Image via Complex Original
Singling out 50 Country Songs That Don’t Suck in a world when there are undoubtedly thousands of country songs that don’t suck might seem condescending, except in the sense that country music’s Suckage Ratio (i.e.: songs that suck vs. ones that don’t) is just as high as any other genre. But sorting through all the chaff to uncover the wheat can be a chore—especially now, when country radio is probably at its dullest, most rote, point in over a decade. So perhaps this primer will help.
We're looking at the style here through a wide scope, historically and otherwise, starting with the decade when record companies first realized so-called hillbilly musicians might be worth signing, and the rural audience might be worth targeting: Three records from the ‘20s, four from the ‘30s, three from the ‘40s, two from the ‘50s, seven from the ‘60s, 11 from the ‘70s, five from the ‘80s, four from the ‘90s, seven from ‘00s, four from the ‘10s (which, after all, are still just a couple years old.) A sort of sloppy Bell curve, if you will.
We intentionally focused on artists who don’t get written about all that much—ones who you might not already know made great records, and also non-superstars who haven’t already earned all sorts of attentive ink from music critics. So: No Hank Williams, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton; no Dixie Chicks, Jamey Johnson, Big & Rich, Miranda Lambert, Taylor Swift—all of whom have made records as good as several on this list. (OK, there were a few people on that level—Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills, Merle Haggard, Loretta Lynn, Toby Keith—we couldn’t resist, no matter how hard we tried.) So we're not claiming these are the 50 best country songs ever made—More like, 50 really good ones that you probably won't be seeing on CMT's Country Music Awards show tomorrow night.
Written by Chuck Eddy
Toby Keith "Beers Ago" (2012)
Album: Clancy's Tavern
Label: Show Dog-Universal Music
Not his best ever, by a long shot-just his most recent-but still probably the catchiest country single I've heard in 2012, a trick Toby Keith has pulled so many times I lost count. Honestly, for my money, he's the most reliable singles artist, any genre, of the past decade (maybe most reliable album artist, too, even if he's noticeably slipped some lately.)
“Beers Ago” gets him in jovial rather than belligerent mode (see “High Maintenance Woman,” “As Good As I Once Was,” “Whiskey Girl,” “I Love This Bar,” etc.), and it's got plenty of fast-talked speed-of-sound small-town-decades-ago details (“spent what little bit of money we had on wintergreen Skoal and Main Street gas,” “man in the moon works his magic on the second runner-up from the 4H pageant,” etc.) and it sounds as good on a car radio as anything else I've heard on my car radio in 2012. So, par-for-the-course Toby, pretty much.
Kind of confusing, maybe, that he sings some girl “The Homesick Blues.” Does he mean “Lovesick Blues” (Emmett Miller via Hank Williams) or “Subterranean Homesick Blues” (Bob Dylan)-which would be really weird-or what?
Only real problem, though, is the beer math: When the song starts, senior year of high school was 1452 beers ago; when the song ends, 1653 beers ago. But Toby Keith graduated high school in Oklahoma in 1979, and even 1653 divided by 33 years comes out to just over 50 beers per year, which equals less than one beer per week! Wow, what a wild man!
Them Bird Things "Georgia Mountain" (2011)
Album: Wildlike Wonder
Label: Playground Music Finland
Mike Brassard and Steve Blodgett had a recording history dating back nearly half a century-to 1962, in the New England frat-party/roller-rink rock'n'roll band Mike and the Ravens-by the time Them Bird Things put out their second album, Wildlike Wonder, in Finland in 2010 and the rest of Europe in 2011.
One Brassard composition on it, “Birmingham,” was almost a half-century old itself, and some of the sounds, schooled in early 20th Century Appalachian string bands, seem several decades older than that.
And yet the music feels as fresh as it is ancient. Salla Day, who says she's “naturally a country singer” and lists Bobbie Gentry and Dusty Springfield as influences, has the vocal stateuesqueness of a less ice-queened-out Nico or Marianne Faithfull.
And the band's groove-given a psychedelic-folk vibe by Arttu Tolonen's mandolin, fuzzboxed lap steel, and distorted harmonica-peers back through the Velvet Underground and Led Zeppelin to their common denominator: the Yardbirds' Middle Eastern drones.
Most of it, though, still feels legitimately down-home-especially a song like the Blodgett-penned “Georgia Mountain,” about country's old standby theme of trying to escape the landscape that reared you only to take the highway back, in this case when a musician's parent dies: Goin' back to find a simpler place and time, as Gladys Knight put it.
The structure is circular and repetitive, but remains pastoral even as the five male musicians behind Day-all wearing dresses in the CD cover-snowball in force and volume so the tune can build to a crescendo.
Flynnville Train "Sandman" (2010)
Album: Redemption
Label: Next Evolution Records
I'd been hearing this droning FM staple by America since the early '70s, but managed to ignore it until these super-scraggly Indiana longhairs turned it into the hardest rocking track I've heard so far this decade.
They're a country band, hypothetically (their 2007 debut came out on Toby Keith's Show Dog Nashville imprint), but they're country in the road-tested Kentucky Headhunters real-band sense, and this cut packs at least as high-decibel a wallop as the Headhunters' 2005 take on "Big Boss Man.”
Total biker jam, exploratory in a Skynyrd sense, with quiet spans and sitar from one Bret Shankar letting rhythm and lead guitars build over monster drums. My colleague George Smith informs me that cover bands frequently handled “Sandman” as “a fuzztone proto-metal dirge around '70-'72.
It was basically a simple dirge all along, so you could hammer the shit out of it” Amazing if it took 40 years for anyone to finally get that idea recorded, but that's pretty much what Flynnville do: Dirge into raveup, at least. (Second most menacing stab at the sound on their 2010 Redemption album: "Friend Of Sinners," about asking Christ's forgiveness since you've flubbed all the commandments.)
Anyway, turns out their big inspiration for pummelling the living dickens out of “Sandman” was 9-11: “We prepared ourselves mentally by watching footage of the attack and printing pictures of Bin Laden and placing them all around us in the studio,” their press bio reveals.
So when Brian Flynn shouts all that cryptic stuff about grounded planes and enlistment and “running from the man who goes by the name of the Sandman,” that's what they have in mind.
America "two American ex-pats and a Brit who first met on a U.S Air Force base, allegedly writing about a squadron based in France "had no idea what they were forecasting.
Lee Brice "Sumter County Friday Night" (2010)
Album: Love Like Crazy
Label: Curb Records
In which a pre-football game Friday Night Lights rumble between rival small-town Carolina schools results in black eyes, and Lee Brice's band sets up an incessant power-chord groove, vicious enough to pass as battle music.
Brice, who went to college in South Carolina on a football scholarship himself, has a tendency to slip in more emphatic moments into vocal inflections out of '90s post-grunge rock-he compresses words and stretches them out, turning individual vowels into several syllables or two words into one, in ways country rarely allows.
On his 2010 debut Love Like Crazy, the track kicks off a brutal three-song midsection-"Carolina Boys" is also about potential violence, threatened against a city-slicker yuppie "in his three-piece suit and his penny loafer shoes” whose girl Lee, in his “white T-shirt and my cowboy hat and my baby blues," wants to steal.
Class warfare of the asshole kind, but efficient. And "Four On The Floor" dives deep into a hybrid of country-rock with post-funk dance while name-dropping both Barry White and Waylon Jennings.
But “Sumter County Friday Night” is the killer: how Brice impatiently switches tempos to dodge radar traps and swallows his words when he rides those big-tire toys on red-dirt roads out to Sparkleberry Swamp, how he sounds so hungry for blood on the word “fott”—translates as “fight,” y'all—even how “50 cellphones ring, and everybody's talking about the same thing.” What, no texting?
Sarah Buxton "Space" (2008)
Album: Almost My Record EP
Label: Lyric Street Records
The title is a pun, an onomatopoeia. Space is what Sarah's selfish boyfriend in the song wants, and space is what the music's arrangement leaves plenty of. This is one of the clearest examples of mainstream country's 21st Century trend toward confessional singer-songwriting by young women: Taylor Swift, obviously, and Michelle Branch's country side project the Wreckers, but also Miranda Lambert, Sunny Sweeney, and so on.
Bitter about her guy complaining they're moving too fast and going too far, the woman in the song is entirely contemporary. Seemingly single and in her 20s, she could be from anywhere-big city, suburbia, small town, doesn't matter.
Though the frustrated sophistication in Buxton's tone certainly does not feel sheltered or provincial-“You need your own room, well how 'bout an island/I bet you can find one, on the dark side of the moon.”
Imagine a more vocally full-bodied, hallway-to-Stevie Nicks version of early Liz Phair-with that sexy Peppermint Petty burr at the edge of her voice intact-and you wouldn't be far off. “How does it feel not to need anyone,” Buxton taunts, channeling “Like A Rolling Stone.”
