1957 Bobby Helms – My Special Angel
When looking at the charts in 1957, we emphasise sales rather than airplay, but in this case Helms’s song was the best seller and the most played by DJs that week. It crossed over from country to pop, hitting number seven on the Hot 100, although notional country songs by his contemporaries Elvis Presley and The Everly Brothers – Jailhouse Rock and Teddy Bear by the singer, Wake Up Little Susie and Bye Bye Love by the duo – went all the way to number one on the pop side.
That quartet of tunes are still heard seven decades later, and Helms is always near the top of the hit parade with his Christmas perennial Jingle Bell Rock, which also came out in 1957 and will still be heard in 2057. It has had 1.2bn Spotify streams; this song, meanwhile, has had just over 5m and lies a very, very distant second. Interestingly, like Elvis’ material, it made both the country and R&B charts, which is code for saying white and black people both took it to heart.
Jimmy Duncan wrote the words, which barely get beyond the formulaic: ‘A smile from your lips brings the summer sunshine’, ‘I feel your touch…and I’m in heaven again’, ‘The Lord smiled down on me’. Bobby Vinton also recorded it, because that’s how things went in the fifties: one copyright, many singers. Michael Vaughan had the UK hit with it, treating it with less gentleness and more oomph.
On Helms’ version, the famed Anita Kerr Singers ooh and coo behind him, as was the fashion of the time. The singer’s delivery is akin to that of Pat Boone, who was very hot in the late 1950s; indeed, Boone’s April Love was number one in the Hot 100 over Christmas 1957.
1967 Bill Anderson and Jan Howard – For Loving You
Ten years later, and here’s another song with a chorus of backing singers and a hot male vocalist. Anderson is accompanied by Jan Howard, wife of Harlan, the man who ought to have copyrighted the phrase ‘Three Chords and The Truth’ as a definition of country music. The pair divorced in 1968; Jan would not marry again for 20 years.
But this is dreck. Bearing in mind that The Beatles were having a Magical Mystery Tour, Jimi Hendrix was pushing rock music forward and Bob Dylan was inventing Americana, Nashville thought people wanted devotion from husband to wife, with the vocalists intoning their lines over an arrangement that could have been written in the 1930s.
Anderson opens his heart by thanking his beloved for making his life ‘so much richer…I never really lived before’. Jan does the same by saying her ‘faith is a little stronger…There was good there, I just could never see’.
But after three verses of fidelity, the dagger comes, as does a key change from E-flat to F: ‘Now I’m losing you and I’m a sadder lonelier man,’ sings Anderson, following ‘the hunting trail of memory’ but appreciating how he ‘had the chance of loving you’. As is often the case, while the kids played with their guitars, their parents wanted to wallow in their sadness.
1977 Dolly Parton – Here You Come Again
By this time in her career, Dolly had jumped from country to showbusiness; accordingly, she cast her net more widely for songs. Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil wrote this song; their copyrights can be summed up by just one, You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling, which they said bought them a flat.
Producer Gary Klein had heard the song when BJ Thomas did it, and he thought it would be perfect for Dolly. He ensured the piano sounded muffled and staccato by dampening down the keys with tape. The pair reached a compromise when Al Perkins added some pedal steel to give it compatibility with a country radio playlist which, by the end of the year, it shared with standards like Take This Job and Shove It and Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue.
Dolly had just changed management, heading out to LA and full speed ahead towards a pop market, although she was keen to say she was ‘taking country with me’ rather than leaving the genre behind. The ploy worked: in 1978 she was named both ACM and CMA Entertainer of the Year. Dolly ended 1977, having started the year as a guest on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, with the biggest song in country music and one of the biggest songs in the USA across all genres.
The song, which was the title track to Dolly’s 1977 album, hit number three in the Hot 100 in early 1978. It crossed over to a pop audience who were enjoying the Bee Gees, who were at two with their chart-topping How Deep Is Your Love; the brothers Gibb would give Dolly an even bigger smash, Islands In The Stream, a few years later.
