The talk at the moment is all about country music, and if you grew up in the West Central Scotland of the seventies, it was country, not rock or pop, which was the dominant music you heard; songs like Freddy Fender's "Before The Next Teardrop Falls," number one in both the U.S.A. and Scotland, unbought south of Dumfries, Tammy Wynette's seven-year-old "Stand By Your Man" which suddenly became a semi-expected national crossover smash, the continued resonance of Jim Reeves, local stars like Sydney Devine.
If you were growing up in 1975 with the music of Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen richocheting between your eleven-year-old ears, you might have thought country as square as Andy Stewart on television at Hogmanay. But it was actually quite a fertile year for the music; indeed, at least three groundbreaking country albums appeared in 1975. There was Pieces Of The Sky by Emmylou Harris, anxious to demonstrate she could do things without Gram, and which proved an excellent set of interpretations. There was the astonishing Old No 1 by Guy Clark, whose character studies and instinctive empathy with working people directly parallel those expressed on Born To Run.
Most strikingly, however, there was Willie Nelson's song cycle Red Headed Stranger, a mixture of old songs and briefer new narratives expertly sequenced to convey the feelings inspired in the singer by a song called "Tale of the Red Headed Stranger," which Nelson regularly played on the radio while a D.J. Think of the two "Smoke Hour" cameos Nelson makes on Cowboy Carter and you'll see where I might be going with this.
It was therefore quite a natural progression for Ray Stevens - the man who discovered and signed Dolly Parton to Monument Records in the sixties - to make a country record, and perhaps furnish a subtle but good-natured rejoinder to Ray Charles' appropriation of the music thirteen years before. The resulting album was named after its title song, a tune written by Erroll Garner in his head while travelling on a 'plane from San Francisco to Chicago in 1954. The 'plane passed through quite a turbulent thunderstorm, and on approaching O'Hare Airport Garner could see a hazy rainbow in the sky. He began to imagine the tune there and then.
Eventually Johnny Burke was persuaded to provide lyrics to the tune, which was promptly subjected to many interpretations, most strikingly that recorded by Johnny Mathis in 1959; a record which really resembles no other (with the possible if distant exception of the Flamingos' contemporaneous "I Only Have Eyes For You") in its weightless ethereality and the singer's supreme confidence in working the studio and treating the record as a record - he frequently stands a little distance away from his microphone before slowly walking towards it, like a lonely sea reclaiming its river.
Stevens presumably decided that, if a song was great enough, it would work in any musical style; hence he treats "Misty" as a modestly-dazzled hoedown with continous pedal steel commentary, a battalion of fiddles whenever a thousand violins begin to play and a vocal performance which in its seemingly unobtrusive and amiable way covers scales as widely and emotionally as Roy Orbison. He is dazed but happy and that's all he wants to communicate, and evidently it was all people in 1975 wanted to be told. When Stevens downplays the comedy - this is the humble novelty of a well-known song interpreted in an unexpected manner - a real smile can develop. He'll be damned if you won't fast dance with him.
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