Yet this was a No.38 country hit, from a woman who Nashville sadly seems to find more marketable as a songwriter for male singers like Keith Urban, or a featured voice on tracks by male singers like David Nail.
Jace Everett "Bad Things" (2005)
Album: Jace Everett
Label: Epic Records
When Epic first put this single out in 2005, as a followup to a No.51-country-charting Everett song called “That's The Kind Of Love I'm In,” nobody much noticed. So I was taken by surprise four years later when somebody on an Internet message board claimed it had one of the decade's best guitar solos.
Then mere days later I went to a Halloween party, and the aging Austin psychobillies who lived in the old-monster-movie-decorated house had instruments set up in the living room, and played stuff like "Whole Lot Of Shakin' Going On," Link Wray's "Rumble," Sam the Sham's "Little Red Riding Hood," assorted Wanda Jacksony and Crampsy and Etta Jamesy things I couldn't place, and, uh... "Bad Things."
Which on one hand fit right in thanks to its dirty twang, but on the other hand felt out of place, because since when do crusty old psychobillies pay attention to current Nashville country?
Of course, this was all before I learned that, in 2008, “Bad Things” had wound up the theme song to HBO's vampire-oriented True Blood, then wound up a small pop hit in England and a bigger one in Scandinavia.
Everett's mostly garage-punkish Red Revelations next wound up one of the best albums of either 2009 or 2010 (it's complicated), and that had “Bad Things” on it, too. Before you knew it, Everett's Amazon page was promoting him as a “swamp-blues rocker.”
Which makes it all the odder that the slimy moodiness, kingsnake crawling, werewolf rockabilly hiccupping, and playfully threatening eroticism of "Bad Things" (which, by the way, is what the mysterious loner in the song promises to do to you before the night is through) were ever pitched to straight-laced country stations in the first place. But they were.
Gene Watson "Flowers" (2003)
Album: Sings
Label: Compendia Records
The past couple decades have seen a spate of alcohol-recovery songs from aging country men-T. Graham Brown, Gene Watson's labelmate for a time on indie-label-for-supposed-has-beens Intersound, did some real good ones for instance. But it's doubtful many were as effective as “Flowers,” sung the year Watson turned 60.
He addresses it to his wife who-we learn as the song progresses-turns out to have died a year before, in a car that the narrator was driving, after she had begged him on her knees not to. He swears he's been sober since, and of course it's totally maudlin, but Watson's delivery is gorgeously understated, and he nails it.
At one point, to illustrate how much he's changed since that tragic day, he mentions a new suit for Sunday he just bought. And how his relaxed tenor rejoices in that high exultant note on “I'm in church now” gives you shivers and breaks your heart "It's hard not to believe that, beyond the plot's hyperbole, Watson hears something of his own life in this story.
The song appeared on a CD called ...Sings "one of 11 consecutive albums on six different labels" (1992 to 2009) listed on Watson's Wiki discography that did not chart at all.
Between 1975 and 1997, though, he had charted over 75 songs "including six number ones. Subtle ballads, mostly "some of which may, or may not, be as mind-blowing as this one.
Rebecca Lynn Howard "I Need A Vacation" (2003)
Album: N/A
Label: MCA Nashville
Kentucky cutiepie Rebecca Lynn Howard debuted at 21, peaked commercially by 23, and by 29 was putting out a country-soul album on an indie label, singing Temptations, Aretha, and Al Jarreau numbers.
During her brief big-league career at MCA, she was best playing a bobo in paradise. There was “Pink Flamingo Kind Of Love,” the most irresistible track on 2002's Forgive "tiki torches, one-legged lawn-ornament birds, ice tea, you and me, garden-hose sprinklers aimed at the patio.
And then this sweet-toothed staycation single a year later, which never even wound up on an album "this time, the patio has a swing you can fall asleep in; there's a sly hint of threesome kink (“Me and my husband we need a wife/Someone whose sole ambition is a laundry”); the asides are somehow more endearing for being more sitcom-middlebrow than they think (“yeah I invented shabby chic,” “if it blooms, it's not a weed”); and we don't “even have to leave 2523 General George Patton Drive.”
Pop-country about suburbia: Underrated again, especially with big Tom Petty jangles and Drifters castanets and Latin percussion touches leading the way. Now, if only Rebecca Lynn Howard would revive Dionne Warwick's “Hasbrook Heights” someday.
LeAnn Rimes "Life Goes On" (2002)
Album: Twisted Angel
Label: Curb Records
Some of the best C&W of the aughts was actually R&B, and vice versa. Faith Hill's “One” was one sterling example; this was another, and it ticked people off. People, see, had in their minds that LeAnn Rimes was supposed to be some kind of pure country singer, thanks to songs she had once been given that had helped her go quadruple platinum as a 14-year-old.
By her next two regular albums, though, she was already covering Debby Boone and Prince, and pretty much her whole career from that point on was a back-and-forth tug-of-war between her alleged old-school country roots and the poppier proclivities she clearly saw as asserting independence. Which they were.
When good-taste know-it-alls with sticks up their keisters want to limit you, misbehavior in the opposite direction counts as an act of courage. With 2000's much-remixed “Can't Fight The Feeling” from the Coytote Ugly soundtrack (think Urban Cowboy two decades on), Rimes crossed over big-time on both charts (No.11 pop, No.61 country) and dancefloors.
And in 2002's somewhat less lucrative “Life Goes On” (No. 110 pop, No. 60 country)-off an album called Twisted Angel which was produced by old metal-disco hand Desmond Child and on which Rimes wore several varieties of wanton lingerie in the CD booklet.
"She stomped under mirrorballs like Laura Branigan or Taylor Dayne while asserting independence from a cad who believes he's the “Daddy Mac.” Thing is, nobody else in pop or R&B was mirrorball-stomping that hard anymore in 2002. If it takes a country diva to do it, so be it.
Ty Herndon "Heather's Wall" (2001)
Album: N/A
Label: Epic Records
The most twilight-zoned country hit so far this millennium "and probably the only one sung from the point of view of a dying man just shot by a bank robber "“Heather's Wall” is also something of a phantom record.
Originally slated to be included on an album called This Is Ty Herndon, it stalled at #37 on the country chart, which caused Herndon's label to lose confidence in his future prospects.
The album never reached the stores, and the song was left off the Greatest Hits album that came out instead. So it effectively ended his six-year career as a Nashville hitmaker "a career that, way back in Herndon's rookie year 1995 when fans still confused him with fellow rookie Ty England, had already managed to survive an incident in which he was apprehended for meth possession and exposing himself to a male police officer in a park.
Charges were reduced, Herndon had hits, but by the early '00s he was weathering other personal travails. As happens in modern America, he'd later resurface as a Contemporary Christian singer, returning to church music he was reared on.
But “Heather's Wall” was his last real shot at glory, and God, what a beautifully stark last shot "he feels the gun exploding, senses things moving in slow motion, remembers New England in the fall of '99, wonders how he can be dying and walking up the stairs at the same time. He will never be set free, as long as he's a ghost that we can't see.
Trace Adkins "I'm Tryin'" (2001)
Album: Chrome
Label: Capitol Nashville
Trace Adkins had not yet settled on his ass-whooping, honkytonk-badonkadonking muscle-car butt-county persona when he delivered this throat-lumpingly sparse divorced-dad sigh in 2001; his baritone was already booming, but not yet bellicose.
And unlike most country songs about alimony and child support, Jerry Reed's hilarious “She Got The Goldmine (I Got The Shaft)” for instance, there's neither bitterness nor self-deprecating comedy at work here, just hurt: “Two years since we finalized, still not used to putting 'ex' in front of 'wife'.”
All she has to say to him anymore is send more money and don't be late, but the bum economy's hanging over his head "“This gettin' up early workin' double shifts/Gonna make an old man of me long before I ever get rich.”
He tries to follow his own old man's advice "“Go easy on the bottle, be hard on yourself”—but he feels like Sisyphus. And when violins and cellos of Dan Huff's production chime in, this mountain Trace must climb feels like a world upon his shoulders.
Alecia Elliott "I'm Diggin' It" (1999)
Album: Alecia Elliot
Label: MCA Nashville
Born on Christmas 1982, Alecia Elliott was one of a few very young country women making the world safe for Taylor Swift at the turn of the millennium. Jessica Andrews and Rebecca Lynn Howard were others "Nashville suits had clearly determined that pre-teen suburban females were a demographic worth targeting, a supposition that, in the long run, would prove a goldmine.
But Alecia went further than others: “I'm Diggin' It,” her closest song to a hit, only got to #50 on the country chart, possibly because its bubblegum-soul bassline bounce leaned as much toward early Britney Spears" (1999 was midway between “…Baby One More Time” and “Oops!…I Did It Again,” remember) as toward Shania Twain.
