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.

1972 - Hart's on fire ...

 In the 1971 column we touched on how, retrospectively, Sonny James’ incredible run of 16 #1 hits felt like it came from some alternate universe where a singer who’s largely forgotten today was beating the likes of George Jones and Buck Owens at their own game.  Well, 1972 might’ve been from that same universe, where apparently the sun rose and set on the sprawling chart empire of Freddie “Easy Loving” Hart and everyone else was just picking up his scraps. Well, his and Donna Fargo’s, anyway.

1972 started off conventionally enough, with Charley Pride and “Kiss an Angel Good Morning” riding high outta 1971, but standing back and looking at it, it would turn out to be a curious year of anomalies, one-offs, and cool little comebacks. Keep in mind that we’re just looking at #1s here. It was starting to look like the Nashville radio-and-records business were doing what they could to make sure everyone who was talented enough or patient enough would get their turn eventually, as opposed to the late ‘50s when a small handful of artists might hog the whole year. But there still wasn’t room atop the mountain for everyone. Slightly lower down the charts, folks like Dolly Parton and Waylon Jennings were laying groundwork, Tom T. Hall and George Jones were still having hits, it just wasn’t brass ring time for them. Folks who’d have far shorter peaks just happened to be on a roll.

Jerry Lee Lewis took over from Charley Pride with a double-sided hit. “Would You Take Another Chance on Me” was nominally the single, but the B-side of “Me & Bobby McGee” got more attention. Janis Joplin’s landmark rock version of the Kris Kristofferson song had been a posthumous hit the previous year; Kristofferson’s original had already run its course, and country radio wasn’t going to touch the Joplin version, but they were happy to make room for a boogie-woogie version by a middle-aged rock & roll pioneer settling into the country phase of his career. Plus “Would You…” was pretty unmemorable, especially by comparison.    

Merle Haggard took over for the rest of January with “Carolyn,” a uniquely pensive number that posited some men were inevitably cheaters and all men could be driven to it “if he’s treated bad at home,” which was surprisingly written by Tommy Collins instead of Billy Sherrill. Nuanced, dark, and downbeat, it doesn’t sound like a guaranteed #1 but Haggard was on a roll. Loretta Lynn’s February hit “One’s On the Way” was a ton of fun, especially relatively: the verses described the travails of the rich and glamorous, and the shifting choruses described scenes of domestic working-class chaos, coming back around to the hook that yet another baby was about to enter the fray. Written with characteristic humor by Shel Silverstein and seemingly customized for Lynn, it’s a keeper.

Faron Young, who’d spent a few years taking a backseat, came surging back with the undeniable “It’s Four in the Morning,” as fine an execution of heartsick vocal prowess as that year (or most years) would ever see. Tammy Wynette’s even-better voice would yet again serve as mouthpiece for a creepy Billy Sherrill number called “Bedtime Story,” in which a doting mother recasts her husband ditching her for some other gal (“because oh what big eyes she had”) and then boomeranging back when it  didn’t work out (“because he missed his little princess and his queen’) as a tale worthy of tears of joy when recounting it to her little daughter. Keep those expectations low, baby girl.

Freddie Hart’s 1971 breakthrough with “Easy Loving” had more legs than history might suggest. First off, though he might sound like just another tenor-voiced romantic crooner, Hart was more than a bit of a badass. Dude lied about his age at 15 to join the Marine Corps and was a combat veteran in Iwo Jima before parlaying his lifelong love of karate into a new career teaching self-defense to Los Angeles cops. At some point he befriended (and/or possibly scared the shit out of) Buck Owens and, intentionally or not, kind of took over for him in terms of chart domination, at least for a short stretch. “My Hang-Up Is You” is of a piece with his signature song, a sweet and unhurried song of devotion, and it held the #1 spot for six weeks. Only Jerry Lee Lewis dared take it away from him, with a cover of the old Big Bopper hit “Chantilly Lace.” It all was a solid indication that, as rock got more experimental and wild and the pop charts got more diverse and eclectic, many of the fans who’d gotten into rock & roll as youngsters had migrated to the safer harbors of country music as they eased into middle age. It was just a matter of time before they brought some of those old songs and artists with them (the aforementioned Sonny James had been doing it for years anyway at this point).