Thomas’s version of this song starts a key lower than Dolly’s, but goes through various chord changes. Verse two is a semitone higher than verse one, and the same for verse three and two. Thomas starts in D-flat and moves first up to D then up to E-flat; Dolly sings the opening verse in F-sharp before moving up to G and finally A-flat.
The song has upward momentum to match the reappearances of the unnamed man (in Dolly’s case) and, with him, the title phrase at the top of each verse: ‘You waltz right through the door…and wrap my heart round your little finger’, ‘you look into my eyes and lie those pretty lies’, ‘shaking me up’. In the bridge section, her ‘defences’ drop when the man decides to ‘smile that smile’. The lyrical turn – ‘here you come again and here I go!’ – is typically masterful and unsurprising from a pair of gifted songwriters.
1987 Highway 101 – Somewhere Tonight
It is strange how some country acts have no cultural footprint beyond their initial moment. Highway 101 were an LA rock band who signed to Warner Nashville, who marketed them at a country audience who would be amused by hearing a band led by a female lead singer, Paulette Carlson. You’d expect a band with a drummer named Cactus and a guitarist called Jack Daniels to be talked about today; I will thus rescue Highway 101 from obscurity.
Their music was produced by Paul Worley, who would work with another band with a prominent female vocalist in Lady A two decades later. This song was their first number one, co-written by two heavyweights, Rodney Crowell and the aforementioned Harlan Howard. I get the sense that Crowell – who was about to have a quite amazing run in 1988-89 with five consecutive number one singles from his Diamonds & Dirt LP – could write this sort of song before breakfast.
The Highway 101 sound is a little bit country, a little bit pop and a little bit rock, all of which is present on this heartbreak song, which came out in the middle of the neo-traditional era dominated by Keith Whitley and Randy Travis; the latter cut the song but the version was not released. It looks back to all those sad songs of the early commercial era sung by girl singers: Paulette’s poor narrator is ‘so lonesome I don’t know what to do’ while her ‘livewire’ ex is ‘shinin’ like a diamond…rollin’ like a summer storm’. He left her a ‘goodbye letter’ which she has ‘read…at least 1000 times’.
Also chiming with the era of independent 80’s Ladies of the kind K.T. Oslin sang about, Paulette’s offer of ‘better homes and garden parties’ were, sardonically, not ‘his cup of tea’ and so he is ‘running wild and free’.
1997 Garth Brooks – Longneck Bottle
How have we only reached Garth Brooks in the final post this side of New Year’s Day?
The first single from his album Sevens, this brings in the mighty Steve Wariner, who wrote the song along with Rick Carnes, to provide some scatting. The song starts with a long held note on ‘looong’ from Garth, with harmonies from Wariner, with the chorus at the top so as not to bore us. Garth then runs through two verses which each last 15 beats. There are no bells or whistles, just pure talent and oomph.
‘Hey jukebox don’t start playing that song again!’ is our narrator’s second complaint, following his first to the titular bottle (‘let go o’ my hand!’). Garth plays a sap, ‘a fool’, who is annoyed at the mirror (‘go stare at someone else’) and the dancefloor, which is ‘underneath my feet everywhere I turn’.
The bottle, jukebox, dancefloor and barroom mirror conspire to keep him far away from ‘the girl at home who loves me’. In any case, she ‘won’t understand’ the pull of the saloon, or how our narrator is hooked, helpless, aware that he should ‘waltz right out of them swingin’ doors’, but that’s a step he ‘just can’t learn’.
The lyric is set to a Western Swing arrangement that Country Universe describes as ‘two parts George Strait and one part Roger Miller’. The players are known as The G-Men: Bruce Bouton on pedal steel, Mark Casstevens on acoustic, Rob Hajacos on fiddle, Chris Leuzinger on electric and Bobby Wood on keys. They were inducted into the Musicians Hall of Fame in 2016; millions upon millions of people have heard their work without any clue who they are.
2007 Taylor Swift – Our Song
She was 17 when this song was released and 18 when it topped the chart, which is a frighteningly young age even without the attendant pressures from fans who were connected across the world and with whom she communicated via Myspace.