But Radio Disney dug it, and it was grade-A machine-tooled head-over-heels teenybop-crush fodder no matter what: “Can't eat, can't sleep/All I do is think about you/Hold on, what's that feelin'/That's my heart you're stealin'/That's okay, my baby/I don't want it baaaaaack…”
Alecia came from Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and had pipes to prove it; if Britney had ever decided to stay true to her Mississippi/Louisiana upbringing and make country records, she couldn't have done much better. Anyway, naturally, it didn't last.
As Alecia's Wiki page says, she “shortly thereafter vanished from the industry”—our loss, obviously. Most intriguing Internet rumor of her whereabouts since: “No longer a singer, and working in the FBI's Cybercrimes Division.”
The Tractors "Fallin' Apart" (1994)
Album: The Tractors
Label: Arista Records
Nobody remembers, but for a while there, in the almost-anything-goes mid '90s, it looked like the Tractors might take over the country music world. Their debut album was one of country's biggest sellers of 1994: Got to #2, sold two million copies.
And basically, that was it "they only ever charted again with a Christmas album, and by 1998 they were already calling themselves Farmers In A Changing World in the title of an album that barely anybody heard.
Admittedly, they would've made for unusual stars: Steve Ripley, their guitar-playing frontman, was already 44 when they hit; he and his fellows had spent previous years backing up mom-and-dad rockers of the Bob Seger/Eric Clapton/Bonnie Raitt/Linda Ronstadt school.
Raitt, J.J. Cale, Ry Cooder, and Leon Russell had cameos on the one big album, and the music was defiantly backdated: Hank Williams and Chuck Berry covers, songs about the sounds of Tulsa (where the Tractors were from) and New Orleans.
The hit, “Baby Likes To Rock It,” had as much choo choo ch'boogie as boot-scootin' boogie in it, and wasn't a whole lot less cornball-kitschy as jump-blues remembrances go than Jump 'N The Saddle's pop hit “Curly Shuffle” in 1984 or Cherry Poppin' Daddys' pop hit “Zoot Suit Riot” in 1998.
Basically, the Tractors come off like a good-timey '80s-style college-radio-type roots outfit (think a less eccentric Rockpile) who briefly managed to convince Nashville gatekeepers that was enough.
Nonetheless, they were in the right place and the right time: Just two years later, the band BR5-49, mining a related brand of retro, never got higher on the country album chart than #33.
And the Tractors were even ahead of their time in a way, putting jokey asides and snippets between their harmonized upbeat dance numbers in ways somewhat anticipating Big & Rich a decade later.
The similarity is most striking in their best song, “Fallin Apart,” a jovial take on romantic and economic collapse that opens up rebutting Bobby McFerrin's “Don't Worry Be Happy.”
Cactus Brothers "Sixteen Tons" (1993)
Album: The Cactus Brothers
Label: Liberty Records
Cactus Brothers, formed at a late '80s funeral from remnants of the sub-Jason and the Scorchers Nashville cowpunk band Walk The West, were theoretically supposed to emphasize “cow” over “punk”: Besides this antiquated coal-mining truck-system lament, their self-titled debut had covers of the Everly Brothers and the 18th Century German-composed fiddle jam “Fisher's Hornpipe”; among its credited instruments were banjo, dobro, pedal steel, dulcimer, fiddle, and mandolin.
Pretty trad, right? Not so fast: Between the thick and nasty noise of Will Goleman and Paul Kirby's guitars, the punch-your-chin gang shouts whenever the title comes around, and the ornery way the vocals stretch out “ya hawwwwwl” and “owe my soul to tha companee stoaaaaaw”, the Cacti's “Sixteen Tons” lands somewhere in the dangerous 'hood of Johnny Thunders' Heartbreakers or Brit pub-thugs the Count Bishops "i.e., more punk than cowpunk ever was in the first place.
It made a dent on CMT regardless, apparently since the Cactus Bros had videos ready to go and bigger stars didn't; Capitol subsidiary Liberty presumably signed them in the wake of a couple Top 3 country LPs by Mercury's likeminded self-contained Southern rockers the Kentucky Headhunters, so perhaps stellar sales figures were hoped for.
No such luck: Country radio remained un-cracked, despite the superb song choice. Most likely written by Merle Travis in 1947 though others have made claims dating back to the '30s, “Sixteen Tons” is best known for the version hillbilly boogie crossover hero Tennessee Ernie Ford took number-one for eight weeks in 1955 even though he'd put it out as the B-side of a Moon Mullican cover.
And it's since been covered by artists in every conceivable genre, from Stevie Wonder and Bo Diddley on down: R&B, folk, metal, jazz, MOR, indie rock, hip-hop. Tom Jones went Top 20 with it in 1967; the Don Harrison Band, boogiefied hard rockers with Creedence Clearwater Revival's rhythm section, took it to #47 pop in 1976; far-lefty U.K. soul punks the Redskins honored striking British miners with it in 1984. Whenever it's done justice, a blue collar caked in coal dust shows through, and the “nother day older and deeper in debt,” unfortunately, never grows old.
John Anderson "Seminole Wind" (1992)
Album: Seminole Wind
Label: BNA Records
None of the other big male '80s neo-traditionalists (think George Strait, Randy Travis, Ricky Skaggs) sang with half the character or personality of John Anderson; those other guys have certainly had their moments, but they all tend to come off sexless and persnickity up against Jawn's robust, randy hangdawg drawl and slur.
He's always sounded more country, more hick, than any of them. But also more rock, which is what he was born singing "albeit rock infused in music of black Americans (soul, blues, funk), just like country was back before it started ironing all its shirts for the mega-church.
Anyway, his most solid albums were in the '80s, mostly early '80s. But in the early '90s he made a brief, massive comeback "1992's Seminole Wind went double-platinum and was his first country Top 10 since 1984; an album he'd put out in 1990 hadn't charted at all.
The title track, an environmental statement against the ravages of technological progress in the Florida Everglades (“In the name of flood control, they made their plans and they drained the land”) and one of three sizable hits from the album, wears its idiosyncrasies like a robe.
The writing is verbose, multisyllabic "“from the Okeechobee all the way up to Micanopy”" (197.2 miles, according to Rand McNally) "and biologically detailed: Not only alligators and eagles, but cypress stumps, otters, and gars (quick "find another song, ever, that names those), not to mention the ghost of Osceola, the 19th Century Seminole chief. And the music's sweep, framed in cinematic fiddles and bolstered by a regal break from what sounds like banjo and mandolin, is as prog as country gets—yet somehow, naturalistic enough to support its artistic ambition.
Sweethearts Of The Rodeo "Midnight Girl In A Sunset Town" (1986)
Album: Sweethearts of the Rodeo
Label: Columbia Records
The primary gender conflict in commercial country music over the past three decades is this: The boys stubbornly insist on staying put with their redneck identity politics in the middle of nowhere (see, say, Montgomery Gentry's “She Couldn't Change Me” or Eric Church's “Homeboy”); the gals restlessly yearn to get out.
This song defines the latter category: Sweethearts Of The Rodeo, named for an archetypally country-rock 1968 Byrds album beloved by alt-country bands, were two 30-ish sisters (from the affluent L.A. beachfront suburb Manhattan Beach, but don't tell anybody), married at some point to guys from the country-rock combos Pure Prairie League (Vince Gill to be exact) and Blue Steel.
But here they're harmonizing, with absolute conviction, about being stuck in a one-stoplight/one-horse hicktown where nobody makes noise and where the sidewalks get rolled up at dusk, when they'd rather be enjoying exciting nightlife somewhere bigger.
Their followup album two years later even had a sequel of sorts, “If I Never See Midnight Again.” The music is pop bluegrass way bubblier than the real thing, and “Midnight Girl” –a #4 country hit—served its own nightlife purpose, judging from its inclusion as a “two-step” on K-Tel's instructive 1995 Country Kickers line-dance compilation.
Just as important, it served as a kind of blueprint for later woman-country escape-from-boondock classics: Trisha Yearwood's “Walkaway Joe,” Faith Hill's “Wild One,” Dixie Chicks' “Ready To Run,” Taylor Swift's “Mean,” “Lauren Alaina's “Growing Her Wings,” and beyond.
T.G. Sheppard "War Is Hell (On The Homefront Too)" (1982)
Album: Perfect Strangers
Label: Warner Bros. / Curb Records
So, which lonely spouse on Army Wives would you want to be deflowered by, if you were a 16-year-old lad? Claudia Joy, Denise, Pamala, or Roxy? Or Roland, for that matter? Imagine the possibilities! T.G. Sheppard did, and not only was that TV show a quarter-century away, there wasn't even a good war going at the time (the Falklands don't count).
So he set the Dear John action in 1944, when a major lack of warm male bodies available were back in garrison. As virginity-lost-to-MILFs fantasies goes, it's at least up there with the Four Seasons' “December 1963 (Oh What A Night)” or Garth Brooks's “That Summer,” and has a more stompingly martial chorus than either.