Merle Haggard scored for a couple weeks in May with “Grandma Harp,” a salute to his grandmother that he even admitted in the song wasn’t much of a story, but 1972 Haggard had clout to spare. Conway Twitty did too, and folks were glad to play along with him adding lyrics to the classic Floyd Cramer instrumental “Last Date” (Skeeter Davis had tried this too back in 1960, but she didn’t have Twitty Momentum on her side). Next up was a newcomer breakthrough, young singer-songwriter Donna Fargo with “The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA.” Buoyant, chipper, and almost madly catchy, the ode to a relationship that sounded way happier than anything Tammy Wynette was dealing with was sort of 1972’s song of the summer, landing a sunny three-week reign in June. Maybe her and Freddie Hart should’ve hooked up, but then again they might have driven sad country songs to extinction.

Speaking of lovey-dovey songs and extinction anxiety, having his record streak of #1s end must’ve been a disorienting experience for Sonny James: he made another run at the top with “That’s Why I Love You Like I Do.” The song had been the B-side to his 1956 breakout record “Young Love” and apparently it was time to unlock whatever mojo the old chunk of vinyl might’ve had. An old hand by now at repurposing songs from past decades, James scored something between a comeback and a victory lap. Hank Williams Jr., meanwhile, continued to benefit from some built-in nostalgia as well. “Eleven Roses,” a sweetly insinuating little apology of a song, snagged him his second #1.

Meanwhile, another star was falling. Buck Owens’ “Made In Japan,” which managed to wrangle some tuneful pathos out of its Asian-gimmick melody, would be his last #1 until a 1998 collaboration with then-newcomer Dwight Yoakum reintroduced him.  His mid-‘60s dominance had been slowly wearing off for a few years at this point; it’s hard to say in retrospect whether in the moment he was creatively exhausted, suffering from overexposure, or just naturally losing ground to a newer generation.  His next single, “You Ain’t Gonna Have Ol’ Buck to Kick Around No More,” might have been a clue to his weariness, or it might’ve just been an obvious Richard Nixon reference reframed as a romantic kiss-off. Either way, going forward he’d be doing good to scratch the lower reaches of the Top 10, and to younger fans he might be better known as the co-host of the cornpone TV comedy Hee Haw instead of being the guy who ruled the Billboard charts and inspired the Beatles. In 1974 his career (and general happiness) would be massively upended by the bike-crash death of his best friend and closest collaborator Don Rich. If recording and touring had become a bit of a chore for him before that, by his own account without Rich it was downright unbearable, and he took a long break from a spotlight that was fading out on him anyway.

Charley Pride was still on a roll though. “It’s Gonna Take A Little Bit Longer,” a driving and resilient twist on his usual heartache ballads, romped atop the charts through three weeks of summer. Freddie Hart swung in again with “Bless Your Heart,” which was – wait for it – another sweetly devotional love song. None of the ironic deployment of “bless your heart” you get from flinty old Southern gals sometimes; this man was dead serious about how much he loves you, baby. Some guy named Jerry Wallace came out of nowhere to displace him with the similarly direct “If You Leave Me Tonight I’ll Cry.” It was a fluke – the song was prominently featured on a Twilight Zone-esque TV show called Night Gallery, providing a weird little back door to exposure that country radio just shrugged and went with. He also sang the theme song for a short-lived Henry Fonda sitcom called The Smith Family; Jerry Wallace was a bigger deal onscreen than on radio. Already-veteran Don Gibson, who’d had a pretty hit-and-miss career since his late-‘50s heyday but never completely disappeared, scored a surprise #1 with the instant classic “Woman, Sensuous Woman” but only stayed there for a week before (presumably furiously) handing it back to “Mr. Hollywood” Jerry Wallace. Both guys would have more Top 10 hits, but no more #1s.

Sonny James swooped in with another cover, this time Ed Ames’ old adult contemporary hit “When The Snow is On The Roses.”  It’s just as pretty and elegiac as the title suggests; it would have been totally appropriate if this was the last song he’d recorded before he died, but it wasn’t even his last #1 (although that would come soon).  Plus he lived to a ripe old age, passing on at 87 years old in 2016 after a long and presumably gentlemanly retirement.  No need to weep for Sonny James just yet (at least in the context of this series).  It held on for one week of September before Conway Twitty, perhaps cashing in on the renewed interest in Don Gibson, briefly took over at #1 with a cover of Gibson’s classic “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” 

Keep in mind that, especially in old-school country music, a new face at the top of the charts is often not necessarily a new face to the business.  Since Nashville back then typically deprioritized youth and glamor, these midlife comebacks by the likes of Faron Young and Don Gibson weren’t as weird as it would be if, say, Sammy Kershaw came roaring back and scored a #1 country hit in 2023.  Sometimes the persistent and patient were rewarded.  Mel Tillis, for example, had been performing and recording since the mid-‘50s.  Writing for Webb Pierce and other stars of the day, he’d come up with classics like “Mental Revenge” and “Ruby Don’t Take Your Love to Town.”  When he hit #1 with “I Ain’t Never” (Pierce had scored with it in 1959) it was already a bit retro for 1972 but it was a welcome milestone for a lifer whose career was finally about to level up (and it’s a total banger too).

