Arthur Penn's movie about Bonnie and Clyde had been showing on America's movie screens since August of the previous year when Merle Haggard's album "The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde" arrived in music stores 50 years ago today.
Haggard was on a real hot streak in the 1960s, and "The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde" just added to it.
Other than being inspired by the movie, though, there was no real link between the two. Haggard collaborated with Bonnie Owens on the title track, but they are better known for another composition of theirs from the same album — "I Started Loving You Again."
The title track went on to become a No. 1 hit, but the flip side, "I Started Loving You Again" (with "Today" added to the title later) went on to become a standard — and may well be Haggard's most covered song.
Reportedly, the song's title originated at a time when Haggard, who had married Owens a few years earlier, believed he had fallen out of love with her. Then, when they were walking through an airport, Haggard looked at Owens and told her, "You know what? I think I started lovin' you again today."
At Owens' suggestion, today was moved from the end of the original sentence to the beginning of the song title.
The A side of the single, as I mentioned, was the LP's title track. Ironically, while "I Started Loving You Again" never charted as a single ("The Legend of Bonnie & Clyde" was Haggard's fourth No. 1 single), it was one of Haggard's most popular songs.
The album was not, as Stephen Thomas Erlewine of Allmusic.com observed, a concept album, no matter what its title might imply. It was mostly an album in which Haggard covered songs written by others. In addition to the two compositions he penned with Owens, Haggard was credited with writing two other songs on the album, leaving seven that were written by other songwriters.
It was noteworthy that Glen Campbell, who had already enjoyed chart–topping success with "Gentle on My Mind" and was about to do so again with "By the Time I Get to Phoenix," played guitar and banjo on the album.
Willie Nelson's "Stardust" album, which hit music stores in April 1978, seemed to catch a lot of people by surprise.
After all, he was practically unknown to noncountry music fans until three years earlier, when he released the wildly popular "Red Headed Stranger" album, which included the No. 1 hit "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain."
But he had been around for awhile, mostly writing songs but recording some, too.
He released another country album the following year, collaborating with Waylon Jennings, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser, but then he chose to do something different.
For "Stardust," he recorded covers of 10 pop standards — songs that many people already knew. And he proved that he was more than a country singer/songwriter. He was versatile enough to cover songs from other genres and make them his own, like "Georgia on My Mind."
"Georgia on My Mind" was written nearly half a century earlier by Hoagy Carmichael and was most closely associated with Ray Charles — until Nelson recorded it. Nelson won a Grammy for his rendition of the song.
Carmichael had another composition on the album — the title track "Stardust," which was written more than half a century before.
The album also included songs written by Irving Berlin, Duke Ellington and the Gershwins, but Carmichael was the only songwriter who had more than one song on it.
A recording of the song was used to wake up the crew of the Space Shuttle in 2000.
Nelson put his own distinctive spin on the songs but perhaps none as much as his version of "Moonlight in Vermont," which was probably one of the newer songs on the album, having been written in 1944 by John Blackburn and Karl Suessdorf.
As with all the other songs on the album, it has been covered many times by many artists, but Nelson's version was truly unique.
Nelson asked his friend producer Booker T. Jones to arrange the song for him, which Jones did.
"Stardust" was certified quintuple platinum in 2002 and later inducted in the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Most of the songs on Merle Haggard's "Roots Volume 1," which was released on this date in 2001, were written before my time — many in full or in part by Lefty Frizzell, one of Haggard's major influences although Haggard did contribute one original composition as well as songs by Hank Williams and Hank Thompson.
Still "Roots Volume 1" was primarily a tribute to Frizzell and the almost joyful mood of his music. Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote for Allmusic.com that the album was "an unexpected return to how country records used to be made."
If that is true — and I have no reason to think it is not — I'm sorry I missed those days.
It isn't the weepy kind of country music I so often heard in the barber shops and hardware stores in my then–small central Arkansas hometown when I was growing up. The melodies had more of a bounce to them, if you know what I mean, and the lyrics were clever. A perfect example is Merle's rendition of Frizzell's biggest hit, "If You've Got the Money (I've Got the Time)." Throw that in with Merle's version of Williams' "Honky Tonkin'," and you may get an idea of what to expect from this album.
I have never really been a country music fan, but I was familiar with "If You've Got the Money (I've Got the Time)." In my hometown, it would have been inconceivable not to be familiar with that one.
But "Roots Volume 1" introduced me to Frizzell songs I knew nothing about.
It's a good album, a fun album to listen to, but it reminds me of a lesson I learned early in my career in newspapers.
From the title, you probably expect there to be a Volume 2, but that would be a false expectation. There was no Volume 2. (It's like starting a news story with the time element, which is almost never the most important part of a news story — but you might be surprised how many people will start their news stories with when something happened rather than what happened.)
I don't know if Merle planned to make a second volume of his versions of old country songs. If he intended to do so, he never followed through.
The closest he came, I suppose, was when he released "The Peer Sessions" in 2002. It was a collection of classic country songs, similar in style, but most of the tunes were written by Jimmie Davis or Jimmie Rodgers. There were no Lefty Frizzell songs on that one.