It went #1 country, of course "one of 14 times T.G. did, most of them forgettable. I bought an album by him once—I Love 'Em All from 1981, which I really hoped to be as cheesy and silly as its cover, where studly T.G. is being mobbed by all the fawning lipsticked ladies he's loved before, but sadly it was a snooze.
As for “War Is Hell,” maybe any hack could've done it. But they didn't, and T.G. did. (Amusing Joel Whitburn note: “Initials do not signify 'The German Sheppard' or 'The Good Sheppard,' as commonly thought.”)
Sylvia "The Matador" (1981)
Album: Drifter
Label: RCA Records
Sylvia of Kokomo, Indiana had a pile of country hits in the early '80s, and is remembered, correctly, as one of country's least-country stars ever. But that doesn't mean she was one of country's worst.
Her album covers tended to credit a surplus of keyboard players (synths, pianos, Rhodes), and plenty of tracks showed a pronounced and mechanistic sense of flashdance AOR if not genuine disco (sonic reference points: Olivia Newton-John, Laura Branigan, Sheena Easton, Stevie Nicks, Donna Summer, though a couple of those obviously came later.)
“Nobody,” her big crossover hit from 1982, was her one stroke of absolute pop-country genius. But this bullfight serenade from a year before "supposedly soundtrack of the first conceptual country video shown on CMT, a 13-year presaging of Madonna's “Take A Bow” no doubt "was stranger.
The flamenco-fluttering opening fanfare suggests Sylvia and/or her producer/boss (she'd been his secretary) Tom Collins had been feasting on '70s gypsy rock-disco records by Babe Ruth or Santa Esmeralda, and the lyrics open on an ominous note: “Everybody holds their breath/as he passes by the horns of death.”
One youtube commenter confesses the song scared her as was a kid "makes sense. Sylvia flattens her vowels like a true Midwesterner, but Abba's “Fernando”/“Chiquitita mode figures prominently, and the big chest-haired backup shouts (there's a “bloodthirsty crowd,” this being a bull ring) are straight out of a Munich leather bar. It's like Europop's misapprehension of Western country was being sent back to us, just to mess with us.
Terri Gibbs "Somebody's Knockin'" (1980)
Album: Somebody's Knockin'
Label: MCA Records
There may not be a darker, bluesier country hit in the post-Jimmy Carter era than this one "and certainly not one that crossed over to the upper reaches of the pop chart. (Went #13 there; #8 country.)
Terri Gibbs was a blind pianist from suburban Augusta, Georgia who sang husky enough to pass for a man, or at least for Phoebe Snow; no doubt she'd listened to her share of Ray Charles as well.
She started out gospel and eventually wound up back there again—“The wheel of life keeps turning as your carriage turns to rust,” as her other great hit, 1982's extremely spare and spooky “Ashes To Ashes,” put it.
“Somebody's Knockin'” takes its pulse from Donna Summer's proto-techno “I Feel Love,” and its haunted temptation from Robert Johnson: The blue-jeaned, blond-haired man at the door, asking Terri her place or his place, is the devil. “He must have known I was spending my nights alone/My body's burning so he oughta feel right at home.”
Even now, the song inspires quotable youtube comments: “Those blond cowboys are so hard to resist, even for a Presbyterian.” “Great song! Maybe somebody can do a metal or gothic-metal cover.”
Don Williams "Good Ole Boys Like Me" (1980)
Album: Portrait
Label: MCA Records
This single, which just missed the top of Billboard's country chart, might well be the most literary-minded country hit ever, since it namedrops not only Uncle Remus, but both Thomas Wolfe (read in bed as a child while tuning into classic high-wattage AM radio R&B deejays Wolfman Jack and John R) and Tennessee Williams ("those Williams boys they still mean a lot to me—Hank and Tennessee.”)
There's also gin-breathed Dad kissing the boy goodnight under a picture of Stonewall Jackson, and eventually a kid down the street who succumbs to bourbon and speed, and the protagonist surviving by learning to pronounce his words like a TV newscaster.
But you can't take the South out of the boy. Written by Bob McDill (also author of Alan Jackson's “Gone Country,” Mel McDaniel's “Baby Got Her Blue Jeans On,” and Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs' “Black Sheep”), the song is as sublime as it is pretentious, and for Don Williams, entirely atypical.
He came up with folkies the Pozo-Seco Singers (six Hot 100 hits, 1966-'67), and his gigantic solo catalog seems long on cycle-of-romance ladies' choices and super laid-back country-comfort food about satisfaction with one's lot in life "gentlemanly and un-redneck enough (he grew up in Texas, but the Gulf Coast) to enable a major audience in England and across Europe.
Critics in his corner swear he retains an undeniable countryness that middle-of-the-road sapsuckers he's inspired only fake. Not sure I buy that, or would care about him more even if I did, but if the ballads ever finally sink in maybe I will.
Eddie Rabbit "Suspicions" (1979)
Album: Loveline
Label: Elektra Records
When you're a country singer born second-generation Irish in Brooklyn and raised in suburban Jersey, you take whatever success you can get, even if you're the guy who wrote “Kentucky Rain.”
But for a while there, Eddie Rabbit had scads of success regardless "between “You Don't Love Me Anymore” in 1978 and “You Can't Run From Love” in 1983, 11 of the 13singles he put out topped the country chart, and almost all pushed the genre's definition in a manner schmaltzy enough to make purists' heads explode.
Which means, in his own way, Rabbit was a real innovator, hearing links between the reverb on pop-disco and Sun rockabilly records, and figuring out how to squeeze the Eagles and “Subterranean Homesick Blues” into the recipe to boot.
“Suspicions,” his most negative-spacious hit, about how when you're in love with a beautiful woman you watch your friends, was also his first to cross to the pop 20, and possibly the most quiet-storming, yacht-rocking country hit ever, from wafting woodwinds to blue-eyed soul falsettos on down. Just gorgeous "no wonder Tim McGraw revived it (gorgeously, too) in 2007.
Ronnie Milsap "Get It Up" (1979)
Album: Images
Label: RCA Records
Blind North Carolina adult-contemporary schlock-country piano player Ronnie Milsap has never been especially shy about showing off his roots in soul music "early '80s hits like “Stranger In My House” and “Any Day Now” can sound downright eerie if you're in the right mood, and “Somewhere Dry,” off his 2006 album My Life, proved he hadn't lost his touch decades after.
But he probably never pushed the influence as far as on Side Two of his 1979 Images album, which started and ended with unabashed disco tracks of almost no legit country pedigree, except for the fact that Ronnie was singing them.
The side opener was a glitzy cover of Tommy Tucker's 1964 r&b hit “Hi Heel Sneakers,” and the closer was “Get It Up” "basically, a '70s-style full-band party-funk number (think Brass Construction or Con Funk Shun maybe) that got to #43 on the pop chart and country radio avoided like the plague. (Something similar happened again to Milsap a few years later, with his slick Cars-ish MTV new wave move “She Loves My Car,” a #84 pop hit in '84.)
Anyway, as its title suggests, “Get It Up” isn't just about dancing; it's also about screwing: “You gotta get it up, get down, get it on, get on out/That's the only way to make my baby shout”; he's going “drive it home in 4/4 time” and move her “'til it hits the spot.”
Dropping down low at strategic moments between the horn and string breakdowns, Milsap's singing is rich and lusty enough to convince, too. I'm guessing the song got disco play "Wouldn't be shocked if it crossed over some to black radio.
The Kendalls "Pittsburgh Stealers" (1978)
Album: Old Fashioned Love
Label: Ovation Records
On the one-of-a-kind 20-track 1981 Warner Special Products country cheating song compilation Motels And Memories, the Kendalls are the only artists to appear twice, a distinguishing trait made even more astounding by the fact that they're a father and daughter singing to each other "both born in St. Louis, respectively in 1935 and 1954.
That should probably weird you out, though when I next explain that they sound like George Jones and Dolly Parton with roots in southern gospel, you might get interested anyway. Fairly traditional sounding for the urban cowboy era, actually "not exactly what you'd expect for a duo who first scored with covers of pop hits by Peter Paul & Mary, the Grass Roots, and Bread. “Pittsburgh Stealers,” wherein Royce works the steel mill day shift and Jeannie's husband works the night shift which provides an irresistible opportunity for nature to run its naked course, came right after two big Kendalls country hits with “sin” in their titles.
It's also notable for its northern urban industrial setting, always a country plus (see: Bobby Bare's “Detroit City”), and for being one of the few Kendalls songs where Royce sings as much as Jeannie does. So naturally, the Steelers wound up winning Super Bowl XIII. But the pair's inevitable 1982 sequel, "A Dallas Cowboy And A New Orleans Saint," wasn't nearly as good.
Stella Parton "Standard Lie Number One" (1977)
Album: Country Sweet
Label: Elektra Records
Dolly Parton's younger sister Stella was to Dolly as Tommy Cash (big hit: 1969's “Six White Horses,” about political assassinations of the '60s) was to Johnny "Which is to say, not an icon genius god for the ages worthy of Mount Rushmore, not even close, but in country music of all places perhaps being a regular old human being should count for something sometimes.