Donna Fargo’s “Funny Face” was not exactly a banger, but if you can get past the idea of “funny face” being a pet name for your wife it’s a sweet enough song, and her voice does have an appealingly sandy sweetness to it.  Merle Haggard followed up with his best and most universal tune in a while, the wryly funny “It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad).”  Between its slightly-saccharine predecessor and the titles that rounded out the year (coming right up!) it was kind of nice to have one in the mix about one of those better-than-nothing relationships that some listeners probably related to more than they’d care to admit.

Tammy Wynette’s “My Man Understands” continued her streak of near-terrifying displays of devotion (yep Billy Sherrill wrote this one too, so it keeps getting weird) but to be fair, this one’s good as hell, with a subtly jumpy bass line driving a jittery tempo that perfectly underscores her great-imitation-of-breathless delivery of the cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof lyrics.  Different kind of “Bedtime Story” I guess, although from the sound of it it’s unlikely she let him make it past the front hall.  Charley Pride’s “She’s Too Good to Be True” was way more chill, maybe even a little boring (at least after listening to Wynette pant her way through the last one).  Freddie Hart’s “Got the All Overs For You (All Over Me)” kind of struck a balance between the two; while we’re at it, Hart’s singles had some of the coolest organ of any country records from the era.  But as his #1 hitmaker days were already almost drawing to a close, maybe the listeners of the day were starting to see him as a bit of a one-trick pony.  Ray Price would close out the year with “She’s Got to Be A Saint,” plenty devoted in its own way, but it had a longer run in 1973 so we’ll talk about it then.  And rank it there.  And maybe go back and listen to that Tammy Wynette song again.  

THE TREND?

It was getting to be kind of a free-for-all.  Folks who seemingly had the #1 locked down for big chunks of previous years had fallen off a bit (Buck Owens, Sonny James), newcomers who wouldn’t be terribly big deals in the long run were temporarily kicking ass (Freddie Hart, Donna Fargo), older guys like Don Gibson and Faron Young were elbowing their way back in … was it a little weird that Don Gibson scored a #1 hit and in the same year Conway Twitty scored one with a cover of Gibson’s signature song?  It’s not like Twitty was some brash young upstart, he’d had a big crossover hit back in the late ‘50s too.  Come to think of it, Jerry Lee Lewis was already a star when the original “Chantilly Lace” came out.  In the days before everything being preserved in digital amber on YouTube, Spotify, etc., everything old could be new again; in the days before targeted youth lifestyle marketing, that was as true for the artists as it was for the songs.

THE RANKING:

1. It’s Four in the Morning (Faron Young)
2. My Man Understands (Tammy Wynette) 
3. One’s On the Way (Loretta Lynn)
4. The Happiest Girl in the Whole USA (Donna Fargo)
5. Woman, Sensuous Woman (Don Gibson)
6. I Ain’t Never (Mel Tillis)
7. It’s Not Love (But It’s Not Bad) (Merle Haggard)
8. Carolyn (Merle Haggard)
9. My Hang-Up is You (Freddie Hart)
10. It’s Gonna Take a Little Bit Longer (Charley Pride)
11. Me & Bobby McGee (Jerry Lee Lewis)
12. Got the All Overs For You (All Over Me) (Freddie Hart)
13. When the Snow Is On the Roses (Sonny James)
14. (Lost Her Love) On Our Last Date (Conway Twitty)
15. That’s Why I Love You Like I Do (Sonny James)
16. Eleven Roses (Hank Williams Jr.)
17. Made in Japan (Buck Owens)
18. Bless Your Heart (Freddie Hart)
19. She’s Too Good to be True (Charley Pride)
20. Funny Face (Donna Fargo)
21. I Can’t Stop Loving You (Conway Twitty)
22. Chantilly Lace (Jerry Lee Lewis)
23. Would You Take Another Chance on Me (Jerry Lee Lewis)
24. Bedtime Story (Tammy Wynette)   
25. Grandma Harp (Merle Haggard)
26. If You Leave Me Tonight I’ll Cry (Jerry Wallace)        

DOWN THE ROAD ...

