1973 - bump bump bum ...

 It was still free-for-all time.  Long runs at #1 for individual songs were becoming a thing of the past.  There was just too much competition (and perhaps some behind-the-scenes cooperation too, making sure more folks got a turn at the top for promotional purposes).  Haggard, Pride, Lynn, Twitty and Wynette were about as close to sure things as you could get, with various wild cards old and new poking their heads in.  Ray Price, for example, was continuing his victory lap into 1973 with “She’s Got to Be A Saint,” which combined Sinatra-level smoothness with classic-country humility, a “My Way” for flawed-but-noble guys who loved their wife more than they loved themselves.  

Barrel-chested newbie Joe Stampley came rolling in from the swamp-rock scene with a hearty love tune called “Soul Song,” announcing a new enduring presence if not exactly a newly-minted superstar or influence.  Tom T. Hall followed up with one of his most beloved singles, “Old Dogs, Children, & Watermelon Wine,” cementing his reputation as one of the very best at squeezing a novella’s worth of narrative poignance into three or so radio-ready minutes.  Seriously, was anyone ever better about sounding like they were genuinely nostalgic already for the everyday moment they were in?  Conway Twitty ably chased it with “She Needs Someone to Hold Her (When She Cries),” which sounded sincere enough about swooping in to pick up the pieces of a failed love affair, because Conway Twitty sounds sincere enough about absolutely everything.  I’m not saying he never half-assed a vocal in his life, I’m just saying I haven’t heard any recorded evidence of it yet.

Statement songs started to make a mini-comeback as winter turned to spring.  Merle Haggard’s “I Wonder If They Ever Think of Me” fell on the bleak side of wistful and still made it to #1; like his first triumphs, it was a prison song, but this time it was in Vietnam.  If Haggard could muster public sympathy for a petty outlaw, you can imagine what he could do for a doomed young soldier.  Loretta Lynn followed up by doing what she could to demand a little understanding for divorced gals seen as loose and easy prey for guys up-to-and-including their best friends’ husbands on “Rated ‘X’.”  It’s a fun ride on a surprisingly gnarly little bounce of a guitar riff, and her vocal sass more than makes up for lyrics that sometimes seem to meander away from the valid point.  Chart newcomer Cal Smith pulled off the hefty feat of making a similarly sympathetic plea for philandering drunks everywhere on “The Lord Knows I’m Drinking,” a self-assuredly catchy ¾ stomp about telling some hectoring church lady who followed you into the bar to piss off so you can keep getting loaded with your girlfriend.  Because anyhow, you see, you’re gonna talk to God directly about this later on.  Modern listeners might alternate between thinking this is kind of dickish and wishing someone on the charts nowadays had the guts to toss this sort of pipe bomb against conservative piety.

Deserving mainstay Tammy Wynette chimed in next with “Til I Get It Right,” the title of which might have alluded to finally not letting Billy Sherrill write the damn song.  Vocal powerhouse that she is, she masterfully dumps little measured teaspoons of heartache on you before sloshing the whole pitcher at you and making you thank her for it.  She somehow ceded to another newcomer (and future obscurity) Barbara Fairchild, whose furry anthem “The Teddy Bear Song” took detailed lyrical pains to describe the sort of inanimate object that she longed to transform into to avoid heartache.  Great voice though, even if it signified a bit of springtime doldrums.  Lynn Anderson’s “Keep Me In Mind” sounded like cocktail-lounge filler without the added elegance of old Patsy Cline records.  Freddie Hart’s “Super Kind of Woman” was more of the hyper-devotional balladry that he was starting to run into the ground.  Charley Pride’s “A Shoulder to Cry On” was pretty good by comparison, although the storyline about boomeranging back to a devoted but callously unappreciated former lover after your other shit didn’t work out had a bit of a sour aftertaste.  But it was way better than Donna Fargo’s (and the industry’s) 1973 nadir “Superman.”  A clumsy, chintzy, poorly-written and indifferently-produced piece of country-pop fluff, it’s hard to imagine why this existed unless it was a tie-in for a Hee Haw skit with some yokel doing pratfalls in a superhero costume.  But that doesn’t explain how it ended up at #1.  I double-checked and this was five years before the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie so it’s not even a cynical cash-in.  So weird.