Stella, who sings like Dolly but less cute, charted country 14 times between 1975 and 1983, but had only four top 20s (including this one) and one top 10.
Whatever, this is an excellent string-soaked countrypolitan cheated-on single, a species that's either extinct or endangered now, but appears to have been fairly prevalent at the time: Bill Anderson's similarly themed “Liars One, Cheaters Zero,” for instance, had just gone Top 10 a few months earlier.
But that one was score-keeping and this one is a countdown (important difference!), and this one is hookier "even if Stella never seems to reveal what Standard Lies number five, six, seven, or nine are.
Charlie Rich "Rolling With The Flow" (1977)
Album: Rollin' with the Flow
Label: Epic Records
Nobody could roll with the flow like Charlie Rich, and this is both one of his last important hits and one of his sultriest performances "perfect saloon-swoon crooning; sounds like it was recorded inside an empty cocktail bar.
But it's also a mellow song about not being mellow, one of those pathetic tunes "see also later ones like Hank Williams Jr.'s “All My Rowdy Friends (Have Settled Down)” and Dierks Bentley's “Am I The Only One” "where a middle-aged man brags about still hanging onto youth by going out to party every night.
“Lotta guys my age are raising kids,” Rich says. “I gotta raise hell like I did.” His friends forgive his sins and he ain't never growin' old and he still believes in rock'n'roll, supposedly, but in truth Charlie had given up Elvis-style rockabilly for blues, soul, Brubeck/Miles/Basie-inspired jazziness, and middle-of-the-road balladry years before, and plenty of his signature songs "“Behind Closed Doors,” “I Do My Swingin' At Home,” “Nice 'N' Easy” "revolved around settled-down domestic pleasures, sexual and otherwise.
Still, this record works "Doesn't hurt that its melody sounds swiped outright from “Good Time Charlie's Got The Blues,” Danny O'Keefe's devastating 1972 pop hit about getting older and washed-up.
Stoney Edwards "Blackbird (Hold Your Head High)" (1975)
Album: Blackbird
Label: Capitol Records
A part-African American, part-Native American, part-Irish hard country honky-tonk singer at a time of soft countrypolitan crossover, Stoney Edwards was an anomaly in more ways than one "according to most sources he was born Christmas Eve 1929, two months after Wall Street crashed, which puts him in his mid 40s by the time he made his first records in the early '70s.
He might not have even made any at all, if a carbon monoxide-induced coma he'd incurred as a forklift operator hadn't forced him to switch careers. “Blackbird (Hold Your Head High),” a song of fatherly advice about how to turn tables with a positive attitude, was probably his best song and almost definitely his most controversial, for these lines: “Me and you and cousin Jesse gonna ride the train/Just a couple of country niggas, stealin' the rodeo, from Georgia on up to Bangor, Maine.”
A caveat: Those words were written by a white man, Chip Taylor, of “Wild Thing” and “Angel Of The Morning” fame. But Edwards "“arguably the only modern black country artist whose blackness did come through in his music,” according to John Morthland's liner notes to the 1998 best-of Poor Folks Stick Together "rasps them with untold sadness, then goes on to relate Dad's words about seeing the good in man and not letting the scarecrows stare you down, even if you were born black and hungry on a little Carolina tobacco farm. It got to #41 on the country chart, but he never ascended that high again.
Narvel Felts "I Remember You" (1975)
Album: Narvel Felts
Label: ABC Dot Records
Narvel Felts, blessed with one of the widest vocal ranges of any country singer ever recorded, is said to have been discovered trying on “Blue Suede Shoes” at his high school talent show in Missouri in 1956; his first chart hit, in 1960, was a Drifters cover.
After that, he got no chart action again until well into the '70s, when he was in his mid 30s. Guess you could classify him in the pop-operatically flamboyant fancy-pants falsetto tradition of guys like Roy Orbison, Freddie Fender, and Gene Pitney.
Maybe some mimicked Mexican mannerisms, too; and probably some influence of Charlie Rich "whose singing could also work in flouncy Latinate filigree stuff—in there too.
Plus, soul music: he hit with Jackie Wilson and Dobie Gray covers. Felts's self-titled album from 1975 had a few hits (I'll take its “Funny How Time Slips Away” over Willie Nelson's), but the most over-the-leftfield-wall vocals on it are in a deep cut called "I Remember You," where his singing shifts smoothly from low-and-manly to almost ridiculously glam-twee: “I remember you-HOO!”
Seriously, the high parts could be Russell Mael in Sparks. Can't think of any other country that does that. So: maybe it's a Lou Christie or Frankie Valli thing? If you don't hate it, you'll love it.
Loretta Lynn "The Pill" (1975)
Album: Back to the Country
Label: MCA Records
Link to a clip of this song on Facebook in these war-on-women days of theocrats blocking Planned Parenthood funds, and everybody knows what you're talking about "It's been decades since “The Pill” sounded so current.
When it came out, it was at least somewhat controversial "sat on the shelf for more than two years after being recorded in late 1972. And enough radio stations laid off that it charted lower than Lynn's previous seven singles "including 1971's epochal “One's On The Way,” which its lyrics reference.
But “The Pill” still got to #4 when, 37 years of supposed female advancement and empowerment later, it's hard to imagine country radio touching the song. The birth-control pill itself had been approved by the FDA way back in the early '60s and made Time's cover in 1967; among other things, it led to wider employment for women.
But in the song, Loretta's main concerns are tossing out her maternity dress and enjoying sex more without risking a bigger brood "even if Hubbie apparently used to tomcat on the side when she was pregnant. A couple times, she audibly laughs in his face.
Statler Brothers "Whatever Happened To Randolph Scott" (1974)
Album: The Best of The Statler Brothers
Label: Mercury Records
Every year except one between 1972 and 1980, the Statler Brothers were named the CMA Vocal Group of the Year "not bad for a crew named after a brand of tissues you blow your nose with.
They'd come up during the '60s folk revival, but to my ears, their harmonies frequently shook out somewhere between gospel jubilee and barbershop, maybe with occasional hints of doo-wop; they switched voices line-by-line/pitch-to-pitch a lot, like doo-woppers (and, later, old-school rappers) did; the bassman voice often hits me as ridiculous, which is either intentional or a generational thing.
What's definitely a generational thing is that four out of 11 songs on their 1975 Mercury Best Of are list songs, all wondering or bemoaning lost days of yore -- early baby-boom/post-war/mostly-early-'50s pop-culture fads in "Do You Remember These" (not unlike Robert Klein's 1973 comedy LP Child Of The '50s, especially since there's nothing particularly rural about the Statlers' memories); classmates who went on to do all sorts of things (including one who kills himself and one who winds up institutionalized "see also the 1976 book What Really Happened To the Class Of '65) in "The Class of '57"; a couple's old photo-album pictures (hence a precursor to Jamey Johnson's 2008 country hit "In Color") in "Pictures."
Most interesting is the lost-Hollywood lament “Whatever Happened To Randolph Scott,” not so much for its appropriately nostalgia-kitschy calliope/ukulele-ish arrangement or even its low-register-verse/high-register-chorus schematic as for the fact that I was apparently born too late to recognize almost any of its references beyond, say, Tex Ritter and Gene Autry.
But Googling establishes that Johnny Mac Brown, Lash Larue, Smiley Burnette, Allan “Rocky” Lane (who later did Mr. Ed's horse voice!), and Randolph Scott himself were pretty much all middle 20th Century screen cowboys.
The Statlers don't stop there, though "they want to be actual film critics, and they are funny about it! They joke about the ratings code, refer like the insiders they are to “the industry,” say you've got to take your analyst along to the movies nowadays. Presumably, they didn't much appreciate M*A*S*H or Midnight Cowboy or Five Easy Pieces: “Everybody's trying to make a comment about our doubts and fears/True Grit's the only movie that I've understood in years.”
To put this in context: 1974, when this went #22 country , was two years after the Kinks did “Celluloid Heroes,” one year after Elton John's “Roy Rogers” and American Graffiti, the same year Happy Days went on the air, four years before the Fabulous Poodles did “B Movies,” and seven before Ronald Reagan was elected president. Clearly, something was in the air.
Barbara Mandrell "The Midnight Oil" (1973)
Album: The Midnight Oil
Label: Columbia Records
No two ways around it: This song "a #7 country hit at the time -- is filthy. Barbara is called back into the office late at night to give the boss "a helping hand," and tomorrow she'll feel "kinda dirty 'cause I'll have that midnight oil all over me,” yowza! Is her shower broke? And if Peter Garrett knew what the midnight oil was, would he have named his band that?