East Texas honky-tonker Mark Chesnutt was just a kiddo in 1972, but judging by his grown-up output I'm gonna assume he was already pretty immersed in the country radio hits of the day. Even on his first few records, when he presumably didn't have much clout in a crowded '90s-country marketplace, he made room for the trad-country likes of Don Gibson's mostly-forgotten-by-then "Woman, Sensuous Woman." Sensuous here anyhow, might as well give it a listen.

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.

1971 - yesterday is dead and gone ...

 The ‘70s were widely nicknamed the “Me” Decade – spurred along by a famous Tom Wolfe essay – and perhaps the country charts were starting to reflect that.  Gone from the roster of #1s in 1971 were any of the big social statements (left or right) that folks felt more compelled to put out in the ‘60s.  Counterintuitively, so were some of the mainstays that had avoided that sort of thing – no David Houston, no Buck Owens, Jack Greene and Eddy Arnold were staying gone as well.  Newly crowned chart perennial Charley Pride put out a song called “I’m Just Me,” characteristically humble and mellow but maybe the title alone was enough to capture the zeitgeist.  It was a big year for standard love songs and personal narratives, so maybe just disregard my “trend” section from the previous year.

Lynn Anderson’s “Rose Garden” opened things up, finishing out the bulk of its 5-week run in early 1971.  It’s a groovy, highly quotable little time capsule, penned by genre-bending Joe South and bearing a clever whiff of paisley-patterned late-’60s pop (it would fit in just fine on an Austin Powers soundtrack).  Lest things get too hip, Johnny Cash took over briefly with the affectionate, earthier-than-thou love song “Flesh and Blood,” followed by an also-rustic number called “Joshua,” Dolly Parton’s first of many #1s.  The tune itself, an odd folksy narrative about pulling some ominous-looking but kindhearted mountain hermit out of his shell, has mostly been forgotten, but of course Dolly herself has proven to be for the ages.  That bighearted crystal twang with more than a note of downhome sass would continue to sit alongside Cash as of the most recognizable voices in any genre.

#1 wasn’t quite ready for Kris Kristofferson’s voice yet, except for as a songwriter. Another one of his elegantly stated heartache ballads, “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” entered the pantheon via relative unknown (but vocal powerhouse) Sammi Smith. World-weary and longing, it was a masterfully crafted and sung example of an honored country tradition: singing unmistakably about sex without coming right out and saying it. Charley Pride was dealt a less elegant hand with “I’d Rather Love You,” a kind-of-clumsy expansion on the old “tis better to have love and lost” adage; staid and uncatchy, its ascension mostly just speaks to what a roll Pride was on in the moment.

Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn, despite their talents and stature, don’t seem like the most intuitive duet partners. But some of that’s in retrospect. Twitty hadn’t firmed up that smooth ladies-man balladeer persona just yet; he was more of a hardcore honky-tonk guy that just happened to have a bigger and more nuanced voice than most, and it coaxed more of a romantic edge out of Lynn than the feisty-and-folksy material she’d become known for. “After The Fire Is Gone” was their first and best hit, a timeless tension-and-release lament of two cheaters who kind of hate how much they’ve come to love each other. The romantic tension the two could muster up on record apparently turned into a lifelong friendship and collaboration: they’ll be back.

Sonny James had a four-week run by raiding the Ivory Joe Hunter catalog again for a pleasant-enough reading of “Empty Arms.” Conway Twitty took back over briefly with “How Much More Can She Stand,” which had kind of the opposite shortcoming, pouring too much anguish and vocal fire into a clumsy tune that didn’t quite deserve it. By comparison, Ray Price’s ongoing resurgence with “I Won’t Mention It Again” was pretty perfectly calibrated: on a song brimming with raw middle-aged heartbreak, he went back and forth between a Sinatra-esque soar and biting down on phrases like a sob might slip through the veneer of masculine reserve at any moment. It hung on until June when Lynn Anderson (in her post-“Rose Garden’ afterglow) nudged him off with the relatively breezy, not-much-to-it “You’re My Man.”