The #1 spot desperately needed some elegance, and that’s what it got.  Charlie Rich’s “Behind Closed Doors” gave everyone a break from ballads of infidelity and general unhappiness to lay out a tale of a married couple whose secrets were actually pretty damn sweet.  “Behind Closed Doors” floated the idea that proper classy married ladies could be total hellcats in the sack.  Huge if true, and a fine song made even finer by Rich’s signature luxurious-yet-masculine delivery.  “Come Live With Me,” by Hee Haw co-host and masterful picker Roy Clark, was the first and last #1 of his overall-not-half-bad career; a bit lightweight, but it was warm and classy as well. 

Things got a bit saltier as a couple of new female faces took over.  Barely out of her teens, future legend Tanya Tucker sounded almost implausibly gritty on a weird but memorable number called “What’s Your Mama’s Name.”  It doesn’t quite spell out that the star of its narrative, a heartsick drunk looking for a long-lost lover who bore him a daughter, spent decades wrongly imprisoned because the law thought he was trying to do something way more unwholesome in his search for the kid. But it’s the logical (if wildly depressing) conclusion.  Jeanne Pruett’s “Satin Sheets” was sort of a delayed answer song to some of those creaky old tunes where a guy complains about how some woman doesn’t truly love him even though he spent all this money on her; straightforward and catchy, if a bit tart, the song’s remembered more than Pruett.  “Satin Sheets” would boomerang back to #1 a few weeks after dropping off, but Pruett would mostly fade out of future Top 10’s. 

Squeezing in between the “Sheets” were Johnny Rodriguez with “You Always Come Back to Hurting Me” and Tammy Wynette again with “Kids Say the Darnedest Things.”  The former was a rare breakthrough for a Hispanic artist in the genre; Rodriguez was just getting started and would prove to endure for awhile.  The latter was a bit of a trip back to the well for Wynette, calling back to hits like “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” and “I Don’t Wanna Play House” with another Billy Sherrill co-write about the impact of marital strife on innocent little kids.  Not a bad song, exactly, just something she’d done better before.  Charley Pride, meanwhile, broke out of his usual mid-tempo groove with “Don’t Fight the Feelings of Love,” a charmingly upbeat trifle that’s been largely lost to time. 

It was succeeded by Kris Kristofferson’s first and only #1 hit as a vocalist, “Why Me.”  Seriously, he never even cracked the Top 40 with anything else as a solo vocalist (the eventual Highwaymen comeback is its own thing).  Ray Price, Sammi Smith, and Johnny Cash could take his songs to #1, and artists as diverse as Janis Joplin and Al Green could score with them in other genres, but it took a quasi-hymn with a huge dose of background singers to boost Kristofferson into this particular niche of public favor.  Sure, he didn’t have a technically great voice, but did Hank Williams or Ernest Tubb?  I doubt Kris minded much … his albums sold fine and garnered critical acclaim, he was putting his rugged good looks to use as a budding movie star, and presumably buckets of royalty cash were always just a mailbox walk away for him.  Maybe his soul needed Jesus as much as his enduring song suggests, but the rest of him didn’t need Billboard all that badly.

Loretta Lynn, meanwhile, couldn’t help but have #1 hits and “Love Is The Foundation” was yet another one, a sunny little mid-tempo number lauding the role romance can play in a couple’s general sense of well-being (the song makes it sound sexier than I just did, even if it didn’t kick up as many sparks as her Conway duets around the same time).  Donna Fargo then popped back up to bum everyone out with “You Were Always There,” a bittersweet song about a dutiful but emotionally distant father that I’m going to assume was at least somewhat autobiographical.  I’m sure the idea resonates with a lot of kids and parents, and maybe it made for a nice wakeup call for some of the loving-but-uncommunicative among us, but unfortunately there’s a bit of dated chintziness to the production and (at least to these ears) some clumsiness to the lyrics that have left it stuck in its era.

