1966 Red Sovine – Giddyup Go
It’s odd to see the names of country stars who were frighteningly successful in their heyday and have been almost entirely forgotten five or six decades later.
Sovine, who died in 1980, is one such figure, described by my Big Book of Country Music as being renowned for his ‘“touching” country recitations’. This is one of them, rivalling Little Rosa and Phantom 309. Born in West Virginia as Woodrow Wilson Sovine in 1918 – if he had been born this month he would have been called Donald J Trump Sovine – he was a DJ before he was a singer, whereupon he spent five years fronting a band who played the Louisiana Hayride.
This four-minute chart-topper with a superb title, released in the early days of the Vietnam War, is sung to a three-chord arrangement that foregrounds that voice. Our narrator is a trucker whose son would treat his dad’s truck like a horse: Giddyup Go is thus its name, with the poignancy of Sovine’s trucker spending six years ‘being in and out’ doing his job. He comes home one day to find ‘my wife and little boy gone’, his voice breaking as he recalls the events. ‘From that day on,’ intones Sovine, ‘it’s just been me and ole Giddyup Go’.
One day, a trip on Route 66 brings him beside a fellow trucker, ‘both stacks blowin’ black coal’, whose vehicle has ‘a little sign on the back…that read Giddyup Go’. Sovine, eyes watering ‘like I had a bad ol’ cold’, follows the new truck to the next rest stop, and offers to buy the driver, whose identity even the stupidest listener will by now have guessed, something to drink. ‘Mom said he got the name from me,’ Sovine sings in the son’s voice with another quiver and tremble in his narration, as the older trucker shows the younger one the famous truck.
‘I felt like a king!’ says the proud father, noting that his son handled his ‘rig better than any gearjammer that I’d ever seen’. The two trucks ride off into the Route 66 sunset, and ‘the lines on the highway have got a much brighter glow’. Sappy songs sell, then and now and forever.
1976 C.W. McCall – Convoy
And indeed, in ten years’ time, they would sell again.
In more ways than one, this is a ridiculous coincidence: ridiculous because, like Giddyup Go, it’s a novelty song about trucking; ridiculous too because it topped the country chart ten years to the day after it. Red Sovine himself even joined the craze with Teddy Bear which, if you can imagine, is an even worse song than this (no time to explain, look it up). Every new piece of technology seems to affect the world at large in some way, be it home gaming consoles, smartphones or, as here, CB (citizens band) radio, which were a useful tool for truck drivers especially.
Do I really need to run through the plot of this song, which is a dirge that is seldom if ever heard today except on Pick of the Pops on Radio 2? Rubber Duck radios Pig Pen to tell him ‘there’s a big 10-4…we definitely got the front door’ and tells the story of ‘the sixth of June in a Kenworth’, where first 85 then ‘a thousand screamin’ trucks and 11 long-haired Friends o’ Jesus’ encounter ‘bears…wall to wall’.
To translate into English: by ‘front door’, McCall (whose CB radio call sign is Rubber Duck) means the head truck in the convoy; by ‘Friends o’ Jesus’, he means hippies; and by ‘bears’, he means policemen, the kind who wore hats that reminded people of Smokey the Bear (‘reinforcements from the Illinois National Guard’, ‘choppers filled the skies’). Our hero encourages the convoy to crash through the tollgate to make a getaway.
Writing for his Number Ones series on Stereogum.com, Tom Breihan compares it to rap music in how it is ‘all about breaking laws’. For me, it’s complete nonsense but it sure sounds good. Simon Cowell would have killed to market this to America and the world, but he had to make do with Westlife, who never sung a truckers’ tale.
Breaking up the narrative is the chorus sung by female backing singers; with the expertise of a jingle writer, it encourages/they encourage people to ‘join our convoy…’cross the USA’. Every number one song needs an advertising campaign behind it, and Convoy had a literal advert for it. Originally created by Bill Fries for a bread commercial, where he sang a minute-long ditty about an Iowa trucking café, the character of C.W. McCall returned for this song, co-written by Chip Davis.
It rose to number one on the country chart within a month and stayed there for six weeks, becoming the number one song in the USA this week in 1976 too. In the UK, where it was parodied by Radio 1 DJs Paul Burnett and Dave Lee Travis, it loitered near the summit for the first few months of the year, sharing space on the record racks with Oh What A Night by The Four Seasons and Love Really Hurts Without You by Billy Ocean. Had it not been for I Love To Love by Tina Charles and Save Your Kisses For Me by Brotherhood of Man, the song would have been a UK number one too.
Its success inspired a movie of the same name which starred Kris Kristofferson; Fries/McCall, meanwhile, became mayor of a town in Colorado and died in 2022 at the age of 93. I hope he used all that Convoy money wisely; after all, for season three of The Simpsons he let Homer sing it tunelessly on the famous Timmy O’Toole episode when Bart ‘fell down a well’.
1986 Kenny Rogers – Morning Desire
Rogers also starred in a film based on one of his own songs (The Gambler, see the December 23 piece), but unlike McCall he had his own set of Transatlantic number ones. Rogers, according to the Big Book of Country Music, was the man who ‘did more to drag country music into the pop domain’ than anyone else of his era, which led to him being ‘glorified and vilified’ in equal measure.
He was still a star in the mid-1980s when he took this Dave Loggins composition to the top of the country charts for his 18th number one. Produced by George Martin (yep, that one) and featuring a solo from jazz guitarist Stanley Jordan, the music video debuted at the CMA Awards. It could not sound more of its time if it tried, with washes of synth beneath bass and electric guitar. Anne Dudley of The Art of Noise is on keyboards, while the solo comes from renowned jazzer Stanley Jordan.
