The 10+ Club - Jim Reeves

AUTHOR'S NOTE: When an artist hits the milestone of having ten #1 hits, i think that deserves a little extra attention to what they meant to their era and country music in general. Some of these artists are unimpeachable greats, others kind of seem more like a right place/right time situation, but clearly they were on to something worth talking about. So welcome to a new recurring feature for this blog.

• Total # of #1s: 11
• First #1: “Mexican Joe” (1953) if we’re covering everything, “Billy Bayou” (1959) if we’re sticking to the consolidated chart era
• Last #1 (for now!): “I Won’t Come in While He’s There” (1967)
• Best #1: “He’ll Have to Go” (1960)
• Honorable Mentions: “Four Walls” (1957), “Distant Drums” (1966), “Blue Side of Lonesome” (1966)
• Worst #1?: “Billy Bayou” (1959) (it’s really not bad … just not much to it)
• Best also-rans: “Adios Amigo” (1962), “Welcome to My World” (1964)

Like a lot of people who enjoy staying up too late and having conversation with friends and family over drinks, I like to throw out conversation starters like “who’d be your dream artist to see perform in their prime?” For me, with the caveat that I’ve seen most of my big faves, I think I’d go with the gone-way-before-my-time Otis Redding. For my late Mom, her quick and decisive answer was Jim Reeves. It probably would’ve been Elvis if she hadn’t gotten to see Elvis already. But that box being checked, it was Jim Reeves.

Her parents/my grandparents were big Jim Reeves fans too, but that sort of made more sense. They were from a generation that considered rock & roll noisy, morally suspicious, and unrelatable. Guys like Jim Reeves were tailor-made for them. Smooth, courtly, suave but not rakish. Capable of stirring the emotions but with a certain amount of manly reserve. There’s just a clean-cut, trustworthy charm to the guy that certainly comes across on his records, but it’s hard to imagine it blowing your mind in a live-music setting. Pleasant, sure. Exciting? Hard to picture.

But the thing is, a lot of Jim Reeves fans had to settle for keeping him on their theoretical dream show list because the man’s life was tragically short, cut short not by unwise self-indulgence but by that other all-too-common talent-killing combo of bad luck and small aircraft. I bet Jim Reeves and Otis Redding concerts didn’t have a ton in common, but their deaths were a tragic echo of one another’s and at least a half-dozen other notables of their generation.

I don’t intend to make every one of these 10+ Club entries into a highly personalized reflection that’s more about my own history than the artists’. Jim Reeves deserves a ton of credit for blending his small-town Texas charm with a hearty dose of Rat Pack urbanity and no shortage of skillfully measured vocal soul. He certainly doesn’t get as much modern love as his rowdier and more haunted contemporaries; his style was just the thing for the America he came up in, but along with his untimely passing it left his music sort of stuck in its era. But I heard him plenty growing up, thanks to my grandparents’ old records, and when I think of Jim Reeves I’ll think of playing “Welcome To My World” as loudly as possible in my truck stereo on the Matagorda shore one weekend as what was left of the family and a few close friends scattered my mother KaSandra’s ashes on the beach and waves one windy Saturday in 2013. Stuck in his era or not, he’s always going to have a special place in at least three generations of my family’s hearts.