When I worked for newspapers, I learned early that, if you're going to run a series of articles on a subject, you better have all the articles written and ready to go before you ever publish the first one. Otherwise, you're just asking for trouble.
We had different reasons for that in the newspaper business than Haggard almost surely had in the music business, but the reasoning is sound in both cases.
I'm not a country music fan, but there are some country singers I like, and Merle Haggard is at the top of my list.
I have assembled a pretty good (but hardly comprehensive) collection of Haggard's albums and, in the digital age, I have been able to combine most of my favorite Haggard tracks on a single CD so when I am about to drive somewhere and I have a hankering for Haggard's music, I can just take that CD with me.
I can be sure that I like every song on it.
But if I do have to listen to an actual album, "Big City," which arrived in music stores 35 years ago this month, is OK by me. I like every song on that one, too.
Two of the songs on "Big City" went to No. 1 — the title track, "Big City," and "My Favorite Memory."
"Big City" was Haggard's 27th No. 1 song on Billboard's Hot Country Singles chart. It was released as a single in January 1982 and was inspired by Dean Holloway, a longtime friend and driver of Haggard's tour bus. The story goes that, after a marathon recording session in Los Angeles, Haggard went to the bus and asked Holloway how he was doing. Holloway replied, "I'm tired of this dirty old city."
And a song was born.
Actually, I guess, the concept of an album was born.
Lifelong country music fans probably have a different take on this than I have, but traditional country music — it always seemed to me, anyway, when I was growing up and heard it playing on radios in the hardware store, the doughnut shop and the barber shop around my hometown in Arkansas — really was about country. Country life. Country people. Country values.
"Big City" was the first country album in my memory that was more about the state of mind than the physical location — in fact, when I was growing up, the where in a country song was nearly always a small rural town or a lonely stretch of highway, seldom a big city — and the title track of "Big City" captured the yearning of an urban blue–collar worker for the freedom of wide open spaces.
Returning to the story of how the title track was inspired, Haggard clearly was refining the inspiration in his mind during his conversation with Holloway (something with which I am familiar from my days as a reporter — I often found myself composing the article in my head while I was finishing an interview for it) when, apparently sensing that the urban–dwelling narrator of the lyrics needed to identify where he would rather be, Haggard asked Holloway that question, and Holloway replied, "Somewhere in the middle of damn Montana."
And a chorus was born.
Haggard wrote the song, but he gave Holloway partial credit; the royalties wound up being worth about half a million dollars to Holloway.
"My Favorite Memory" is the kind of country song that I remember hearing when I was a child. I couldn't have heard that song when I was a child, but I heard songs like it.
I can't say it evokes specific memories, mostly general ones of lying on a rug in the dining room or the kitchen, reveling in the warmth of the room on a chilly winter's day and hearing songs like it playing on the radio. It was a country love song, not the kind of song that speaks of drinkin' and cheatin' and carousin' but of caring and commitment.
"I guess everything does change except what you choose to recall," Haggard sang in one of my favorite lyrics on the album. "There's a million good daydreams to dream on, but, baby, you're my favorite memory of all."
Thom Jurek of Allmusic.com wrote that "My Favorite Memory" was "one of the most beautifully sung and arranged moments of [Haggard's] long career." Although I haven't heard all of Haggard's songs, I would have to say that is true of the songs I have heard.
It is one of the best, inspired by the best elements of country music.
My very favorite song on the album, though, is "Are the Good Times Really Over?"
It didn't make it to No. 1, although I always thought it should have. It came close, just missing at No. 2. I liked a lot of things about it, but I guess one of the things I liked the most was that, although the title asked a negative question, the song itself provided a positive answer.
Haggard offered hope.
When I think of that, I think of another song on the album, "I Think I'm Gonna Live Forever." Sadly, Haggard didn't live forever, even though he claimed in the song that "Dyin' ain't on my list of things to do."
"Big City" was full of genuine Haggard classics — and others that should have been.
In its way, I guess, "Big City" was a harbinger of things to come. When I was growing up, most country music was kind of weepy sounding and mostly negative in its messages. "Big City" had a jazzier sound than most country albums — even today, when much of country music doesn't sound too different from rock 'n' roll.
"Big City" had horns and drums and piano that sounded like the barroom music of late 19th–century saloons.
Even the one song that, from its name, one might expect to be in that weepy tradition — "Texas Fiddle Song" — was more upbeat than most country songs.
"Look at the past 25 years — we went downhill, and if people don't realize it, they don't have their fucking eyes on. In 1960, when I came out of prison as an ex–convict, I had more freedom under parolee supervision than there's available to an average citizen in America right now. I mean, there was nobody going to throw you down on the side of the road spread–eagled and look up your butt for a fucking marijuana cigarette. God almighty, what have we done to each other?"
Merle Haggard
I was driving home from work this afternoon when I heard on the radio that Merle Haggard had died.
Now, no one would ever mistake me for a country music fan, but there are some country singers I like. Most of them are dead now, I guess. Hank Williams Sr. has been gone a long time. Waylon Jennings hasn't been gone quite as long. Neither has Johnny Cash.
