1958 Ray Price – City Lights
We discussed this song in the October 21 piece.
1968 Glen Campbell – Wichita Lineman
‘And I need you more than want you, and I want you for all time.’
Jimmy Webb has written many celebrated lyrics, not least ‘someone left the cake out in the rain’, but the song about the longing lineman takes the cake. The protagonist is on the lookout for electrical overloads and complains that he needs ‘a small vacation’. He hears an unnamed woman ‘singing in the wire’, one for whom he has an intense longing that is shown in the top note Campbell hits at the end of each refrain (‘still on the line’).
Before the final chorus, Campbell’s three phrases of guitar, saturated in reverb, mimic the loneliness the lineman feels, physically and emotionally. The song is in the key of F, but the key is only stated in the opening theme and never recurs, emphasising the lack of resolution in the song and the lineman’s thoughts. The strings take over for the coda, which fades out cinematically.
The song’s success provided name recognition for Campbell, a former Wrecking Crew session musician, who presented a variety show of his own for three years between 1969 and 1972. The song has been interpreted by dozens of artists including Elbow, Ray Charles, Johnny Cash and Dwight Yoakam. The writer Dylan Jones composed a book-length essay on it, such is his admiration for the world it paints.
1978 Kenny Rogers – The Gambler
Like Wichita Lineman, Don Schlitz’s story which was given wind by Rogers has never not been popular. Chelsea FC sung it in their dressing room, and an American insurance company hired Rogers to reprise it in a commercial.
Amazingly, nobody wanted to cut The Gambler based on the demo, with Conway Twitty and Schlitz himself doing so before Larry Butler brought it to Rogers. He then employed several musicians from the Nashville A Team including Pig Robbins on piano, Pete Drake on pedal steel and the Jordanaires on backing vocals.
Thanks to a key change and a smattering of new lyrics, Rogers’ version brought the wisdom of cards to the wider world: ‘know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em’; ‘count your money’; ‘there’ll be time enough for counting when the dealin’s done’. Less heralded is his wise counsel that ‘the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep’.
The opening verse has the excellent image of the narrator and the gambler ‘too tired to sleep…the boredom overtook us’. The latter, who is an expert at ‘reading people’s faces’, espies that Rogers is ‘out of aces’; the final line of the final verse picks up this image (‘I found an ace that I could keep’).
1988 Restless Heart – A Tender Lie
This was the sixth number one in just over two years for the quintet signed to RCA Records. Randy Sharp wrote the song, which producer Tim DuBois plucked from the submissions pile.
It’s a soft-rock ballad with a strong vocal from Larry Stewart and a pleasant acoustic guitar solo passage from Greg Jennings, albeit the song has a bland snare drum which ruined much 1980s country music. Each verse and each chorus ends with the title, with the first line of every chorus hitting a new chord progression. The band harmonise over it with possible lies: ‘say you’ll never stop loving me’; ‘say you’re gonna come back to me’. When they ask ‘how much more damage’ such fabrications can do, they also use the phrase ‘unto me’, purely for syllabic reasons.
Strangely, at one show in 2019, Restless Heart did not play this song but they did cover Wichita Lineman.
1998 Brooks & Dunn – Husbands and Wives
Here’s another example of an old copyright given new life, in this case a Roger Miller hit from 1966. Miller died in 1992 and, six years later, the duo covered it on their fifth album If You See Her. After performing it at the CMA Awards, it headed to the top of the charts; their version is in F, while the original is in C.
With help from Larry Franklin’s fiddle and mandolin, Ronnie Dunn gives a predictably excellent reading of the waltz which offers a view on the propensity for people to divorce, which was far more common in 1992 than in 1966. Even in 2024, as in both those years, couples need to have less ‘pride’ and more forgiveness. ‘Angry words spoken in haste’, a line is delivered over some melancholy chords, is to the narrator ‘such a waste of two lives’, causing hearts to look like ‘houses where nobody lives’.
Before the verse and chorus are repeated in their entirety, the middle section comprises a post-chorus lyrical turn to show that both husband and wife are equally guilty: ‘a woman and a man…some can, some can’t’.
2008 Montgomery Gentry – Roll with Me
Eddie Montgomery and Troy Gentry were, like Brooks & Dunn, a country duo whose voices blended together well. The pair had their 20th hit with this song, written by Clint Daniels and Tommy Karlas, which came from their sixth album Back When I Knew It All.
Gentry takes the verses, while Montgomery and John Ondrasik (aka Five for Fighting) add harmonies on the sweet chorus. Having seen the light during a Sunday church service (‘it was like the Lord spoke right to me’), he has decided to focus on his own life (‘the man I wanna be’) and asks an unnamed addressee to join him on his journey. It might be a lady but more likely it is a possible apostle.
In the second verse Gentry’s narrator lingers on the memory of a sobbing mum at the funeral of her 20-year-old son; ‘made me think how we all just have our time’ is Gentry’s conclusion. The emphatic chorus includes a series of rising phrases which hit the words ‘down/around/town’ and ‘time/rhyme/song’.
After a guitar solo, the narrator admits in the middle section that he would ‘rather not know’ what the future has in store. The song’s gentle arrangement supports this carefree attitude, along with the stabs of organ played by former Allman Brothers Band member Chuck Leavell, who has spent half his life as the Musical Director for the Rolling Stones; he also has credits on albums by Train, John Mayer and Aretha Franklin.
2018 Dan + Shay – Speechless
This wedding ballad from Dan + Shay was number one on both charts, Hot Country and Country Airplay, at the end of 2018. It’s a sort of update of Wonderful Tonight, where the man is made to wait for his lady (‘you say you’ll be down in five’) but is bowled over by how wonderful and beautiful his lady looks, especially in ‘that dress’, which is an effective rhyme with the title.
She is his ‘weakness’ and serves to ‘take the breath out of my lungs’; with a neat match of music and lyric, after he hurries the second part of the second verse, Shay Mooney holds on to a long ‘I’m’ before the second chorus which cuts the verse short. The imagery is delightful, with ‘the smell of your perfume’ drifting downstairs to where Mooney’s narrator waits, knowing that as per usual he’ll ‘be a mess the second that I see you’.
Some of the lines are vague; the colour of ‘those eyes’ is not specified, nor the hairstyle beyond a description of being done ‘like you do’, and when the pair met she ‘just did something to me’. Some detail would be nice, but the chorus is where the meat of the song is found, all the better to allow Mooney to show off his voice.
Written with Laura Veltz and Jordan Reynolds, this is an Adult Contemporary pop song which might have been modelled on Amazed by Lonestar and then repurposed for an era where anyone can knock up a photo or video montage based on social media posts.
A Country Way of Life 