Jerry Reed’s “Lord Mr. Ford” fortunately swooped in to save the day.  All motor-mouthed humor, shit-hot guitar picking, and good-ol’-boy charisma, it’s even funnier in retrospect that the man best known to many audiences for the Smokey & the Bandit movies had a #1 hit bitching about what a burden automobiles are.  Freddie Hart got in one last smoothly devotional love song with “Trip to Heaven;” as mentioned in the past, Hart was apparently a good dude and offhanded badass, but unlike Jerry Reed’s cinematic big rig, as an artist he only had one gear.  His last #1 was the upbeat bridge to Loretta Lynn and Conway Twitty’s raucously romantic “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man,” and even though Twitty was portraying the one from Mississippi he lets loose some pretty convincing Cajun-style “ayyyyyy-eee’s” as they both sound as sincerely horny as ever.

Merle Haggard’s live single “Everybody’s Had the Blues” was pretty damn charming too, an old-fashioned number even by his standards that showed off some subtly impressive vocal prowess.  Conway Twitty could only stay out of #1 for so long though: he was right back up there with “You’ve Never Been This Far Before.”  It’s still one of his best-known songs, partly for that memorable “bump-bump bum” vocal hook that stands in for more explicit descriptions, and partly because the lyrics that actually are there are such a heady mix of earnest affection, horndog solicitation, and florid romance – each one heightened by Twitty’s usual all-in vocal delivery – that it’s impossible not to react to.  And sometimes those reactions might be at least a giggle, if not a flat-out incredulous laugh.  Twitty was already 40 in 1973, and the song’s popularity meant he was singing it live well into middle age, so a song about shepherding a young lover through her first round of all-the-way might hit a bit of an ick factor as well.  But then again, Marty Robbins wasn’t really a gunfighter either, so why rule out that it’s a performance in character?  End of the day: great record.

So was Tanya Tucker’s “Blood Red & Going Down.”  Like her previous 1973 #1 and her previous-year breakthrough “Delta Dawn,” it’s a Southern Gothic throwdown rich with ominous harmonies and dark lyrical detail.  Over the course of three singles, this teenage kid went from jilted insanity to wrongful imprisonment to a flat-out murder song about a kid roped into following her dad around on the hunt for her bar-hoppin’ mama.  Pretty wild shit at any age.  Ray Price’s suavely grateful “You’re the Best Thing That’s Ever Happened To Me” continued his mid-to-late-career comeback; it was his last #1 single before easing gracefully back down the charts (Gladys Knight would have an R&B hit with it before long).  Newly-minted star Johnny Rodriguez took over the #1 mantle after a week with possibly his best-known (and self-penned) song, “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico.”  A sepia-toned acoustic ramble that fit its hitchhiking subject matter to a T, it held on for two weeks before George Jones & Tammy Wynette’s “We’re Gonna Hold On” um, held on.  While their marital life was reportedly (and unsurprisingly) rife with ups and downs, on record they summoned one hell of a twangy tenderness out of each other, bending notes together as easily as most couples fold laundry.

The chart warhorses would briefly give way to another kiddo.  If Tanya Tucker came across like the teenage reincarnation of some hard-worn honky tonk angel, Marie Osmond was another brand entirely.  A smiley showbiz kid ladling on the schmaltz, hitting the notes but (at least for the moment) missing the point.  “Paper Roses” isn’t bad, exactly, but it’s all dazzle, a ‘70s talent show bid that just somehow ended up on the country charts.  Charlie Rich’s takeover “The Most Beautiful Girl” is kind of schmaltzy too I suppose, but Rich had the vocal depth and maturity to set the hook and make it so timeless George Costanza would be quoting it on national TV 20 years later.  Hell, so is Charley Pride’s next #1, “Amazing Love” … it’s sweet and all, and Pride sounds as warm and human as Marie Osmond hadn’t gotten around to sounding yet, but it’s greeting-card stuff from an artist whose best work offered much more. 

Merle Haggard dished out “more” on a regular basis, as a singer and songwriter, and the year-closing “If We Make It Through December” was no exception.  Bleak by Christmas-song standards, there’s still a warm ray of optimism poking through the laments of a laid-off factory worker (and father) staring down the barrel of an impoverished holiday.  The record made it through December just fine, scoring two weeks apiece in 1973 and 1974 (we’re ranking it here) with a mini-portrait a lot of listeners could probably see themselves in.  Sad but resilient, regretful but optimistic, unmistakably down but not quite out.  Haggard was one of the most successful artists of his generation at this point, but he hadn’t forgotten what it was like to not be.

THE TREND?