I like Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, too, and I always took comfort in the fact that they were still around — and still recording together. Last summer they released their sixth — and, as it turned out, final — album together. I got it a couple of days after it was released, and I couldn't tell you how many times I listened to it in my car.
I had a couple of opportunities to see him play last year, but I passed them up. It goes without saying, I suppose, that I regret that now. Tickets were too expensive, I tell myself now as I did then. They were expensive, but if I had seen him play, I would have a memory that would last the rest of my life.
And you can't really put a price on that.
Oh, Merle died today. Complications from pneumonia. It was his 79th birthday.
I've seen Willie Nelson in concert — twice. The first time was the summer after high school graduation. I took a couple of girls I graduated with to see him perform with Emmylou Harris. Then, when I was in college, a friend of mine and I went to see Willie Nelson with Ray Price.
Those were great shows, and they are great memories for me. I never think about what those tickets cost — much less than concert tickets today, I am sure, but probably still a bit pricey for the time. I remember the experiences, just as I would be remembering that night when I saw Willie and Merle together.
Except I didn't see them together. I was too cheap.
I'm being too hard on myself, I guess. Like a lot of people, I was hit hard by the Great Recession. Money has been hard to come by for me, and I seldom spend it on something I see as frivolous.
Last year I felt that a concert ticket would be a frivolous expense for me.
I don't feel that way tonight.
Rest in peace, Merle. I think I'll listen to "Are the Good Times Really Over?"
On this day in 1960, Ferlin Husky's "Wings of a Dove" became just the fourth song to climb to #1 in Billboard's Hot C&W chart that year.
You could expand that list to five if you include Marty Robbins' "El Paso," which reached the top spot late in 1959 and remained there through the first five weeks of 1960.
But in the year itself, only four songs ascended to #1 on the Billboard chart. The other three were Jim Reeves' "He'll Have to Go," Hank Locklin's "Please Help Me, I'm Falling" and Cowboy Copas' "Alabam."
Compare that to modern times, when there seems to be a new #1 hit on music charts every week.
Not long after I got my first stereo, I was listening to Denver's music on a regular basis (along with Three Dog Night and Cat Stevens). At one time in my life I had most of his albums, but I wasn't exactly blazing a trail there. I mean, a lot of people liked John Denver in those days. He was quite popular. You didn't really have to have his records in your possession to listen to him, either. You could hear his latest hits on mainstream radio pretty frequently.
But if you wanted to hear his latest songs that were not being played on the radio, you pretty much needed to have his latest album.
I would venture to say that most people didn't think of John Denver as a country musician. He was primarily regarded as a pop star, but he sang about country topics — simple pleasures, the rural lifestyle and small–town values — but his music never really met the definition of country music that had been established by David Allen Coe as a spoken interlude in his 1975 recording, "You Never Even Called Me By My Name" — at least not in my opinion.
"Well a friend of mine named Steve Goodman wrote that song
And he told me it was the perfect country and western song.
I wrote him back a letter and I told him it was not the
Perfect country and western song because he hadn't said
Anything at all about mama or trains or trucks or prison or gettin' drunk."
No, that wasn't John Denver's style.
He had a lot of crossover appeal, though. It seemed there were a lot of artists who were like that in the '70s — or maybe it just seems that way in hindsight. Most of today's music seems to be designed to appeal to a narrow niche.
Of course, there are acts that try to blend styles and create something new, but that isn't really the same thing. Most such acts seem to be little more than cynical attempts to cash in on more than one market simultaneously.
What I'm talking about is a genuine connection to people and how they relate to others, to places, to themselves. Earlier in 1975, Denver had a big hit with a song titled, "Thank God I'm a Country Boy," which spoke to the human condition more than it did to musical genres. That was the essence of Denver's music. It was a uniter, not a divider, to borrow a famous phrase.
There aren't many performers these days who try to push the envelope and make music that attracts a diverse audience, but it wasn't too uncommon 40 years ago. It seems as if I was always surprised to learn that a pop star I liked was getting a lot of airplay on country stations.
John Denver was one of those musicians, and the best evidence of that may be that on this day in 1975, his single "I'm Sorry," which had been released in July, reached the top spot on Billboard's Hot Country Singles chart. In September, the song reached the top position in Billboard's Hot 100, just as "Thank God I'm a Country Boy" had.
I suppose the greatest difference between the two is the fact that "I'm Sorry" turned out to be the final #1 pop hit of Denver's career.
In the mid–'70s, Denver probably was at his peak in popularity with a string of #1 songs and #1 albums, crossing over into multiple categories. "I'm Sorry," for example, not only occupied the top spot in Billboard's Hot 100 before claiming the same spot on the Hot Country Singles chart, but it was also #1 for awhile on Billboard's Easy Listening chart (now Adult Contemporary).
"I'm Sorry" was Denver's last #1 hit on the Hot Country Singles chart — the last of three, all in the mid–1970s. He had been topping other charts in the earlier years, but he had only reached #1 with the country audience for the first time about a year earlier with "Back Home Again," a song with a country flavor but still very much the folk music for which Denver was known originally.
In fact the B side of "I'm Sorry" is a good example of Denver's versatility. One would never mistake it for a country song.
