Today in 1980, George Jones recorded “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” He made a bet with his producer that it wouldn’t go to #1 on the charts.

It has been named in several surveys as the greatest country song of all time. It was released in April 1980 as the lead single from the album I Am What I Am. The song was Jones’s first solo No. 1 single in six years. The melancholy song was written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman. The week after Jones’ death, the song re-entered the Hot Country Songs chart at No. 21. As of November 13, 2013, the single has sold 521,000 copies in the United States. Since 2008 it has been preserved by the Library of Congress into the National Recording Registry. The song was #275 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Alan Jackson sang the song during George Jones’ funeral service on May 2, 2013. George Strait and Jackson sang the song as a tribute during the 2013 CMA Awards on November 6, 2013.

Producer Billy Sherrill introduced Jones to the song in 1978 but, according to Sherrill and Jones himself, the singer hated the song when he first heard it. In Bob Allen’s biography of the singer, Sherrill states, “He thought it was too long, too sad, too depressing and that nobody would ever play it…He hated the melody and wouldn’t learn it.” Sherrill also claims that Jones frustrated him by continually singing the song to the melody of the Kris Kristofferson hit “Help Me Make It Through the Night”. In the Same Ole Me retrospective, Sherrill recalls a heated exchange during one recording session: “I said ‘That’s not the melody!’ and he said ‘Yeah, but it’s a better melody.’ I said ‘It might be—Kristofferson would think so too, it’s his melody!'” In the same documentary, Sherrill claims that Jones was in such bad physical shape during this period that “the recitation was recorded 18 months after the first verse was” and added that the last words Jones said about “He Stopped Loving Her Today” was that no one would buy it. Although he had disliked “He Stopped Loving Her Today” when it was first offered to him, Jones ultimately gave the song credit for reviving his flagging career, stating that “a four-decade career had been salvaged by a three-minute song.” It was as much a tour de force for the producer was for the singer, featuring all the hallmarks of Sherrill’s symphonic approach to country production, featuring cresting strings and dramatic flourishes. Had it not been for Sherrill, it is unlikely the song would have ever been recorded, such was his belief in the song, although he did share some of Jones’ misgivings initially; in his 1995 memoir, Jones recalled, “Putman and Braddock killed the song’s main character too soon in their early versions. Billy kept telling them to kill the guy at a different time and then have the woman come to his funeral…He gave the song to me, and I carried it for more than a year, also convinced that it needed rewriting. Billy had a notebook about an inch thick that was nothing but rewrites for ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today.'”

The success of “He Stopped Loving Her Today” led CBS Records to renew Jones’ recording contract and sparked new interest in the singer. Jones earned the Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance in 1980. The Academy of Country Music awarded the song Single of the Year and Song of the Year in 1980. It also became the Country Music Association’s Song of the Year in both 1980 and 1981.

Source: Wikipedia

This day in 1998: Patty Loveless receives a platinum album for “The Trouble With The Truth.”

The Trouble with the Truth is the eighth album by country music artist Patty Loveless. It peaked at number 10 on the Billboard Top Country albums charts, and number 86 on the Pop charts. It was certified Platinum for shipments of over 1,000,000 copies in the U.S. The singles “Lonely Too Long” and “You Can Feel Bad” both made number 1 on the Hot Country Songs charts; “She Drew a Broken Heart” hit number 4. “A Thousand Times a Day” and the title track both made Top 20 hitting number 13 and 15 respectively.

“Tear-Stained Letter” is a cover of a song which was originally recorded by British singer Richard Thompson, and again in 1988 by country singer Jo-El Sonnier, whose version was a Top 10 country hit. Additionally, “A Thousand Times a Day” was previously cut by George Jones on his 1993 album High-Tech Redneck.

Today in 1972, Loretta Lynn’s “One’s On The Way” hits number one in Billboard.

Originally released in 1971, the song was the title track to her 1971 album and became one of her best-known hits. It was written by Shel Silverstein.

Country music writer Tom Roland described “One’s on the Way” as a “humorous piece on motherhood,” wherein a stay-at-home mother in Topeka, Kansas (pregnant with the latest in a family of several children) contemplates her hectic lifestyle and compares her conditions to the glamor-based lives of Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor. The song also makes reference to First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy at the White House and sex symbol actress Raquel Welch again in contrast to the housewife vocalist’s conventional life.

The song was the latest in a series of what genre historian Bill Malone said was “feisty” songs from Lynn. In effect, “One’s on the Way” and similarly themed songs, such as “Don’t Come Home A’ Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind)” and “The Pill”, helped Lynn become “the spokeswoman for every woman who had gotten married too early, pregnant too often and felt trapped by the tedium and drudgery of her life.”

Loretta appeared as a guest star in episode 8 of season 3 of The Muppet Show in 1978 and sang this song.