If Anderson sort of generically brightened things up, Jerry Reed came barreling in to put a shit-eatin’ grin on everyone’s face for five weeks of summer. A handsome, fast-talking guitar-slinger with more than a touch of Roger Miller kookiness, he scored his first #1 with the motor-mouthed gambler’s-anthem singalong “When You’re Hot You’re Hot.” When that one finally ran out of gas, Charley Pride’s humble, optimistic “I’m Just Me” kept things upbeat, followed by Sonny James getting downright bluesy for once on a cover of Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights Big City.” Tammy Wynette’s “Good Lovin’ (Makes It Right)” was a bit more hushed but had some smoky charm of its own. It was another round of Billy Sherrill writing her a song exhorting women to not only be patient with their men but also to get better at sex, an approach that was apparently successful at the time but seems a bit pathological in retrospect.

Freddie Hart’s “Easy Loving” cranked up the romance and dialed down the complications. It’s gotten some critical heat down through the years for being cheesy, simplistic etc. and I just don’t get that. Sure, country singers will probably always sound a little weird coming right out and saying “sexy” but to me Hart wrote and sang a sincere little charmer here; it’s catchy and affectionate, especially on the bridge. Tom T. Hall’s Dixieland-inflected tale of a childhood guitar hero – “The Year Clayton Delaney Died” – took over the #1 for a couple of weeks, but Hart snatched the #1 spot back through early October. Lynn Anderson’s banner year continued with “How Can I Unlove You,” which hit somewhere in the middle between “Rose Garden” grooviness and “You’re My Man” forgettableness.

Sonny James took back #1 in mid-October and – believe it or not – it was his 16^th #1 single in a row. His next one would stall out at #2 for the first time in years. “Here Comes Honey Again,” that 16^th #1, was a James original, a weary-eyed number about helplessly loving an unfaithful woman. It’s a good song with a poignant vocal but there’s not necessarily a line that’ll haunt you or a melody you’ll catch yourself humming all day. Early in this column I’d noted how Sonny James seemed like kind of a non-entity when I first dove into the project; memory jogged, I remembered he was the guy behind “Young Love” but that one pre-dated the consolidated Billboard chart. The dozen-plus songs I’ve heard of his since have all seemed new to me; I can’t swear I’d never heard them before, but they sure don’t sound familiar relative to most of the other tunes surrounding them. It’s almost a little spooky, sort of a Mandela Effect if you’re inclined to go down the rabbit hole of looking that term up, like I lived in some parallel universe where Mr. James faded into obscurity shortly after “Young Love” instead of being apparently one of the biggest country stars of the ‘60s and ‘70s. He didn’t seem to be on the oldies-heavy playlists of the Houston-area radio of my childhood, or in the stacks of vinyl and cassettes at my parents or grandparents’ homes, or among the constant boozy blare of vintage country music at the Dixie Chicken in College Station where I frequently lost track of time but hardly ever let a killer song go unnoticed. Maybe he just wasn’t as big of a deal in Texas as he was in other country music enclaves? In the pre-ClearChannel days of radio it was easier to be a household name in one region and an unknown in another. At any rate, if I’d caught Sonny James in my more-formative years, maybe his apparently towering appeal would be more obvious to me, and his success would be less of a surprise in hindsight or otherwise.

Although I can’t recall a time I didn’t know who they were individually, I also didn’t remember Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn having quite so many duets, but they took back #1 with “Lead Me On.” It gives off a subtler heat than “After the Fire Is Gone” but it’s a nicely nuanced take on full-grown but tentative romance, a love affair where the “extramarital” is implied instead of bluntly stated in a year when the songs that hit #1 seemed to finally be chilling out a bit on the cheating fixation. The year rounded out on upbeat, goodhearted notes with Merle Haggard’s “Daddy Frank (The Guitar Man)” and Charley Pride’s “Kiss An Angel Good Morning.” The Haggard tune about a travelling family band where the blind dad played guitar and French harp and the deaf mom sang harmonies by reading lips wasn’t terribly plausible (even people with perfect hearing can have a hell of a time nailing harmonies, right?) but it was catchy enough. The Charley Pride tune was just an evergreen classic, even catchier and warmly romantic, a great thing to play any smarmy philistine who declares country music (especially the old stuff) is all sad-bastard weepers about dead dogs and broke-down trucks. Number one for five weeks and still treasured today. In a year where pretty much all the singers at #1 were just talking about themselves, at least Pride was also dishing out some good advice along the way.

THE TREND?

As mentioned at the get-go, the country charts of the early ‘70s might’ve been where broad social statements went to die. The emphasis is on songs about romantic ups and downs, self-evaluations both Jerry Reed-comical and Charley Pride-earnest, memorable little narratives about Clayton Delaney and Joshua, etc. “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” if we’re looking for an exception, spurred some discussion for its sympathetic depiction of casual sex. It’s not like the subject had never been broached in country music, or like Smith’s indelible delivery took the subject lightly, but maybe the song (and its subject?) was just too damn good not to talk about.