Until just a few years ago, I thought the B side — "Calypso" — was an A side. It was a tribute to French oceanographer Jacques Cousteau and his vessel, the Calypso, and it was featured in a television documentary about Cousteau's work. I was certain I had heard it played on the radio more often than I had heard "I'm Sorry." And, as I say, I was a John Denver fan in those days.
Truth is, "Calypso" apparently did receive more airplay than "I'm Sorry" did, and RCA reversed the order on the single, making "Calypso" the A side and "I'm Sorry" the B side.
"Calypso" may have had more airplay, but it never made it to #1 on any chart.
Doolittle (Tommy Lee Jones): [after Loretta's first appearance on the Grand Ole Opry] What we got to do next is figure out what to do next.
"Coal Miner's Daughter," which premiered 35 years ago today, was really two stories in one.
The first story was about a rural Kentucky girl named Loretta Webb, raised in poverty in a bump in the road called Butcher Hollow ("Holler" in Kentuckyspeak). For the first half of the movie, the focus was on Loretta (Sissy Spacek) and a young man, Doolittle Lynn (Tommy Lee Jones), who wanted to marry her.
Doolittle was kind of wild, and Loretta's father (played by my fellow Arkansan, Levon Helm) disapproved of the relationship. But when the two decided to get married, he didn't stand in the way. In fact, he showed up at the little country church where vows were being exchanged — at least long enough to answer in the affirmative when the preacher asked, "Who gives this woman's hand in marriage?"
So the two embarked on their life together, but life was hard for the newlyweds — until Doo discovered Loretta's musical talent, which led to her well–received performance before an audience.
That was the transitional moment. The audience loved Loretta, and she and Doo used it to launch her musical career. They succeeded — and found that fame and fortune didn't solve all problems. They merely created new ones.
But that scene in which she sings in public for the first time is an empowering moment. You could see her gaining confidence with each note.
It was the transition to that second story in the movie — about the problems that fame and fortune brought to their lives. Such is the nature of biographical movies, I guess. Of course, the fact that such a movie is being made at all is evidence that the subject of the movie succeeded — to an extent, at least — in overcoming his/her demons.
Loretta Lynn often used those problems as inspirations for her most successful songs.
Spacek also re–created the relationship Lynn had with country music legend Patsy Cline, a relationship that ended tragically when Cline was killed in an airplane crash. As big a star as Cline was, Lynn was probably country music's first female superstar, and their scenes together represented more than a friendship. They represented a transitional period in country music.
There was kind of an odd dichotomy, though, in the film's treatment of that relationship. On the one hand, the stars — Spacek and Beverly D'Angelo in the role of Cline — didn't lip synch while someone else did the singing for them — even though lip synching was usually done in that kind of movie at that time. The refusal of the film to yield on that point suggests (to me, anyway) a commitment to an honest approach by the actors — rather like not having a stunt double do the rough stuff in one's scenes.
On the other hand, though, the film did take certain liberties with the truth. For example ...
Lynn and Cline never toured together. In the movie, they tour together and confide in each other. They were confidants in real life, but they never toured together. I don't know whether touring together was the custom of the time for popular stars, country or otherwise, but I know Cline and Lynn never toured together.
They might have talked about it, though. I have heard that Cline may have been thinking about buying a touring bus shortly before her death. If so, then there are scenes in "Coal Miner's Daughter" that offer a tantalizing glimpse into what the future might have been like if Cline had not died.
But they do not re–create actual events.
Now, I'm a history buff, and I always enjoy good historical movies. And I know that, the movie business being what it is, even the best stories are going to get embellished in some way before they make it to the silver screen — whether I think the stories need embellishment or not. Sometimes I can live with those embellishments. Sometimes I can't.
In "Coal Miner's Daughter," I have decided I can live with the ones I know about. I can't say how I will feel if I learn about embellishments of which I had no knowledge. Depends on what they are, I guess, and how crucial they are to the story.
The scenes from the tours were kind of used to tie together loose ends and establish the closeness of Lynn's relationship with Cline. It was during such a Hollywood–created tour, for example, that Lynn caught Doo cheating on her, and she confided in Cline. Now, that didn't fundamentally alter the facts. Doo still cheated on her, and that still led to her authorship of one of her biggest hits.
That's the kind of Hollywood lie that I can live with, though. In the movie, Cline was the sympathetic friend, an innocent bystander. She wasn't the one with whom Doo was cheating nor was she the one who broke the news to Lynn. If the script had altered either of those conditions, it would have fundamentally changed the story and almost certainly changed the nature of Cline's relationship with Doo.
Speaking of Doo, I think this may have been the first time I ever saw Tommy Lee Jones in a movie. He had been in movies for about 10 years prior to that, and I saw some of the movies he made in the '70s, but I believe I saw them on TV long after they made the rounds of the theaters. If I saw one or more of them before I saw "Coal Miner's Daughter," his appearance(s) made no impression on me.
I saw "Coal Miner's Daughter" on the big screen when I saw it the first time, and I was impressed with the work done by all the participants, not just Spacek, who took home the Oscar for Best Actress. Jones really did make an impression on me with his performance. I'm tempted to describe it as sensitive — but that almost seems to deny a steely resolve that Jones brought to the role of Doo. If Doo really was that persistent, it's no wonder Lynn became a country superstar.