Rogers had told Loggins to write a cross between I’m On Fire by Bruce Springsteen, which explains the lyric ‘I’m on fire’ in the chorus, and Something’s Burning by his old band the First Edition, jokingly keeping him in his guesthouse after the pair played golf. Perhaps inspired by this, Loggins wrote a song set in the bedroom, and so Rogers sings in his trademark style about his carnal lust: ‘I listen to her breathe and it makes me wanna wake her up’. On three occasions he mentions the thunder, which ‘sounds like horses’ hooves’.
1996 Faith Hill – It Matters to Me
Faith had vocal surgery after completing the promotion of her debut album, and ironically this is a song about a woman given the silent treatment: ‘where’d you ever learn to fight without saying a word then waltz back into my life?’ Accordingly, Kevin John Coyne’s piece for Country Universe calls this ‘absolute classic’ an example of a new description of a human experience which, as the lyrics read, explains ‘the distance between the woman and a man’.
The piano-led torch song, written by Mark Sanders and Ed Hill (no relation), could have been a career song for Reba McEntire or Martina McBride, but it went to Faith and was the title track of her second album. Fun fact: Dann Huff plays the guitar solo.
The chorus is morose, singalongable and suitably empowering for the era: it matters to the woman ‘when we don’t talk, when we don’t touch, when it doesn’t feel like we’re even in love’. Faith’s narrator asks ‘how can I make you see’, a line fraught with emotion which will chime with her target audience of mature women who might well be used to the silent treatment. Let us hope her own husband heeded the lessons of this chart-topper.
2006 Billy Currington – Must Be Doin’ Somethin‘ Right
In any case, as Currington sings in the opening line of his first number one, ‘A woman is a mystery a man just can’t understand’; that sounds like an old George Jones song. Produced by Carson Chamberlain, who has links to both Keith Whitley and current star Zach Top, this is Adult Contemporary Country of the highest order, whose album version lasts four and a half minutes.
Our narrator is besotted by his beloved’s ‘deep blue, need-you eyes, don’t know what I did to earn a love like this’, as his voice soars to a top E on ‘baby I’. The verses are full of fidelity (‘tonight’s about giving you what you want’) and advice to other fellas: ‘other times you gotta take it slow’. Hence why sometimes country music offers life lessons you don’t learn in school or on the farm.
It’s as close as country gets to a sultry r’n’b ballad, and proves how influential the pop sound was on country music of the time. Also on the charts in early 2006: Your Man by Josh Turner, What Hurts the Most by Rascal Flatts and Come a Little Closer by Dierks Bentley, which this song replaced at number one. Plus Joe Nichols’s song about the magical powers of tequila.
2016 Thomas Rhett – Die a Happy Man
And here’s the man who replaced Billy Currington on country radio: a swarthy guy with a catalogue of love songs who can croon in a poppy yet country manner.
It is often the case that country music looks at what is happening in the pop charts and adds a bit of dobro, fiddle and twang. Thomas Rhett Akins Jr. is known as TR, and he is still one of the big acts on the label Big Machine; signed, in fact, to its Valory Music imprint. TR was following up Crash and Burn, an infectious song with a debt to Chain Gang by Sam Cooke, a song from the pop charts of two generations ago.
In January of the previous year, Ed Sheeran’s wedding ballad Thinking Out Loud, a song with a debt (but not, in the end, a plagiaristic one) to Let’s Get It On by Marvin Gaye, had been the second biggest song in the USA. In January of the following year, and indeed for the first six weeks of 2016, TR’s wedding ballad was at the top of both the Hot Country and Country Airplay charts.
Rather cheekily, our besotted narrator even mentions Gaye in the opening verse, knowing even at this point that TR’s song, written with LA-based pop writers Sean Douglas and Joe ‘London’ Spargur, borrowed the feel of the aforementioned song. The previous night was ‘hands down once of the best nights I’ve had, no doubt’, what with the wine and the dancing and the ‘crazy love’, which is itself a reference to a Van Morrison ballad of that title which also sounds an awful lot like Thinking Out Loud. (Sheeran would quote Morrison in his defence of borrowing the musical idiom of his predecessors; Mark Krais, his defence lawyer, is the brother of my uncle’s good friend Ashley.)
And never mind the red dress, ‘the black dress makes it hard to see’. He’s so excited he can barely breathe, extolling his saint and goddess, a ‘masterpiece’. He will die happy even if he never sees the Northern Lights or Paris (‘the Eiffel Tower at night’), or if he doesn’t head to California, all with his beloved’s hand in his. She is his ‘great escape’, even when they are dancing in the living room with the radio on. The mention of a ‘mansion in Georgia’ marks TR’s heritage as the son of Rhett Akins, who grew up in the state; I reckon TR can, by now, build his Southern mansion.
The song was the second single from TR’s second album Tangled Up, a top ten on the all-genre Billboard 200 chart. It featured guest vocalist contributions from three pop acts drafted in to help spread TR’s music to pop fans: Jordin Sparks, Tori Kelly and LunchMoney Lewis. Another track invited listeners to shake their ‘southside’, while Vacation was credited to 13 writers because it interpolated the melody and feel of Low Rider by War. It was TR’s worst performing song on radio, although it has become a bankable set opener.
If he would ever fail to play Die a Happy Man, the official music video of which has been viewed just short of 300m times, he risks the ire of thousands of people who have paid good money to hear it.
A Country Way of Life 