John Denver's Triple

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John Denver was one of my early favorites.

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.

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"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."

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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).

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"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.

Summertime ... and the Listening's Easy

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If you are a follower of Billboard magazine's "Adult Contemporary" chart, you might be interested to know that it made its debut 50 years ago today.

Apparently, for a few years prior to this day in 1961, there had been a growing desire on the part of many radio stations in America to play popular songs without becoming known as "rock 'n' roll" stations. The music industry had to acknowledge that there was a portion of the market that wasn't rock 'n' roll — and it wasn't country — and respond appropriately.

Billboard's response was to devise a chart that would list the current best–selling recordings that the magazine had decided were not rock 'n' roll songs. Billboard had written about this a few times before so the list was hardly a surprise for regular readers.

Thus, in the beginning, there was a general hits chart — and, from that, a more style–specific (or, perhaps, content– is a better word) chart was derived that was known, initially, as Easy Listening.

The format was established enough by 1965 that Billboard was able to treat it as it did other genres. By that time, it had been through a number of name changes already — a year after it was introduced, it was known as "Middle–Road Singles," then it was known as "Pop–Standard Singles" in 1964.

In 1965, it was known again as "Easy Listening," and it retained that designation through the 1970s. In 1979, it was renamed "Adult Contemporary," and those words have been part of the chart's title, in one form or another, ever since.

The early editions of the list were led by the artists and the kind of songs you probably would expect — the songs were often show tunes and love songs, and performers who specialized in them tended to be the top sellers.

That's why it seems strange to me that the very first #1 recording on this chart was called "The Boll Weevil Song." Perhaps you aren't familiar with the song. It's a blues song, about 100 years old now, according to some folks, and it has been recorded by several blues artists.

(If you haven't lived in the South, you might not be familiar with boll weevils, either. They're insects, pests as far as cotton farmers are concerned. Well, the word pest probably isn't adequate. They devastated cotton farmers before and during the Great Depression — which happened to be when many of the initial followers of the Easy Listening chart were born.)

The version that was a hit 50 years ago today was recorded by Brook Benton, a popular performer of the time who was known for his rock 'n' roll recordings — but also for his R&B and blues stuff, too, which made him something of a crossover artist, I guess.

Actually, applying the label of "rock 'n' roll artist" to Benton seems inappropriate to me. His two breakthrough hits from 1959 — "It's Just a Matter of Time" and "Endlessly" — would have been right at home on an Easy Listening chart if such a thing had existed at the time.

And if you listen to the other hits he had in the late 1950s and early 1960s, I think you would conclude that he was more of an easy listening artist. He sure wasn't an Elvis or a Buddy Holly or a Chuck Berry. He was more like Nat King Cole.

(In fact, Benton and collaborator Clyde Otis originally offered those breakthrough hits to Cole — but, after Otis joined a music label, he persuaded Benton to record them instead.)

As I say, Benton recorded many songs that would have earned prominent spots on an Easy Listening chart — but it was the song about boll weevils that was popular when the chart debuted. Weird. Good song but weird.

Boll weevils aren't lovable or cuddly. Thus, it seems very odd to me that they should have such a role in the history of this kind of chart. If you haven't heard the song, the title read kind of like an ode to roaches.

It's also odd, I think, that, given the kind of songs Benton frequently recorded, he never returned to the top of the Easy Listening chart. He did come close, though — with his comeback song, "Rainy Night in Georgia," in 1970.