Whether it was the first time I saw him or not, I have seen him in quite a few movies since — and I honestly think this was his best performance. Or, at least, I believe it is the best performance I have seen him give. He wasn't nominated for an Oscar for his work — that kind of recognition came later, perhaps belatedly, although it would have been hard to wedge him in as a nominee for either Best Actor or Best Supporting Actor that year.
Without him, though, it is hard for me to imagine Spacek winning Best Actress — so maybe that was as much his award as it was hers.
If we all could sound like we wanted to, we'd all sound like George Jones.
Waylon Jennings
I'm not the country music fan that some of my friends are.
Sure, there are some country performers that I like to listen to — if I'm in the right mood. None of the modern stuff, though. I prefer country singers like Merle Haggard or Waylon Jennings or Hank Williams Sr.
That may seem contradictory. I grew up in the South, and country music was always playing on the radios in the barber shops, gas stations and hardware stores where I went with my father as a child.
And one of my earliest memories is of hearing the rockabilly song, "Root Beer," being played on one of those radios in one of those businesses. I guess I ought to remember more, but I don't. Fact was, in my then–small hometown, the only real difference between those businesses was the products they sold or services they provided.
Otherwise, they were pretty much the same. And so were most of the country songs I heard — or at least they seemed that way to me.
(Which reminds me ... I worked with a guy once who had been employed as a cameraman for a company that taped weddings and receptions. He once told me that he taped a Latino wedding that lasted for four hours, and a Tejano band provided the music.
("They played for four hours," he told me, "and it was thesame song the whole time!")
Anyway, I guess that was the kind of music for which Jones was known initially, but he evolved into a balladeer, and that is how I knew him as I got older. In those days, I guess I would have thought of his first #1 hit, "She Thinks I Still Care," whenever his name was mentioned.
But I was more interested in Southern rock — Lynyrd Skynyrd or ZZ Top. George Jones and his ilk seemed more suited for people of my parents' generation. At that time in my life, rock music seemed to be about the joy of living whereas country music was about sadness and death.
In addition to his drinking — which was legendary — Jones was also known for his duets with his one–time wife, Tammy Wynette, who died 15 years ago this month. They had a tumultuous marriage but a popular recording partnership, and I guess that was one of the things that attracted people to him. It never really appealed to me, though. Maybe I missed out on something.
I didn't miss out on what turned out to be his iconic hit, 1980's "He Stopped Loving Her Today," although I guess I sort of did at first.
I was in college when the song was released, and I really didn't pay much attention at the time, but I did later, and I had to agree with the conclusions of several surveys — it may well be the greatest country song of all time. It's hard to say that, I suppose, when there are so many worthy nominees, but it's hard not to say it after you've heard the melancholy tale of a man who loved a woman all his life, who never gave up on the hope, however slim it may have been, that they would eventually be together — until he died.
And Jones had the perfect voice for it. He thought the song was too morbid to be successful, but he was wrong.
For a long time, I've heard Jones called "The Possum," but I never knew why until after he died. It's because his nose and general facial features resembled the creature.
Personally, I never saw it. And I don't think that is a bad thing, either. Of course, I'm seeing a lot of things about Jones after his death that I never gave much thought when he was alive.
I doubt that I will ever see him as a possum.
But it is tempting to equate "He Stopped Loving Her Today" with a line from "The Natural," which was in theaters nearly 30 years ago.
In that movie, Robert Redford's character observed, "Some mistakes we never stop paying for."
Jones made his share of mistakes in his life — just like the rest of us. But even though he had his reservations about recording "He Stopped Loving Her Today," time has proven that it wasn't a mistake for him to record it.
Nor was it a mistake for him to record the other songs in his library, from "Root Beer" to "He Stopped Loving Her Today" and everything in between.
He stopped living today, but he still lives through the miracle of recordings. No mistake there.
About a year and a half before his still–mysterious death at the age of 29, country music legend Hank Williams released one of his final #1 hits — "Hey Good Lookin'."
Hank was on a roll at that point in his life. He'd had a single #1 hit between 1947 and 1949, but, in 1950, he seemed to explode on the charts with three #1 hits — and he kept that hot streak going the following year, starting with "Cold, Cold Heart" — and he nearly made it three #1 hits in a row with "Howlin' at the Moon," which reached #3.
You could probably recite a list of all the #1 hits Williams had in his brief but explosive career (as well as after his death), and any one of them could almost be said to be the definitive Williams song.
His style could be bluesy and earthy, and it could be playful and lively. I always felt "Hey Good Lookin' " touched on it all.
Oh, I guess you could say the same thing about songs like "Jambalaya" or "Settin' the Woods on Fire" — or several other Williams standards. For that matter, "Howlin' at the Moon" had the same sense of whimsy as "Hey Good Lookin'," but it isn't as well remembered, even though it was released at about the same time.
In the last year of his life, Williams had five songs that made it at least to #2 on the charts — and two of them reached the top. One of those songs was "Jambalaya" (which was released more than a year after "Hey Good Lookin' ") and the other, ironically, was called "I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive."
