, R&B, and early rock & roll into
his sound, and it sold. The ‘70s was going to be a big era for ‘50s nostalgia
so Houston’s kinda-retro approach was at least lucky if not prescient.
Tom
T. Hall scored his first #1 as a performer with “A Week in a County Jail.” As a
songwriter, he’d already hit #1 with two lightning rods, “Hello Vietnam” and “Harper
Valley PTA,” and though he’d dabble in topical songs through his career usually
his sociopolitical points hung out in the margins (at most) of his indelible
story songs. Maybe “County Jail” was a subtle dig at the potential phoniness of
heartland values, or maybe it was just a more-or-less-true tale that felt worth
committing to song.
If
his longtime competitor David Houston was biting some retro sounds, Sonny James
was just snatching whole songs from the past, continuing his previous year’s
transition into a countrified-cover specialist. Can’t blame him for finding a
niche as a rising tide of newer stars started buying up some of his chart real
estate, and Brook Benton’s “It’s Just A Matter of Time” proved adaptable enough
that Glen Campbell and Randy Travis would eventually have country hits with it
too. I’ve never quite gleaned what’s so special about the slow-rolling tune,
but maybe it’s also just a matter of time.
Merle
Haggard kicked it back down the line with “The Fightin’ Side of Me.” Though he
wrote it and presumably meant it, later in life he’d show some ambivalence
about how his record label doubled down on the whole ornery-conservative thing
just as aggressively as they’d doubled down on the ex-con thing when he first
broke through. If “Okie From Muskogee” rolled it’s eyes at the hippies,
“Fightin’ Side” stared a damn hole in them and dared them to blink. Nobody was
going to mistake this for satire: it was a common viewpoint, and Haggard
expressed it with hard-eyed authenticity. It was so tense that someone had to
crack a joke.
So
we got “Tennessee Bird Walk,” a novelty tune from future trivia questions Jack
Blanchard and Misty Morgan, and it actually is a pretty fun listen. Blanchard
wrote it, but it sounds like something Roger Miller might’ve scribbled on a
napkin a few drinks into the day, catchy and absurdly funny but nicely offset
by the kinda-deadpan delivery of the husband-and-wife duo (as opposed to the
sort of hammy Ray Stevens bullshit that was lurking moistly just around the
corner). It was an amusing opening act for Charley Pride’s evergreen stomp “Is
Anybody Goin’ to San Antone,” a stoic telling of a breakup so devastating that
the protagonist apparently was driven to homeless drifterhood. Usually divorced
dudes just get a studio apartment and lease a sports car. This must’ve been
bad.
The
eternal tragedy-laced love described in Marty Robbins’
even-more-operatic-than-usual “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife” sounds even more
stressful. Gorgeous song, with that undeniable voice, but man it is a lot. The next #1 was a breather, with trucker-song
specialist Dave Dudley telling everyone a folksy little hard luck story with
the Tom T. Hall-penned “The Pool Shark.” Sonny James scored yet again with “My
Love,” which combined his newfound love of cover songs (this one was a 1965 pop
hit from Petula Clark) with his recent penchant for letting his sentimental
vocals ride atop an incongruously hard-charging beat. It’s pretty good.
But
“Hello Darlin’” was even better, of course. Conway Twitty found himself a new
peak as a songwriter and singer with a smartly-sketched, mightily-sung tale of
wrenchingly affectionate regret. It would’ve been rightly hailed as a
masterpiece twenty years prior or twenty years later. Unlike a lot of these songs,
there’s never been a particularly well-known cover of it, because it’s
absolutely inimitable and it doesn’t need to be tinkered with, ironically
juxtaposed, etc. Just embrace the damn thing and preserve it forever. “He Loves
Me All the Way” by Tammy Wynette is pretty good too. One of the few vocalists
of that day or any that could emote on a Twitty-esque level, her impressively
horny pledge to a guy who’s either naturally gifted or at least a devotedly
unselfish lover managed to be refreshingly direct without saying anything a
censor could reasonably object to.
Charley
Pride had another turn at it next, and “Wonder Could I Live There Anymore” was
in its own way as topical as “Okie From Muskogee” or “Stand By Your Man,” if
maybe headed in the other direction. “It’s nice to think about it/Maybe even
visit,” the narrator says about his rural roots before swinging into the title
phrase, and it’s a refreshingly frank take on a modern man’s relationship to
his farming forebearers. It’s too bad it’s sort of faded from public memory
relative to some of Pride’s other hits; maybe an industry that just started
getting comfortable with a black hitmaker still wasn’t ready to part with the
idea that rural living deserved only reverent nostalgia.
Speaking
of setting aside nostalgia, Sonny James went with a self-penned number instead
of another chestnut cover with “Don’t Keep Me Hangin’ On,” a sweetly heartsick
waltz with a bit of jangly kick to it. Next, landing his first #1 despite being
in the business since childhood, Hank Williams Jr. had some nostalgia to set
aside as well. The only son (far as we know) of a doomed music legend that he
could scarcely hope to remember in person, Williams Jr. spent a good chunk of
his childhood wearing little tailored cowboy suits and singing his dad’s old
hits at the behest of his mom and scores of bereaved paying fans. Whatever
psychic toll that might’ve taken, he still transitioned in adulthood into a
successful artist finding his own voice, going back and forth between songs
by/about his father and more original material as he’d continue to do
throughout his eventually-iconic career. On “All For the Love of Sunshine,” his
first #1 after getting as high as #3 in the previous years, you can hear traces
of that wild rock-inflected, nothing-like-his-dad vocal prowess that would
eventually take center stage. But you can also hear a man playing it safe with
a wholesome string-sweetened song for an industry that wasn’t ready to let him
grow all the way up just yet.