In later years when Lynn would perform the song in concert, she would frequently substitute references to the now deceased Jacqueline Kennedy (called simply “Jackie” in the song) with Nancy Reagan, but also has used Michelle Obama, the former First Lady of the United States. Despite the March 2011 death of Elizabeth Taylor, Loretta does still include “Liz” in the song.

When released in November 1971, Decca Records issued the single to record stores and radio stations under the title “Here in Topeka” (in reference to the hook line). Once the mistake was discovered, new singles were issued with the correct title. However, for years, Lynn received requests at concerts to perform “Here in Topeka.”

Source: Wikipedia

Today in 1978, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson’s album “Waylon and Willie” was certified gold.

It stayed at #1 album on the country album charts for ten weeks and would spend a total of 126 weeks on the country charts.

At the dawn of 1978, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson had attained country music superstar status. Jennings had scored three #1 country albums in a row, and his most recent, 1977’s Ol’ Waylon, included what turned out to be the biggest hit single of his career, “Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love).” Nelson, who had taken a verse on the Jennings single, had enjoyed blockbuster success of his own with the release of his 1975 West Texas epic Red Headed Stranger and would again with Stardust in 1978. After so many one-off collaborations and tours, it was inevitable that the pair would record an album of duets, although the fact that they were both contracted to different record labels (Waylon with RCA and Willie with Columbia) made matters difficult. According to RCA executive Jerry Bradley, Jennings initially attempted to overdub his vocals on a few old Nelson recordings (Nelson had recorded for RCA Victor from 1965 to 1972) but struggled to do so; instead, he approached Columbia Records in Nashville with the idea of recording an album of new duets. In a surprising show of cooperation, Columbia agreed. Jennings and Nelson had achieved great success previously, winning the CMA award for Duo of the Year for their song “Good Hearted Woman” in 1976 and were the marquee attractions on the Wanted! The Outlaws compilation, country music’s first million selling album.

The album contains three songs sung individually by Jennings and Nelson, as well as five duets. Although it was presented as a new release, several of the tracks had been recorded for some time and had been redone using overdubbing. The Nelson-sung “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way” and “If You Can Touch Her at All” had appeared on Jennings’ 1974 album This Time (which Nelson had co-produced), as had the song “Pick Up The Tempo”, which is featured on this LP as a duet. Nelson’s guitar playing is noticeably absent on the recording.

Jerry Bradley later recalled:

“Waylon come to play those for me. He looked at me and said, ‘You don’t really like them?’ I said ‘Well, we’ll do well with them, but I don’t think there’s one as good as what we had with the Outlaws.’ He said, ‘What about this one?’ And that’s when he played ‘Mammas.'”

“Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”, written by Ed and Patsy Bruce, peaked at number 1 in March 1978, spending four weeks atop the country music charts. It also reached 42 on the Billboard Hot 100, and won the 1979 Grammy Award for Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. It propelled the album to the top of the Billboard country albums chart. The Waylon-sung “The Wurlitzer Prize (I Don’t Want to Get Over You)” also shot to number 1, while Nelson’s reading of Lee Clayton’s “If You Can Touch Her at All” reached #5. As music journalist Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic observes:

“…in retrospect, it looks like where the movement was beginning to slide into predictability, even if both singers are more or less in command of their talents here. Though still at the peak of his popularity, Waylon had begun to slip slightly creatively starting with the very good, but not great, Are You Ready for the Country, which suggested that he was having a little harder time getting a full album of consistently great material together. The patchwork nature of this album suggests that he still had the problem, but since it was divided into three solo songs apiece and five duets, this plays to his strengths, because the limited number of new songs doesn’t give him room to stumble.”

Jennings’ legal problems, including a much publicized cocaine bust in 1977, were no doubt a distraction and perhaps the inspiration for “I Can Get Off On You”, a songwriting collaboration with Nelson (a notorious pothead) that celebrates the triumph of new love over past vices (“Take back the weed, take back the cocaine baby, take back the pills, take back the whiskey too…”). Jennings’ cover of Fleetwood Mac’s “Gold Dust Woman” also addresses drugs, and was another example of Jennings’ penchant for appropriating FM rock staples; he had previously covered Neil Young’s “Are You Ready for the Country” and the Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See”. Near the conclusion of Kris Kristofferson’s “Don’t Cuss the Fiddle”, Waylon and Willie began singing “Good Hearted Woman”, which has an identical musical arrangement.

The original liner notes, complimenting Jennings and Nelson on their ability to surprise and deliver solid material, were written by Chet Flippo of Rolling Stone. Waylon & Willie was reissued by RCA Records in 2001. The 2001 CD marks the first time the full album was issued on CD in the US; previous US CD issues contained only eight of the album’s eleven songs.

Source: Wikipedia

This day in 1977, Loretta Lynn won two American Music Awards. Johnny Cash became the first country artists to win the Award of Merit. Conway Twitty, Charley Pride, Glen Campbell, Willie Nelson, Olivia Newton-John and The Eagles also won awards.