The song was intended to be humorous, as you can probably tell from the title. It was still climbing the charts when Williams died on the first day of 1953 — and took on considerably deeper meaning after that.
But, in June 1951, that was still in the future.
Sixty years ago, Williams was crooning to someone who was good lookin' and wonderin' what she had cookin'.
"How's about cookin' somethin' up with me?"
It has been covered by countless performers over the years, but, half a century after it was released, Williams' version was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
When I was a senior in high school, I wrote an entertainment column for my high school newspaper. I wrote about many topics — movies, music, books, TV — much as I do today in this blog.
Occasionally, I have gone back and read some of my clippings from that period in my life. And there are times when I am, frankly, impressed. I was more insightful than I remember being at that age, I have told myself.
But, if I am to be honest, there were far more instances when my youth, my naivete, my inexperience were on full display. I was too young — and so, too, were most of my readers — to realize it, but, unless my teachers were not as sharp as I gave them credit for being, some of them must have seen it.
Perhaps they were just being kind or polite by not pointing out to me that I was full of it — or maybe they had just spent so many years trying to educate the younger generation that they instinctively realized it was a phase through which everyone must pass and trying to spare anyone that experience is a mountain too high.
Anyway, I have grown and matured, as people tend to do, but I still remember the frequent urging from Paula, my high school editor, to write about one of her favorite singers, Emmylou Harris.
It was a request I finally granted that spring about a month or so before graduation.
I wrote about Emmylou's then–current release, "Quarter Moon in a Ten–Cent Town," a good album but Paula, a singer and guitar player who has gone on to run her own music store in our hometown, cut her musical teeth on Emmylou's earlier efforts.
Paula knew that "Quarter Moon" was only Emmylou's latest recording — not her best.
Unfortunately, I did not discover those earlier works until after I finished high school and I was dealing with a painful breakup with the girl I loved.
In the interest of accuracy, that girl was not Paula — although I must confess there was a time in my life when I did have something of a crush on her (and, based on the recent photos I've seen of her, she is still striking).
Nevertheless, I can see now, as I did then, quite a resemblance between Paula and Emmylou. Both were talented and beautiful, with the same long, dark hair parted in the middle.
When Paula held a guitar, she looked like Emmylou. And when she sang, she sounded like Emmylou.
Well, to me, she did.
It wasn't hard for me to see a younger Paula emulating Emmylou as she learned to sing and play the guitar. From what I had seen of Paula performing, she had the same mannerisms, the same stage presence, even the same vocal range. Emmylou's style — a mixture of earthiness, poignance and melancholy — was Paula's style, too.
Under the circumstances, Emmylou provided the kind of soothing music I craved, even though I had not grown up on country music. And, to be accurate, Emmylou and Paula both seemed to favor music that was more folk, more bluegrass than country, and I was always comfortable with that.
She seemed to burst through barriers with her covers of tunes like Lennon–McCartney's "Here, There and Everywhere" that was included on Harris' "Elite Hotel" album, which was released 35 years ago today.
I guess "Elite Hotel" came to be my favorite of her records when I was in college. I acquired it with a few others by Harris at that time in my life.
I never replaced them with CD versions — guess I'll have to get around to doing that one of these days — but I still admire them.
Harris has released a lot of albums in the years since I was in college. I haven't listened to many of them; occasionally, she may have risen to the same level she reached on "Elite Hotel." I don't know.
She, like Paula, is a gifted singer. She had a sort of steel–belted delicacy about her that I always found enormously appealing. Apparently, so did many others.
But if she has matched — or even exceeded — what she did on "Elite Hotel," she must have done so rarely. It was too good, and habitually duplicating it would be like hitting an ever smaller target from an ever greater distance — not necessarily impossible, just very improbable.
Her recordings in those days were diverse collections. On the same album with Lennon–McCartney tunes could be found Harris' homages to Hank Williams Sr., Gram Parsons, Buck Owens, Patsy Cline, Don Gibson, Rodney Crowell.
Much the same could be said of her debut album from earlier that year, "Pieces of the Sky," which did quite well, but "Elite Hotel" really built on its success and became Harris' first #1 country album.
And it gave her her first #1 country songs, "Together Again" and "Sweet Dreams."
But it was a crossover success as well. Not only country listeners were aware of Harris' talent. Other audiences were listening to her as well.
I, for one, didn't think of it as country, although it clearly had country influences and represented a departure from the kind of music I had been listening to. Until I started listening to Emmylou Harris in my early college days, the extent of my country music knowledge tended to be Hank Williams Sr., Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard and, OK, a little Kenny Rogers.
I wished I had known in high school what I discovered in college about Emmylou Harris. In a way, I felt like I had missed so much.
But I guess I didn't. Not really. I did get to hear Paula.
Today is the 82nd birthday of a fellow named Bill Fries.
Nearly a quarter of a century ago, he was elected mayor of a tiny town in southwest Colorado, and he served in that capacity for some six years. But that isn't his real claim to fame.