Regardless, there's something refreshing about a female singer falling back on the gotta-work-late-honey lie (see Isley Brothers, “Work To Do.”) This is from early in Mandrell's career, when she was just 24 "four years or so before she really took over the charts, seven before NBC gave her a variety show. Her music wasn't quite as R&B-infused as it'd be later, though her 1977 Columbia Best Of already had her interpreting songs by Aretha Franklin, Joe Tex, and Texas boogie-man Roy Head.
Listening now, you can tell why hip people thought of her covers as squaresville whitewashes; she definitely Pat Boones some of them. But she could be great, too, and she sure did love those cheating songs: Side One starts with a great doomed end-of-the-affair one called "Scarlet Water," where they're gonna "sip the scarlet water one more time." Which water may well be midnight oil, too.
Anne Murray "Snowbird" (1970)
Album: This Way Is My Way
Label: Capitol Records
Lush, bittersweet, impossibly beautiful music about lost youth and birds migrating south for Winter, from a Nova Scotia gym teacher paving the way, in a way, for fellow Canadian divas Shania Twain and k.d. lang. Basically, the music sounds like birds riding brisk air; Gene MacLellan, who wrote it then, in 1995, committed suicide, came from the Maritimes himself.
The beat is a sort of light oompah, the roots of Abba; Murray's vocal influences were Rosemary Clooney and Brenda Lee, and on the debut U.S. LP this came from "actually a compilation of her first two Canadian albums "she also covered James Taylor, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Canadian Christian liberation theologist folksinger Bruce Cockburn, and the hippie folk-mass standbys “Get Together” and “Put Your Hand In The Hand.”
What all that has to do with country music is anybody's guess, but who cares? This was a Top 10 country hit regardless, and Murray wound up scoring in the format well into the '90s, topping the chart ten times.
Tom T. Hall "The Homecoming" (1969)
Album: Homecoming
Label: Mercury Records
A songwriter with as journalistic an eye and pen as any in the past half-century, Tom T. Hall could've taken all 50 spots on this list. He wrote “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” for starters. His definitive 1988 double-best-of The Essential Tom T. Hal has blurbs from Jimmy Carter, Kurt Vonnegut, and bearded academics on the back.
Narrowing down which song to highlight wasn't easy, but this one-sided, talk-sung conversation from a not-entirely-reliable narrator's compartmentalized life seemed a good bet. Give or take Creedence Clearwater Revival's “Lodi” "or Hall's own “Last Hard Town,” from five years later—it's hard to think of a more matter-of-fact, less romanticized depiction of being a touring musician.
Basically, a guilt-ridden fellow shows up at his cattleman dad's house after missing Mom's funeral, and as far as we can tell he never gets past the foyer. Almost every line, we learn a new detail, and it just snowballs—he's only fulfilling a routine family obligation, and it's up to us whether his awkward excuses (never even knew Dad had a phone!) makes him a selfish narcissist or just a busy guy.
Dad heard one of his songs on the radio—not exactly a hit, but the next one will be. He picked up a cheap and shiny ring in Mexico because “in the business that I'm in, the people call it putting up a front.” The road life hasn't been healthy "he's lost weight, looks pale like he just left prison "but don't worry, he does his work in “nightclubs” not “beer joints,” and you can't get hurt there.
Then there's that lady guitarist sleeping in the car, catching a nap after driving from Nashville to San Antone, since she needs to be alert en route to Cartersville tonight. (Women's lib!)
And so on "mundane small talk across worlds and generations, and Dad's probably heard most of it before anyway, and real soon it's time to hit the lonely road out of town again: “By the way, if you see Barbara Walker, tell her I said hello.”
John Wesley Ryles "Kay" (1968)
Album: Kay
Label: Columbia Records
A Nashville cab driver "or at least a Nashville-via-Texas-via-Louisiana singer-songwriter who plays one "spends a night cruising the streets. He misses the lady singer whose New York success he bankrolled, gives a local teen beauty queen a lift to the hospital so she can have her baby, listens to two Fort Campbell soldiers tell him how bad Viet nam's going, hears junkyard dogs and police sirens then learns somebody got stabbed out there.
At 3 A.M., a clock strikes, and all the night people look so sad. He doesn't sound rural at all, and neither do his “latest sounds from Music City, U.S.A,” as he puts it: guitar, horns,piano, violins-not-fiddles.
But the song went top 10 country anyway, then charted again a decade later. In 1968, John Wesley Ryles was 18 years old, and though he charted country with 30 songs in the next two decades "hitting the top 20 as late as 1987 "this one was tough to top.
O.C. Smith "The Son Of Hickory Holler's Tramp" (1968)
Album: Hickory Holler Revisited
Label: Columbia Records
More R&B and less C&W than O.B. McClinton, more C&W and less R&B than O.V. Wright, Louisiana-born O.C.Smith is one of scores of black singers to make country music in the past half century "If that sounds like a contradiction to you, please hunt down Warner Bros.' 1998 From Where I Stand: The Black Experience In Country Music box set or Trikont Germany's Dirty Laundry: The Soul Of Black Country compilations from a few years later, and school thyself.
Anyway, Smith's biggest hit was 1968's “Little Green Apples,” which went #2 pop and nowhere on the country chart, then somehow won the 1969 Best Country Song Grammy regardless "maybe because it was also covered by Roger Miller, and Glen Campbell dueting with Bobbie Gentry, but it's hard not to suspect segregation at work.
It's a lovely tribute to middle-class marital bliss either way, weirded only a little by Smith's anachronistically minstrel-like delivery of one line (“when myself is feelin' low.”) Smith did chart a country single earlier in 1968, though "at least if the Canadian country chart, where “The Son Of Hickory Holler's Tramp” got to #4, counts.
Now, this is dark stuff: Smith recalls growing up with 13 siblings in a destitute cabin; his drunk dad goes deadbeat, so Mom does what she must to keep them fed. Every night, after they're in bed, she turns on the red light.
Merle Haggard "I Take A Lot Of Pride In What I Am" (1968)
Album: Pride in What I Am
Label: Capitol Records
One of the very greatest voices of our time, being countercultural at a moment when almost everyone perceived him otherwise: “Things I learned in a hobo jungle were things they never taught me in a classroom/Like how to find a handout when bummin' through Chicago in the afternoon.” Home's where you find it, he says, even sleeping on a city park bench. (On his most recent album as I write this, 2011's Working In Tennessee, the most memorable track by far was also about being homeless "“Under the Bridge,” a zillion times better than the Red Hot Chili Peppers song.)
Anyway, of 24 studio albums that Haggard put out between September 1965 and May 1977, Pride In What I Am was the only one that didn't hit the country top 10, but that's not where I first heard “this old mental fat” Merle says he's chewing anyway "My introduction was the long out-of-print 1977 Capitol Special Products double best-of Songs I'll Always Sing, where it's not only the final track but easily the shortest: 1:56, punk-rock length for a punk-rock theme in a punk-rock year.
Most versions you'll find are nearly a minute longer, and not as fast, so the trick is to look for live ones "like the 1:54 2008 Wheeling, West Virginia one somebody posted on youtube, and the 1:52 one on 1970's Fightin' Side Of Me, a live LP rush-released (like 1969's Okee From Muskogee) to carry a new conservative silent-majority anthem. Politics are complicated.
Hank Thompson "Smokey The Bar" (1968)
Album: Smoky The Bar
Label: Dot Records
Whiskey-smooth, corny-punned, buy-another-round two-step relaxation honky-tonk about, well, a smoky bar, from an amiable Texan who mined several decades worth of country hits (from a #2 in 1948 to a #32 in 1980) out of balancing the good times and bad times in drinking establishments after dark, and who managed to keep Western Swing and hillbilly boogie halfway viable years after their sell-by-date to boot..
On the Smoky The Bar album, for instance, "Let's Get Drunk And Be Somebody” beats Toby Keith to that title by several decades, and has a nifty alliterative part about "a gushing goblet goads my ghostly gloom"; "Drunkard's Blues" updates "St. James Infirmary Blues" and sounds like a goth jazz dirge, "I See Them Everywhere" jokes about seeing pink elephants and other creatures crawling up walls; "Girl In The Night" considers a sad beauty who soaks in the nightlife every night to kill some past pain the singer hasn't quite figured out (popular glam rock theme too!); "New Records On The Jukebox" hopes somebody will play them because all the old ones choke Hank up too much.
Most of the songs are tragic, but hardly any of them are slow, and most have a beat. Also, Hank's voice sounds surprisingly gentle, somehow, even when he's rowdy—a trick Toby Keith managed to pull off decades later, but not many others have.
Thompson's 1966 Six Pack To Go LP with the Brazos Valley Boys (“a program of their biggest beer-drinkin' hits”!) actually had two songs with “hangover” in the title "how often does that happen? Smoky The Bar notes cite “the gentleman scholars of Heidelberg (lifting) their steins,” and calls him “the Poet Laureate of beer drinkers.” So…Thirsty yet?