The daughter of stockbroker Scott, Taylor Swift has had more than one book written about her in 2024 alone. You can try Caroline Sullivan’s unauthorized biography, inevitably titled Era by Era, or Rob Sheffield’s book-length essay Heartbreak is the National Anthem. In any case, Taylor is now the most famous woman in the world, so type her name into Google if you want to find out everything you could possibly wish to know about her.
Taylor’s genius was similar to Garth’s: marketing, connection with an audience and writing (or picking) great material. Both acts are now bigger than country music itself, but there will always be a place for them as and when they want to return home. I think Taylor is going to write books and poetry anthologies, because she has run out of worlds to conquer on the pop music front.
This self-written chart-topper, the third single from her self-titled debut album, a teen-pop song with country instrumentation, from the opening fiddle riff and dobro played by the aforementioned Rob Hajacos and Bruce Bouton, while producer Nathan Chapman dusts the arrangement with banjo and plays a chunky guitar solo.
Our narrator is ‘riding shotgun’ without a care in the world, singing along to the metaphorical song shared by her and her beloved. They lack an actual one but, suggests her beau, their song is a series of images: ‘a slamming screen door’, ‘the way you laugh’, the first date missed opportunity (‘man I didn’t kiss her and I should have’).
It is interesting, looking back almost two decades, how the chorus has God in a prominent place: ‘asking God if He could play it again’. The second iteration of this chorus is preceded by the narrator going to her ‘lovin’ bed’, a poetic device known as a transferred epithet because a bed cannot be loving. The bed is full of roses upon it, as well as a note upon which is written ‘our song is a slamming screen door…’
The middle eight is a sigh that Taylor has ‘heard every album, listened to the radio’ but can’t find a song as good as theirs; whenever you are pandering to radio programmers, as Taylor Swift and her then Big Machine label boss Scott Borchetta were doing, it pays to mention the radio. Then, in a very meta touch, she adds a coda which returns to the opening image of ‘the front seat of his car’: she ‘grabbed a pen and an old napkin and wrote down our song’. Taylor played that song acoustically in the filmed version of the $2bn-grossing Eras tour across 2023 and 2024, by which time she need never write another song.
As she was on the world tour, Taylor still had time to write and record 31 more, which were collected on her Tortured Poets Department set of 2024. Not even Garth Brooks could do that.
2017 Bebe Rexha and Florida Georgia Line – Meant to Be and Blake Shelton – I’ll Name the Dogs
We discussed Meant to Be in the October 21 piece.
Shelton’s radio chart-topper matches Honey Bee in how the singer is the Y to his addressee’s X: ‘you be the pretty and I’ll be the funny’, ‘you pick the paint, I’ll pick a guitar’, and the title hook ‘you name the babies, I’ll name the dogs’. It also includes an eight-beat middle two, rather than a middle eight, the better to return to the chorus: ‘Laying next to you every night sounds like a damn good life’.
The verses are typically lovey-dovey: ‘no more messing around’, ‘you, me, with the same street name, same last name’, ‘watch the sunset from a gravel road’, ‘still lovin’ on you when the rooster crows’. The rural imagery – ‘sing you a song out there with the crickets and the frogs’ – is alluring, while the use of zeugma is excellent throughout. From the Greek for ‘to yoke together’, as in oxen to a plough, zeugma is when you use one verb to govern two clauses: as well as the fantastic example of picking in the chorus, the second verse includes the couplet: ‘I’ll put a little swing on the front porch if you put a little tea in my glass’.
It’s a rural love song, written by Matt Dragstrem, Ben Hayslip and Josh Thompson, which Shelton delivers with a typical mix of charm and confidence. There is also a faithful demo version of the song with lead vocals from Thompson, who used to be an artist signed to the same label as Miranda Lambert before writing hit songs for Jason Aldean (Any Ol’ Barstool), Luke Bryan (One Margarita), Dustin Lynch (Stars Like Confetti) and, most remuneratively, Morgan Wallen. The singer took Wasted On You into the top 10 of the Hot 100, seven decades after Bobby Helms did the same, three decades after the domination of Garth Brooks and during the world-beating decade-long titanic success of Taylor Swift.
A Country Way of Life 