A little more than a decade before he became mayor of Ouray, Colo., in November 1975, Fries — who is more widely known as C.W. McCall — released a novelty recording, "Convoy," a half–spoken, half–sung homage to the citizens band (CB) radio fad, which reached its peak in popularity in the mid–1970s.
CBs had a reputation in those days as being the principal form of communication for truckers, but many were owned by private citizens. There was a definite subculture at the time of people who communicated from their homes with any truckers who happened to be passing through — and sometimes they developed relationships with people they "met" this way.
From time to time in the 1970s, I heard stories of truckers who frequently drove the same routes and became friendly with CB operators along those routes, communicating with them each time they went through.
CBs had kind of a mixed appeal, I guess. The language was kind of earthy and almost criminal, I guess, but it also had a lot of references to bears, which gave it kind of a Winnie the Pooh aura.
I don't know the actual release date of the song. Maybe it was released on Fries' 47th birthday. I guess it doesn't matter. Eventually, the song spent a week at the top of the pop charts and a month and a half at the top of the country charts.
I was just a young boy at the time, living in a state that was (and, I presume, still is) somewhat technologically challenged, but I had a friend who always seemed to be (and, apparently, still is) on the cutting edge of of technological advances.
And he had a CB radio.
I remember nights spent in his home or in mine, listening to his CB radio and, occasionally, listening to him to speak to other CB'ers. In hindsight, those CB'ers couldn't have been too far away because restrictions on wattage and antennas made it a short–distance form of communication at best, and any folks we spoke to on those nights must have been only a few miles from us.
But I always imagined them being far away — on an endless stretch of highway, perhaps, beneath a velvet night sky dotted with shimmering stars. I guess that image made it seem more magical to me.
Not that it wasn't already magical. The language of CB radio cast a spell all its own, and McCall capitalized on it in his song. Phrases like "That's a big 10–4, good buddy" were unbelievably popular in the 1970s — but, as a young boy in rural Arkansas, "good buddy" seemed, to me, to be not too far removed from the "good ole boy" label that was tossed around almost casually by many of the adults in my world.
I guess that made CBs more plausible for me in those days before cell phones.
And I suppose CB radios are still in use today, although they may not be quite as prevalent as they once were.
There are many more technological options available for both truckers and armchair communicators than there were in the 1970s, and my guess is that the groups who once communicated primarily by CB radio use a combination of them today.
I'm not really sure if that makes me feel more or less secure on the road.
I mean, in the days when drivers were talking about speed traps on CBs, they might have appeared to be speaking into dead air and listening to static–filled radio — but at least their eyes were on the road.
They weren't banging out text messages.
Of course, there might have been occasions when one of those truckers was so obsessed with finding the right CB channel that he failed to pay the proper attention to the road and wound up paying a price for it.
So I guess there are dangers in every era with every form of technology.
What is called for — both then and now — is at least a modicum of common sense.
Whether you read what I write at this blog or my other blogs, you're probably getting tired of reading about my friend Phyllis, who passed away last week.
She's going to be a tough topic for me to let go — even after next Monday, when many of our mutual friends are sure to be in our hometown of Conway, Ark., for her memorial service. I can't be there, but I still have a very strong feeling that I'm never going to shake her, that she will always be there in the recesses of my mind, whatever I do, wherever I go.
And I will probably feel a need to write about her from time to time in the future. Sometimes, I am sure, it will be because something has reminded me of her. And other times, I am sure, it will simply be because I miss her.
I was on the phone last night with a mutual friend who is in Conway working on the plans for the memorial service. He seems to be holding up well, although there were times in our conversation when he sounded like he was struggling to maintain his composure. And I know there were times when I struggled to maintain mine.
Phyllis loved and appreciated music, all kinds of music. Really, it went beyond that. She was very talented, able to play instruments and sing better than anyone else I have ever heard. When the Bible said to make a joyful noise, she really took it to heart.
If ever anyone made a joyful noise, it was Phyllis.
Now, even though we grew up in a small Southern town where country music could be heard playing on the radios in just about every gas station, store and waiting room in town, my taste in music always leaned to rock 'n' roll, jazz, the blues. I was familiar with the country stars and hits of the previous generation, but I didn't really follow them.
What I learned of the country music of my day I learned from Phyllis. In fact, I will always remember one hot summer evening after we graduated from high school when we drove, along with a classmate named Ellen, from Conway to Pine Bluff to see Willie Nelson and Emmylou Harris in concert.
I don't know how Phyllis felt about the country performers who came along later in her life. We never discussed, for example, Garth Brooks, who may be one of the most influential country performers of the last 20 years.
Now, I'm not saying that I am — or ever have been — a Garth Brooks fan. He burst onto the scene in 1989, the year after I left Arkansas, and then, in April of 1990, released as a single (at a time when vinyl albums and 45–rpm singles were still being produced and sold) what has come to be regarded as his signature song, "The Dance."
In the 20 years that have passed, I'm sure many people have drawn comfort from the words of the song — which could be interpreted as a tribute to a passionate love affair that has come to an end but has always seemed to me to be about accepting the death of someone to whom you are close.
Hindsight, as just about anyone will tell you, is 20/20. And, when I think of Phyllis these days, I am reminded of the words of Brooks' song.