Dick Curless "A Tombstone Every Mile" (1965)
Album: A Tombstone Every Mile
Label: Tower Records
From a strong silent type who looks as robust as the men he sings about, brass-knuckled and burly-baritoned Country & Northern about truckers navigating an ice-ribbon stretch of highway in Maine (“Route 2A between Houlton and Macwahoc,” according to John Morthland's liner notes to 1998's The Drag 'Em Off The Interstate Sock It To 'Em Hits Of Dick Curless) "About as masculine as music ever gets, with momentum like an 18-wheeler sliding down the mountainside. Curless, born on Maine's Canadian border himself in 1932, has an eyepatch over his right eye, and sounds like it. “You've got it made if you're hauling goods any place on earth but those Hainesville Woods” "so the mile-spaced gravestones come from imagining how the landscape would look if all the truckers lost there had been buried there. A #5 country hit, framed in sub-Arctic wind sounds that feel like specters.
Cowboy Copas "Alabam" (1960)
Album: N/A
Label: Starday Records
A living fossil in the age of rock'roll, Cowboy Copas had a career that dated back to '20s string bands, then had a top five country hit in 1946. “Alabam,” which topped the country chart and got to #63 pop in Billboard when he was 47, partook in a rhythm unmistakably echoing those bygone eras. And it wasn't even the last of its kind "Guy Drake" (1970's race-baiting “Welfare Cadillac”), Jerry Reed (most blatantly maybe in “The Uptown Poker Club” from 1973), obese Hee Haw sideshow Junior Samples, and “Convoy” trucker-rapper C.W.
McCall all made music at times harking back, somehow, to the white talking country blues of the Great Depression, long after most anybody remembered was being harked back to. “Alabam” itself consists primarily of warmly recited couplets that, for all we know, could've survived on stages or in barn dances since Reconstruction days "about people down the street eating like wild geese, tramps in the cornfield, Sal with worn-down shoes tied onto her feet. Who knows anymore whether it was heard as a novelty, or whether its sound had simply retained backwoods currency over the decades? Not Cowboy Copas, that's for sure "he died three years later, in the same plane that killed Patsy Cline.
Harmonica Frank Floyd "Rockin'Chair Daddy" (1954)
Album: N/A
Label: Sun Records
Born in Mississippi in 1908 and showing off his two-harmonicas-at-a-time (one with his nose!) and singing-while-playing-harmonica-out-the-corner-of-mouth tricks in carnivals and medicine shows for decades thereafter (only competition, maybe: Peg Leg Sam Jackson, who seems to have kept alive a similar Vaudeville-minstrel shtick), traveling hobo Harmonica Frank Floyd didn't record until well into his 40s.
But once he did, holy shit: There was “Swamp Root,” a slobber-scatted talking blues where you best get out of saliva range every time a word starts with “B” or “P” (most dangerous, appropriately: “PPPimm-PPPle”); there was “Shampoo,” dang near obscene enough to make Blowfly blush; there was “The Great Medical Menagerist,” an American historical tent-show tall tale about concoctions that grow hair on doorknobs, among other miracles.
And there was the slavering, deranged, distorted, and frequently incomprehensible proto-rockabilly single “Rockin' Chair Daddy,” which feels downright primitive, and just as mean "the most outrageously nasal white-man falsettos and asides since Emmett Miller (“awwww shucks "BOOT it now!”), subversive boasts about being an unschooled fool, lines half-recalled from old Jimmie Rodgers records (“told her my name was on the tail of my shirt/Rockin' chair daddy don't have to work”), all amid noise that's an uncanny forecast of Captain Beefheart. If that ain't country, he'll kiss your bbbig bbbullfrog.
Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith "Who Shot Willie" (1951)
Album: N/A
Label: Jasmine Records
Eight years before George Jones's wild rockabilly side “Who Shot Sam,” a comparably cooking wise-ass murder mystery that's no mystery at all: Pretty Maxine's groom gets shot on their wedding day, and Smith knows the culprit but he's pleading the fifth: “Who could it be? I ain't gonna tell 'cause they'd hang me.” “I'm a country boy,” he admits, “but I know this much "to keep my eyes wide open and my big mouth shut.”
Smith came up playing Dixieland jazz and got his nickname from an early hit; he also" (1) composed “Dueling Banjos”; (2) hosted the first nationally syndicated country music radio show; and (3) ran the North Carolina recording studio where James Brown recorded “Papa's Got A Brand New Bag.” And judging from his vocal cadences and sense of humor in early '50s ditties like “Just Lookin'” and “Don't Look For Trouble,” he probably taught Bob Dylan a thing or too, two.
Delmore Brothers "Freight Train Boogie" (1946)
Album: N/A
Label: King Records
Respectable tenant farmers' sons from Alabama, the Delmores' close family harmonies, once reverently rooted in gospel and Appalachian folk music, learn to rock'n'roll a decade too early, but don't hold that against them. By 1946, they had accrued a full band: bass, mandolin, steel guitar, fiddle, guitars. Electric guitar and drums wouldn't be added until a year later apparently, but they already had the beat down.
And that beat sounded like valve gears, high whistles, smokestack lightning: On the 1975 vinyl Gusto set Best Of The Delmore Brothers, emphasizing their boogie period, three songs out of 10 are train songs: “Pan American Boogie,” “Tennessee Choo Choo,” and this one, which is the most propulsive, jazzy breakdown and blues harmonica tooting from Wayne Raney on down.
Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys "I'm A Ding Dong Daddy" (1946)
Album: N/A
Label: N/A
The Texas Playboys were the Beatles of Western Swing, and Bob Wills was the Bob Marley maybe, in the sense of towering "in terms of sheer historical visibility" over his musical genre. Thing is, compared to lots of Western Swingsters, if not necessarily compared to nostalgists from Asleep At The Wheel to George Strait to Hot Club Of Cowtown who've attempted to revive the sound since, there was something too doggone polite about the Playboys.
In his 2003 book Southwest Shuffle: Pioneers Of Honky-Tonk, Western Swing, and Country Jazz, Rich Kienzle even dismisses them as “a mediocre band led by an ex–Light Crust Doughboy.” Maybe it's just the price of superstardom: "When you're the record company's meal ticket, you might have to rein your sound in now and then, if not always.
But these guys had a smart way to circumvent that. Wills had been making records for well over a decade when, in 1946 and 1947-"fortunately, right around the time Lester Barnard started letting his electric guitar distort"-the band recorded 370 "Tiffany Transcription" tracks onto noncommercial 16-inch discs for play on a syndicated radio show. These recordings let them get loose in ways that Vocalion/OKeh, MGM, Columbia, and the like wouldn't.
Rhino Records finally issued several collections of them in the '80s; Volume 3, called Basin Street Blues, focused on the Playboys' “swing, blues, and jazz side,” and is probably the best for it. My pick-hit from that disc, “I'm A Ding Dong Daddy,” bounces all over the dancefloor, with new recruit Roy Honeycut (“that's that boy, his name is Roy”) taking a sweet steel guitar solo, and Tommy Duncan sounding both slurred and assured on top, boasting about being a “wild Poppa from polecat holler, I don't wanna get rough,” threatening to shoot some little dame down with his Thompson gun nonetheless, and granting y'all permission to shake it and break it and hang it on the wall "just like Delta blues founder Charley Patton had in his catchiest song, from 1929.
Moon Mullican "Pipeline Blues" (1940)
Album: N/A
Label: N/A
Sort of the white rural equivalent of Louis Jordan–era jump blues, hillbilly boogie was the missing link between Western Swing and rockabilly. Historians usually peg 1940 as the year it started, thanks to a record called “Boogie Woogie” by Johnny Barfield, but Moon Mullican was boogie's main hillbilly, and 1940 was the also the year he initially laid down “Pipeline Blues.”
He'd record the song again and again well into the '50s-eventually shaking it up more and more like Jerry Lee Lewis, who his ivory pounding laid the groundwork for, but also eventually watering down its lyrics. For instance, early on, he'd sing “I'm an old pipeliner, and I lay my pipe all day/ I got four, five women waitin' to draw my pay,” which sounds a whole lot raunchier than his later “four, five young'uns.”
Also, “the meanest gal in town” reforms, in later years, to “the sweetest gal in town.” Didn't really work, though-by the '50s, he looked too old for rock'n'roll's new teenyboppers to care, and to this day, YouTube commenters know what his manual labor was really about: “It's true: wine dine pipeline,” observes one. Dude was pimpin', either way.
(Also worth hearing: the 1983 cover by usually chaste family bluegrass/gospel group the Whites, sung atypically by patriarch Buck: “Every time I see you, you're always on the street/You hang around the corner just like a policeman on the beat.” But Buck still swears he'd walk 130 miles-“Dallas clear into Witchita Falls, Texas”-to see her.)