THE RANKING: 

1. Sammi Smith – “Help Me Make It Through the Night”
2. Charley Pride – “Kiss An Angel Good Morning”
3. Jerry Reed – “When You’re Hot You’re Hot”
4. Loretta Lynn & Conway Twitty – “After the Fire Is Gone”
5. Lynn Anderson – “Rose Garden”
6. Ray Price – “I Won’t Mention It Again”
7. Tom T. Hall – “The Year Clayton Delaney Died”
8. Freddie Hart – “Easy Loving”
9. Johnny Cash – “Flesh and Blood”
10. Loretta Lynn & Conway Twitty – “Lead Me On”
11. Merle Haggard – “Daddy Frank (The Guitar Man)”
12. Charley Pride – “I’m Just Me”
13. Tammy Wynette – “Good Lovin’ (Makes It Right)”
14. Sonny James – “Empty Arms”
15. Dolly Parton – “Joshua”
16. Sonny James – “Here Comes Honey Again”
17. Lynn Anderson – “How Can I Unlove You”
18. Conway Twitty – “How Much More Can She Stand”
19. Sonny James – “Bright Lights Big City”
20. Charley Pride – “I’d Rather Love You”
21. Lynn Anderson – “You’re My Man”

DOWN THE ROAD ...

We were still more than a couple of decades away from Martina McBride busting onto the scene like a big-voiced, blue-eyed force of nature. A lot of people don't remember that she originally was pushed as a more-traditional artist before finding bigger success with a more pop-tinged approach, but once established she got back to her roots for the 2005 covers album Timeless, cherry-picking some of the all-time greats including the '71 smashes "Help Me Make it Through the Night" and "Rose Garden." If a distaste for pop-country ever put you off McBride's music, perhaps this bit of spare, beautiful, steel-laced balladry would be a nice re-introduction to a remarkable vocalist.

1970 - make believe you love me one more time ...

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

1. For the Good Times (Ray Price)
2. Hello Darlin’ (Conway Twitty)
3. Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down (Johnny Cash)
4. The Fightin’ Side of Me (Merle Haggard)
5. Is Anybody Goin’ to San Antone (Charley Pride)
6. A Week in a County Jail (Tom T. Hall)
7. Wonder Could I Live There Anymore (Charley Pride)
8. Baby Baby (I Know You’re A Lady) (David Houston)
9. Coal Miner’s Daughter (Loretta Lynn)
10. My Woman, My Woman, My Wife (Marty Robbins)
11. Don’t Keep Me Hangin’ On (Sonny James)
12. Fifteen Years Ago (Conway Twitty)
13. Endlessly (Sonny James)
14. He Loves Me All the Way (Tammy Wynette)
15. There Must Be More to Love Than This (Jerry Lee Lewis)
16. My Love (Sonny James)
17. I Can’t Believe That You’ve Stopped Loving Me (Charley Pride)
18. Tennessee Bird Walk (Jack Blanchard & Misty Morgan)
19. All For the Love of Sunshine (Hank Williams Jr.)
20. It’s Just A Matter of Time (Sonny James)
21. The Pool Shark (Dave Dudley)
22. 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.

1969 - okie dokie

 Maybe 1968 was peak relevance for mainstream country music.  It was such a banger of a year, exciting artists coming into their own and releasing Hall of Fame-worthy material, 1969 had a tough act to follow.  And it seemed like the chart mellowed out at least a little, like everyone needed to catch a breather.  No less a barnstormer than Johnny Cash held down #1 for the first six weeks, but it was with the wholesome, sentimental, family-friendly “Daddy Sang Bass.”  It was penned by his longtime buddy and onetime fellow Sun Records hellraiser Carl Perkins; a couple weeks later (after another brief Jack Greene run with “Until My Dreams Come True”) their maybe-even-wilder cohort Jerry Lee Lewis would jumpstart the country-gold phase of his career with “To Make Love Sweeter For You,” a song of mature devotion and fidelity that was nice but kind of off-brand. Speaking of Sun Records, next up was a cover of Roy Orbison’s “Only The Lonely” by Sonny James; not a half-bad version, and there’s some cool organ work in there, but Orbison was such a singular artist as to be nearly cover-proof. Plus his original was less than ten years old at the time.