It’s
successor at #1, Ray Price’s “For the Good Times,” was about as grown as it
gets. Its writer, Kris Kristofferson, found that as with Tom T. Hall, the
industry was ready for his material before it was ready for his undiluted self.
And the venerated singer of this version might’ve been dealing with a bit of
frustration himself; Price was a semi-regular chart presence through the 1960s,
occasionally getting as high as #2, but hadn’t scored the top spot since 1959. This
rapturously tender number was just the tipping point he needed, a mature and
rueful farewell that rises well above (or maybe soars partly due to?) its
countrypolitan trappings. Another storied music-biz vet, Jerry Lee Lewis,
eventually unseated him with his own lovesick “There Must Be More to Love Than
This.” It’s not as elegant as “For the Good Times” (what in hell could be?) but
it’s a worthy addition to the conflicted-cheating-anthem pantheon.
Kristofferson
had another vicarious go at it with Johnny Cash’s booming take on the rueful
“Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down,” with the Man In Black lending his lived-in vocal
authority to his buddy’s snapshots of dissolute, suddenly-unwanted bachelorhood;
two revered outlaws teaming up to let everyone know that maybe happy
domesticity is the real prize. Tammy Wynette sure as hell would’ve agreed with
them: if you think “Run, Woman, Run” is about seeking justified independence,
you have not been paying attention. It’s a soft-spoken, admittedly lovely
exhortation to a young woman to hurry back to the man she just ditched and make
nice ASAP lest she die alone.
The
next two stints belonged to Charley Pride’s “I Can’t Believe That You’ve
Stopped Loving Me” and Conway Twitty’s “Fifteen Years Ago,” which we might as
well lump together. Both are solid if not-unforgettable honky-tonk weepers
about how emotions sometimes grow impervious to time, both reliable entries
from guys who were clearly becoming the new guard of consistent hitmakers. Sonny
James followed with a three-week run on another Brook Benton song, “Endlessly.”
He broke out the whole jittery-beat/sweet-vocal trick again, but to be fair it
was not dissimilar to the original. Both are lovely.
Loretta
Lynn stepped away from her established role as potential-adultress-confronter
and found a whole new signature song with “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” which in retrospect
is weird to think only spent a week at #1. It would eventually be revived, of
course, a decade later for the hit movie about Lynn’s life. Affectionate nostalgia was just as good a fit
for her as righteous hostility. Despite the song’s immortality, it would be
shuffled off the chart by the also-undeniable “Rose Garden,” but since that one
only grabbed the last week of 1970 before extending its run well into 1971,
we’ll save it for next time.
THE
TREND?
Despite
the retro trappings offered up by David Houston and Sonny James, the snapshots
of rustic childhoods in “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and elsewhere, and the career
revivals of already-warhorses like Ray Price and Jerry Lee Lewis, the #1
rundown for 1970 gives you at least a whiff of hunger for new perspectives to
match a new decade. Kris Kristofferson and Tom T. Hall, two writers who’d help
redefine Nashville for a while, scored two #1’s apiece. Country music had a
long history of mostly straightforward songs where the meaning often had to be
enhanced in the delivery; guys like Hall and Kristofferson could write
something that was almost as impressive on the page as it was to the ear. Alongside
statements both bold (“Fightin’ Side of Me”) and relatively subtle (“Wonder
Could I Live There Anymore”), Nashville remained a pretty solid home for
singers with something to say. Statement-averse artists like Buck Owens might’ve
had more of an uphill climb all the sudden.
THE
RANKING
- For the Good Times (Ray Price)
- Hello Darlin’ (Conway Twitty)
- Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down (Johnny Cash)
- The Fightin’ Side of Me (Merle Haggard)
- Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone (Charley Pride)
- A Week in a County Jail (Tom T. Hall)
- Wonder Could I Live There Anymore (Charley Pride)
- Baby Baby (I Know You’re A Lady) (David Houston)
- Coal Miner’s Daughter (Loretta Lynn)
- My Woman, My Woman, My Wife (Marty Robbins)
- Don’t Keep Me Hangin’ On (Sonny James)
- Fifteen Years Ago (Conway Twitty)
- Endlessly (Sonny James)
- He Loves Me All the Way (Tammy Wynette)
- There Must Be More to Love Than This (Jerry Lee Lewis)
- My Love (Sonny James)
- I Can’t Believe That You’ve Stopped Loving Me (Charley Pride)
- Tennessee Bird Walk (Jack Blanchard & Misty Morgan)
- All For the Love of Sunshine (Hank Williams Jr.)
- It’s Just A Matter of Time (Sonny James)
- The Pool Shark (Dave Dudley)
- Run, Woman, Run (Tammy Wynette)
DOWN THE ROAD ...
Texas musician Doug Sahm was a onetime childhood fiddle prodigy who grew into even greater talents as a restlessly creative and wildly versatile singer/songwriter/musician respected by everyone from psychedelic hippies to honky-tonk true-believers to blues diehards to the cross-cultural Tex-Mex music community. Famously, the San Antone native had named his breakout '60s band the Sir Douglas Quintet just in case they could fool the record-buying public into thinking their hits like "She's About a Mover" were real-deal British Invasion pop that just happened to sound like Tex-Mex honky-tonk psychedelic blues. Sahm cycled through various bands and genres and record labels, snowballing his legend through the decades until 1990 when he and his similarly legendary buddies Freddy Fender, Augie Meyers, and Flaco Jimenez formed a supergroup called The Texas Tornados. They didn't have the marquee value of the Highwaymen or Traveling Wilburys, but they had better chemistry than any of them and attacked the Charley Pride classic "Is Anybody Goin' to San Antone" like it was their birthright. Good thing ol' CP had over two dozen other #1s to fall back on, because he wasn't ever getting this one back.
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