Smokey Wood and the Modern Mountaineers "Everybody's Truckin'" (1937)
Album: N/A
Label: N/A
Eighteen-year-old white boys, big Fats Waller and Count Basie fans, and at least as big marijuana fans-or at least Arkansas-born/Oklahoma-raised pianist Smokey Wood was; according to liner notes of the 1982 reissue The Houston Hipster: Western Swing 1937, he used to raise 20-plus stalks between signboards near Houston's Main Street. Also, they played like adolescent punks: sax and clarinet fart-honking fully down into the dirt, Smokey and southpaw guitarist Lefty Grove yelling choruses way too loud when the boogie-woogie piano kicks in.
Sensitive souls averse to racist horseshit might want to cover their ears now: “Down in Harlem on the street! You can hear them dancin' feet! See them darkies everywhere they go! You can hear 'em singin' hidey-hidey-ho!” So yeah, they apparently knew their Cab Calloway too; he'd put out “Minnie the Moocher” in 1931, and another, maybe even higher-temperature, Modern Mountaineers track, “Keep On Truckin',” is an homage to gongs being kicked around. And oh wait, left out the most punk-rock part: Everybody's not just “singin' and truckin'.” They're also “swingin' and fuckin'.” Repeatedly.
Milton Brown and his Brownies "Texas Hambone Blues" (1936)
Album: N/A
Label: N/A
An ex-cigar salesman from Fort Worth lets his Western Swing band stomp and swerve: The fiddler, pianist, and guitar player all take hot solos; the latter, Bob Dunn, was electric and amplified before anybody else in his vocation. Who knew an instrument from Hawaii could change the world? Meanwhile, Milton Brown gets dirty. “I'm goin' down to Cowtown, to get my hambone boiled/'Cause the New York women done made my hambone spoiled.” (You've heard of Cowtown, right? Big Balls there, Western Swingsters always claimed. AC/DC would understand.)
He's got groupies in Houston and San Antone, too (hoes in different area codes!) and a “Dallas gal make a good man leave his home,” not to mention-you figure it out-“a black-headed gal make a tadpole hug a whale.” At the time, this team was not only better, but also more popular, than the one led by Brown's former fiddlebandmate Bob Wills. But their reign would end later that year, when Brown was killed in a car crash at 32-possibly asleep at the wheel, and with a teenage girl in the passenger seat.
Roy Newman and his Boys "Sadie Green (Vamp Of New Orleans)" (1935)
Album: N/A
Label: N/A
When Texans first started Western Swinging, they were really more Western Dixielanding, truth be told. (In 1935, swing had only just begun.) And this Dallas ensemble, numbering up to 10 members revolving around trumpet/guitars/fiddle/standup bass/drums, was certainly on the pre-swing end of the spectrum.
Their most high-profile vinyl reissue is on a record label called Original Jazz, and the rhythm here-starting with a generous instrumental lead-in-could almost pass as a smoking Charleston. The words concern a popular young woman named Sadie, who's “got more beaus than the Navy's got Marines” and “big brown eyes and teeth (!?) to match.”
Look out, because “when she starts to love, oh gosh/All over my Macintosh” Or maybe (as some clearer enunciators than Roy Newman have covered it) “Mama burn my Macintosh.” How did these guys know about Apple computer sex way back in the '30s? Unless Roy's Macintosh was a British raincoat, and Sadie peep-show entertainment.
Either way, what's certain is that a group called the Five Harmaniacs had recorded the same title way back in 1926, and the all-black Memphis Jug Band had done the related “Everybody's Talking About Sadie Green” in 1930: “everything about her is tight like that,” “wears her dresses above her knees, lets folks say what they please,” “uses powder, uses paint, it makes her look like what she ain't,” “lets you ride her…in her car.” Must have been quite some lady.
Jimmie Rodgers "Blue Yodel #9 (1930)
Album: Blue Yodels
Label: N/A
Six years after he caught tuberculosis and three after he got the bright idea to make a series of records inspired simultaneously by Swiss yodelers and train whistles-“nuh-yodel-ayhee! OH-HEE! AY-HEEE..,” this one's big moment goes-Mississippi's Singing Brakeman scores a racial-crossover coup: Louis Armstrong on trumpet, Lil Hardin Armstrong (aka Mrs. Satchmo) on piano.
Their Dixieland backing makes this record stand out from the blue-yodel pack even if, like record buyers at the time, you didn't know they were there. But so does the narrative, a patchwork quilt from public-domain tradition: A cop (sorry, “a PO-lice”) stops him while he's loitering on the Memphis corner of Beale and Main and asks him who he is; Jimmie answers like a badass: “I said you'll find my name on the tail of my shirt/I'm a Tennessee hustla, don't have to work.”
Also, a gun-toting lady buys him a $100 suit-which, especially seeing as how the Great Depression had just kicked in, was quite the stroke of luck.
Allen Brothers "Maybe Next Week Sometime" (1929)
Album: N/A
Label: Victor Records
Two Chattanooga siblings-Lee on guitar, Austin on banjo, both on vocals-spin wobbly yarns around the pickle barrel, sounding simultaneously lazy, melancholy, comical, maybe even drunk (though not nearly as drunk as they sounded in 1934's “Drunk and Nutty Blues,” which largely consisted of them laughing and crying hysterically).
Also, at least to other white folks of the time, they sounded black. So much so that they once sued their record label for releasing one of their singles as part of its “race” series. Here though, they might well have assisted that perception, and not just by echoing jug bands: “Y'know, I was goin' down the street with lowdown blues. Shineboy said 'Look heah nigga, let me shine up them shoes'.” That ugly word returns later, too, tossed off in a disturbingly casual way; country music hadn't learned yet to even try to hide its roots in 19th Century minstrel shows.
Anyway, the Allens decline the shoeshine offer for today, leaving the following week's engagement calendar open-same thing they do later in the song to the looney Birmingham gal who pulls down the shades, the ghost chasing them who suggests they stop to rest, the buddy they're throwing a “spree” with who requests another drink, and the horny gal in the parlor who turns down the lights: “Ya husband might come home; I'm scared.” Strings provide rhythmic accompaniment for the recitation throughout; between some verses, Lee's high flatulent kazoo serves the yodel role.
Emmett Miller and his Georgia Crackers "Lovesick Blues" (1928)
Album: N/A
Label: N/A
A throwback blackface minstrel backed by jazz musicians-including Tommy Dorsey on trombone and Jimmy Dorsey on clarinet and alto sax-starts out with a comedy dialogue, offensively parodying dialect Uncle Remus-style: “Birds singin' in de trees and de sun am shinin', you shouldn't have no blues.” “I know I shouldn't have 'em, but, but…I got it. Every known indication of bein' in that condition.” “What's the matter, did they lock up your bootlegger?” Nope, Emmett explains, it's his girl-she “done caught air.”
Then, to some loud but teary-eyed brass chords, he starts singing, showing generations of later country singers how it's done. Many mimicked his over-the-top phasing outright: Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams (who theoretically made this song his own in 1940), Bob Wills, Jerry Lee Lewis (who covered it in 1958), Merle Haggard (who paid tribute to Miller on 1973's I Love Dixie Blues). The secret is in the impossibly crazed and stretched-out hangdog high-notes-often “yodeled,” but not the way sheep-hearders in the Alps yodeled.
It's probably not what the Russian-born Jewish-American Irving Mills had in mind when he'd copyrighted the words back in 1922: “I'm in love, ah-HIIIIME in love.” “I got a feeling for the blue–WHOOO–ooz,” “She calls me sweet DA-AA-AA-DEE.” Other notes get lowdown-the “refuse” in “I TRIED and I TRIED but she just refuse,” an “Oh Lawd” that all but altered the earth's axis.
And this wasn't even Miller's most audacious vocal: Check out the insane, almost klezmer-like prohibition speakeasy tongues of “Anytime,” recorded two months later. Or maybe 1936's -a full-fledged rap record, 43 years before “Rapper's Delight.”
Charlie Poole & the North Carolina Ramblers "White House Blues" (1926)
Album: N/A
Label: Columbia Records
Country music just a few years into its record-making existence, already fixated on the distant past: A string trio led by the banjo-African instrument, barely used anymore by African-Americans-chronicles the news of exactly a quarter-century before.
Namely, a president's assassination in 1901 by a second-generation Prussian/Polish anarchist from Alpena, Michigan, and his replacement riding the train from Buffalo, where he took the oath of office, to Washington: “Roosevelt's in the White House, he's doing his best/McKinley's in the graveyard, he's taking his rest.” Then, a threat from an ex-first lady widow with a gun.
Poole, in his middle 30s but just five years away from his own death, has what sounds to us like an old man's voice, but he sings and plays with a young man's energy-a hard liver, he'd mangled his banjo-playing hand in a drunken baseball accident.
Poole's sound could actually charge more furiously elsewhere, but “White House Blues” is the song that Tom T. Hall harked back to in 1973 on a non-LP B-side called “Watergate Blues”; the song John Mellencamp, pissed off about hanging-chad recounts in Florida, recast as “To Washington” in 2004.