Buck Owens had established himself as not only a heavyweight hitmaker but also possibly the hippest of his contemporaries, with rock heavyweights like the Beatles and the Byrds avowing his influence, and maybe some of that influence boomeranged back. “Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass” was as playful sonically as it was lyrically, with fuzzy, chunky guitars pushing along a cool, off-kilter dynamic. Loretta Lynn broke out the poison pen for some other hussy trying to ply her man with “Woman of the World (Leave My World Alone),” which was sweeter in tone than “Fist City” but still carried the same message, kind of like how “bless your heart” can more or less mean “fuck you” in certain southern ladies’ delivery. Like the former Sun Records guys, Lynn seemed to be dialing it down a bit for 1969.

Hell, the next #1 was also a #1 on the Easy Listening chart. And Glen Campbell’s “Galveston” is easy to listen to, because it’s really good. Warm, even a bit opulent in its orchestration, but grounded in a soldier’s story that was relevant in the Vietnam era without making any sort of larger point about it. Merle Haggard snatched up the mantle a few weeks later with “Hungry Eyes,” which has got to be just about the most morose #1 hit of its time. It’s a thing of weary beauty, specific and lived-in, but damn buddy. Great Depression indeed. Bill Anderson’s “My Life (Throw It Away If I Want To)” was depressing too, mostly just because of how clunky the phrasing and backing track were. Tammy Wynette broke its short reign with “Singing My Song,” another honeyed missive from the POV of an endlessly devoted housewife; also notably in 1969, she’d marry George Jones, which is probably as good a way as any to test one’s capacity for wifely devotion. 

Speaking of decisions that look questionable in retrospect, Sonny James’ cover of the former pop #1 “Running Bear” took over the country #1 for three weeks, and I think “questionable” is a good way to put it. I don’t blame somebody who thinks a white guy singing a song about Native Americans while “hoy-ya-hoy-ya” chants pulsate in the background is pretty insensitive. But you could also say that it’s a Romeo & Juliet riff that just happens to be about natives and borrows a few motifs but there’s nothing inherently disrespectful about their depiction here. I grew up hearing and liking this one and I’m not gonna pretend I retroactively hate it; it’s way better than Johnny Preston’s pop/swing version of it, if nothing else. Jack Greene stepped up his game too with his next #1, “Statue of a Fool.” After a few decent but forgettable tunes that still managed to hit #1, this time he earned the hell out of it with a bravura performance of an imagery-rich ballad.

Conway Twitty kept up his newfound habit of topping the chart with “I Love You More Today,” a slightly clunky tune that’s redeemed by the sincerity and sheer firepower in his vocals; it’s no “Hello Darlin’” but it’s worth rediscovery. Less compelling was Buck Owens next #1, a kind-of-half-assed live cover of Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode” where they don’t even bother nailing that signature opening guitar lick even though it was likely well within the Buckaroos’ talents. If racial considerations weren’t a thing, the stylings and lyrics of the Berry original probably would have fit just fine on country radio. Or maybe his timing was just wrong, because Charley Pride was up next with the first #1 of a career that was remarkable on several levels.

If you didn’t already know these things: Charley Pride was black, and successful country music artists were overwhelmingly not, and in the country music industry of the day even the most blatant racism was unlikely to be confronted. One can assume that the late Pride’s talent must have been matched by his capacity for patience and quiet courage, not to mention a healthy dose of intelligence and intuition. A single like “All I Have To Offer You (Is Me),” with its humble lyrics and wholesome affection, was a wise way to get a foot in the door, versus some horndog swagger that would’ve scared or pissed off most of the folks who were in a key position to help. Maybe I’m overthinking this more than they did: it’s a solid song, but it also sounds like something you’d release if you were concerned that your very presence might be a threat to some listeners.

Merle Haggard, on the other hand, could get ornery and prideful if the song called for it (and more and more, they would). “Workin’ Man Blues” marked the first time in a while that a song that spelled out the connection between blue-collar values and country music would hit #1, and the trend dug in so hard it’s more or less still in force today. While Hag was undeniably a very hard-working musician, it’s still a little weird to hear a man once sent up the river for petty theft thumbing his nose at welfare. It’d get more complicated soon though.

Haggard’s tune only punched the #1 clock one week, and then Johnny Cash and “A Boy Named Sue” made a five-week stay out of it. A genuinely funny story song penned by generational polymath Shel Silverstein, it was the perfect match for Cash’s blend of macho deadpan and incongruous goofiness, a filial grudge match that’s both a bit absurd and strikingly easy to picture. “Tall Dark Stranger” by Buck Owens was similarly cinematic but without the laughs, and it only stood its tallest for a week. He wouldn’t hit #1 at all again until 1972, and after that never again as a solo artist. There was more to it than just his approach going out of style or the field getting too crowded, but we’ll get to it when we get to it.