Although it seems like a pretty big deal to suddenly have two girls (Tanya Tucker and Marie Osmond) barely in their teens breaking through in an industry where both the artists and the listeners seemed to lean middle-aged, I don’t know if it quite qualified as a “youth movement.”  It seems more like a bid for a bunch of grandparents to “aww” over than a plea for kids to ditch rock & roll for country music; if it was the latter, wouldn’t a few 20-year-old faces make more sense?  If there was a youth movement maybe it was Johnny Rodriguez and Joe Stampley, even though that feels weird to type.

At any rate, the teen girl micro-invasion was but a blip on the general adult-ness of ‘70s country music.  The core artists of the era were successful and productive with sounds and lyrics that would’ve mostly been at home on the chart 10-15 years prior, so the audience had plenty of time and impetus to form an idea of what “real” country music was; fifty years later, when fans pontificate about “real” country music they still mean the likes of Merle Haggard and Loretta Lynn more often than not.  As much as any year surrounding it, in 1973 if you listen close you can really hear those bootheels digging in. 

THE RANKING 

1. Old Dogs, Children and Watermelon Wine (Tom T. Hall)
2. You’ve Never Been This Far Before (Conway Twitty)
3. If We Make it Through December (Merle Haggard)
4. Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico (Johnny Rodriguez)
5. Rated ‘X’ (Loretta Lynn)
6. ‘Til I Get It Right (Tammy Wynette)
7. Why Me (Kris Kristofferson)
8. The Most Beautiful Girl (Charlie Rich)
9. Behind Closed Doors (Charlie Rich)
10. Blood Red and Goin’ Down (Tanya Tucker)
11. What’s Your Mama’s Name Child (Tanya Tucker)
12. Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man (Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn)
13. Everybody’s Had the Blues (Merle Haggard)
14. You’re the Best Thing That’s Ever Happened to Me (Ray Price)
15. We’re Gonna Hold On (Tammy Wynette & George Jones)
16. I Wonder if They Ever Think of Me (Merle Haggard)
17. Lord, Mr. Ford (Jerry Reed)
18. She’s Got to Be A Saint (Ray Price)
19. She Needs Someone to Hold Her (When She Cries) (Conway Twitty)
20. The Lord Knows I’m Drinkin’ (Cal Smith)
21. Kids Say the Darnedest Things (Tammy Wynette)
22. A Shoulder to Cry On (Charley Pride)
23. Love is the Foundation (Loretta Lynn)
24. Super Kind of Woman (Freddie Hart)
25. Satin Sheets (Jeanne Pruett)
26. Soul Song (Joe Stampley)
27. You Always Come Back to Hurting Me (Johnny Rodriguez)
28. Come Live With Me (Roy Clark)
29. The Teddy Bear Song (Barbara Fairchild)
30. Paper Roses (Marie Osmond)
31. Keep Me In Mind (Lynn Anderson)
32. Superman (Donna Fargo)

DOWN THE ROAD ...

One of my favorite accidental music discoveries was hanging out in Sundance Records (RIP, as with most record stores) in San Marcos, TX, sifting through the vinyl racks and then becoming acutely aware that something wonderful and kind of unconventional was playing over the shop system; I couldn't pick out Bobby "Blue" Bland's voice specifically, but clearly an old-school R&B dude was lovingly having his way with a set of country standards recast as lush but vital soul. A quick discussion with the counter guy (maybe it was my friend, excellent music writer Richard Skanse, but perhaps I'm conflating that with another visit) revealed the identity of the singer and quickly made the sale. Get On Down With Bobby Bland is an album so perfect that I guess music history could barely handle it: it's not on any of the streaming services and pretty hard to even find on CD, and even in the omnivorous environs of YouTube it's only available at the moment in full-album form. Fortunately the whole thing's great, with Bland tackling songs from Merle Haggard ("Today I Started Loving You Again"), Johnny Paycheck ("Someone to Give My Love To") and perhaps most inevitably, a tender but empassioned take on Conway Twitty's "You've Never Been This Far Before." It's up there with Al Green's "For the Good Times" and a few key Ray Charles numbers as the greatest examples of artists from black-oriented genres tackling country classics and reshaping them into something differently majestic from the original. God bless the golden days of American musical cross-pollination. It's so damn good.