I really am glad that I didn't know how or when — or why — Phyllis' life story would end. For that matter, I'm glad I wasn't aware of just how serious her condition was in the last month she was in the hospital. There was nothing I could have done — except hope and pray. And there were already plenty of people doing that, I imagine. Would one more person hoping and praying have tipped the scales and permitted Phyllis to recover? I don't know.
Our lives really are better left to chance. On a note Phyllis wrote about herself on Facebook last year, she said, in response to a question, that she would like to know in advance the day of her death — if such a thing was possible. But, if what people say of God is true, it seems enough to me that God knows when everyone will die. That is knowledge that I do not want or need.
When someone you care about dies, there is always, it seems to me, a tendency to wish you had known ahead of time so you could say your goodbyes. But I've been in the position where I knew someone I cared about was dying and I was probably seeing that person for the last time — and yet, I could never bring myself to say the things I wanted to say.
On those occasions, my friends were dying of cancer or some other disease, and maybe the very act of saying "goodbye" seemed like giving up. That is something I have never been prepared to do.
Afterward, I regretted not saying it — but I still prefer not to know when death is going to come to me or anyone else. If it's going to come as a shock, let it come as a shock. The pain will wear off eventually. Guess it beats knowing that you or someone you love has three days — or three hours — left. What would you do with the time that remained?
And, while I sure could have missed this pain, that would have meant that I'd have had to miss the dance. Knowing Phyllis was a real kick. I'm sorry for those who never had that pleasure. I'm sorry she's gone. I hope we'll see each other again. I'm glad she was in my life.
My life wouldn't have been nearly as rich if Phyllis hadn't passed my way.
My father was a college professor in Arkansas when my brother and I were growing up. And, for about four months in 1973, the whole family lived in Nashville while my father was on his sabbatical.
Obviously, that was many years ago. I don't think I've been in Nashville since that time. But I did live there for awhile. Many things have changed — but not the names of streets and waterways and buildings that were standing then and still stand today. Hearing the names brings back memories I haven't thought about in a long time.
For example, one of the buildings that was standing when my family lived in Nashville was Ryman Auditorium, the original home of the Grand Ole Opry.
For more than 30 years, Ryman was the Mecca of country music. The Grand Ole Opry show made Ryman, which began its existence as a tabernacle, its permanent home in the 1940s, and just about everyone who ever amounted to anything in country music performed there at some time during the next three decades.
But, as it turned out, the Opry relocated to a larger facility that was part of Opryland the year after my family left Nashville. And, for nearly 20 years, Ryman stood empty and unused, until Emmylou Harris came to do some shows in 1992 and made an album of the songs she sang there. Apparently, that revived local interest in the place (which is known as "the Mother Church of Country Music"), and it was restored for use as a performance venue and a museum.
It seems ironic, to me, that this should happen at this time. It was 15 years ago today that my mother died in a flash flood here in Dallas. And this flood seems to have caught Nashville as much by surprise as the one that struck Dallas in 1995.
I always had the feeling that Mom really enjoyed the time we spent in Nashville. And, while I would never say that she — or I — had much interest in the Opry, I guess we developed a kind of a local interest in it and the people who performed there.
I will always remember that she seemed genuinely sorry that David Akeman ("Stringbean" in the attached video clip) and his wife were ambushed and murdered on their rural Tennessee property about a month before we moved back to Arkansas. Perhaps that is why I make a mental connection between Mom and Nashville.
Well, things sort of seem to have come full circle now.
I never got to see an Opry show when I lived in Nashville, but I hope those who see one at Ryman while Opryland is being restored appreciate the rare opportunity they are being given to experience the Opry the way so many experienced it back in the day.
And I hope that Nashville — and the Gulf of Mexico — recover faster than most people think they will.
It may be hard for modern country music fans to imagine, but there was a time when women weren't fixtures on the charts.
Kitty Wells, who celebrates her 91st birthday today, changed that.
In the early 1950s, Wells became the first female country music singer to top the charts with her song, "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," and she followed it with a string of hits over the next couple of decades that earned her the nickname, "Queen of Country Music."
I think it is fair to say that, without Wells blazing the trail, stars like Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette might still have broken through, but their arrivals might have been delayed considerably. And that, in turn, likely would have postponed the appearances of their successors, like Dolly Parton and Reba McEntire.
Deservedly, Wells was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1976. She is the oldest living member of the Hall of Fame.
Would that be the distinction from which she derives the most pride? Perhaps.
She also is one of the few country stars — regardless of gender — who was born in Nashville. That's a distinction that might also be a source of pride for her.
But she might take more pride in the fact that her marriage to Johnnie Wright (who turned 95 in May) has lasted more than 70 years. Few marriages last that long, and my guess would be that even fewer celebrity marriages do.
I got my bachelor's degree in journalism from the University of Arkansas, and I got my master's degree in journalism from the University of North Texas. Most of my adult life has been dedicated to writing and editing in one form or another. Most recently I have taught writing (news and developmental) as an adjunct journalism professor at Richland College, where I advise the student newspaper staff. Go, Thunderducks!