Longtime chart warhorse Sonny James scored his third #1 of the year with “Since I Met You Baby,” and like the others it was a cover of a non-country tune from about a decade prior. R&B journeyman Ivory Joe Hunter, the song’s originator, would cross over into country a little himself in the ‘70s (perhaps emboldened by Charley Pride?), scoring no major hits but notching a few Grand Ole Opry performances. James’ version was faithful to the original, they’re both sweet little time capsules. Tammy Wynette took on dutiful-woman duty again with “The Ways to Love a Man,” a bit more breathlessly sexy than her other recent hits, and Conway Twitty scored his best #1 since his late-‘50s breakthrough with the near-raging pathos of “To See My Angel Cry.” 

And then Merle Haggard came back in, all hard twang and even harder sneer, with the self-penned country music landmark “Okie From Muskogee.” Much discussion has been made over whether he was dead serious, satirical, or somewhere in between when he wrote and recorded this declaration of Middle America pride, lauding the good ol’ boys pitchin’ woo at their wholesome hometown gals but spending even more time basically telling the hippies, draft dodgers, and other ungrateful malcontents they could stick it. If he meant it, you can hardly call the man out-of-touch: it was a confrontational time, and folks with a sincere belief in American exceptionalism had every right to stand up for themselves verbally. On the off chance he was totally (or just mostly) joking, the joke was largely on him, because the fans singing along sure as hell embraced it at face value. 

Charley Pride wrapped up the year on a more melancholy note with “(I’m So) Afraid of Losing You Again,” which, aside from those extraneous parentheses and a whole industry full of Okies-in-spirit reckoning with their first homegrown black star, was a pretty straightforward country weeper that again foregrounded a sort of low-key humility to help ease audiences into the idea. And while there’s something to be said for playing the long game, maybe it’s too bad they didn’t just have Charley Pride sing “Okie From Muskogee” and somehow manage to piss everyone off at once.

THE TREND?

If you could somehow conclusively prove that Merle Haggard was being satirical instead of sincere on “Okie From Muskogee” (he was coy about it later in life) then maybe you could argue country music was getting a bit progressive in 1969. Breakthrough black artist scoring two #1s, stalwarts Buck Owens and Sonny James covering hits by black artists they admire, Owens toying with psychedelic sounds, aging rock stars welcomed into the fold, a whole song (however iffy) about Native American romance … hell, maybe even “A Boy Named Sue” was sort of an olive branch to folks who don’t conform to traditional gender norms (it probably was not). They didn’t call it “woke” back then and you probably wouldn’t today, even with that term at your disposal. But it wasn’t stodgy, and that’s something.

THE RANKING:

1. Okie From Muskogee (Merle Haggard)
2. A Boy Named Sue (Johnny Cash)
3. Galveston (Glen Campbell)
4. Daddy Sang Bass (Johnny Cash)
5. Statue of a Fool (Jack Greene)
6. Hungry Eyes (Merle Haggard)
7. To See My Angel Cry (Conway Twitty)
8. Running Bear (Sonny James)
9. (I’m So) Afraid of Losing You Again (Charley Pride)
10. Who’s Gonna Mow Your Grass (Buck Owens)
11. All I Have to Offer You (Is Me) (Charley Pride)
12. Workin’ Man Blues (Merle Haggard)
13. Singing My Song (Tammy Wynette)
14. To Make Love Sweeter For You (Jerry Lee Lewis)
15. Only the Lonely (Sonny James)
16. Tall Dark Stranger (Buck Owens)
17. Since I Met You Baby (Sonny James)
18. I Love You More Today (Conway Twitty)
19. Woman of the World (Leave My Man Alone) (Loretta Lynn)
20. Until My Dreams Come True (Jack Greene)
21. Johnny B. Goode (Buck Owens) (the original would’ve been #1)       
22. My Life (Throw It Away If I Want To) (Bill Anderson)

DOWN THE ROAD ...

I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that sludge-rock legends The Melvins approached Hag's "Okie From Muskogee" at an ironic arm's length, unless some sort of punk contempt for hippies made them unlikely allies. But it's still fun to hear some noisy rockers appropriate a little twang here and there. This wasn't just a live lark, the prolific band included a version on their 2000 album The Crybaby.