Nice way to kick off a career! Florida’s Bellamy Brothers hit #1 this day in 1976 on Billboard with their biggest hit, “Let Your Love Flow.” Remarkably, although the duo of David and Howard “Homer” are still going and have released 37 studio albums, they’ve never had another mainstream top 20 hit…although they’ve been staples of country music radio where they’ve notched another 10 #1’s at home with titles like “If I Said You Had A Beautiful Body, Would You Hold It Against Me?”, “Do You Love As Good As You Look?” and “Redneck Girl“.
Says Howard Bellamy, “it’s become a standard, basically. I wish another of those would come along.” The brothers each play guitar and David also is proficient on fiddle and piano. they made their money to get to L.A. (where they signed with Curb Records, then a division of MGM) from quirky singer Jim Stafford. David co-wrote his song “Spiders & Snakes” and Howard was Stafford’s manager. “Let Your Love Flow” was written by a friend of Neil Diamond’s, Larry Williams, but when Neil turned it down, as did Johnny Rivers, so it was the Bellamy’s for the taking. No coincidence then that Diamond’s backing band filled out the sound in the studio for the pair.
The song also was a hit in Canada, where it got to #3 and Britain, where it made #7 then saw it return to the charts in 2008 after being used in a credit card commercial. BMI report the song was one of the 100 most-played songs of the 20th Century. The brothers are inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, as well as the German Country Music Hall of Fame, where they join Johnny Cash as the only Americans. And no, we didn’t have a clue that Germany would have a Country Hall of Fame either!
Happy Earth Day! It’s both great that there is an unofficial holiday at least to celebrate the Earth and remind us to take care of it, it’s a bit disappointing that it’s still necessary, 54 years after it began because we just don’t seem to get the message as a species. For every step forward we seem to make on the environment, it seems like we take two back… our air is still polluted, oil spills are rather routine, the Amazon (the rain forest, not the omnipresent online store) continues to be logged and so on.
A lot of musicians are environmentalists but not that many have done much about it in song. Marvin Gaye got the ball rolling in 1971, with “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” a song Motown boss Berry Gordy famously hated and didn’t want released. The song was a top 10 hit in the U.S. and Canada, which perhaps diminished Gordy’s anger a little. Gaye explained the song with lyrics like “oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas, fish full of mercury…” by telling his biographer “when we don’t follow (Jesus’) example and turn to exploitation and greed, we destroy ourselves.”
Since then stars like k.d. lang and Morrissey are outspoken vegetarians and artists like the Eurythmics, Depeche Mode and Sting have taken part in major environmental fund-raising events. But one of the most sharply-worded musical rebukes was made 50 years ago by a perhaps unexpected source – The Man in Black. And who wants to be scolded by Johnny Cash! He put out his 47th album, Ragged Old Flag, in 1974, and it delivered a sort of state-of-the-nation address from Cash, who broached subjects like Watergate, flag-burning and patriotism, unemployment… and our destruction of the environment. Among his backing musicians were Carl Perkins on guitar and the Oak Ridge Boys singing backing vocals on some tracks. This month’s Forgotten Gem is “Don’t Go Near The Water” by him. It was the b-side to the single “Ragged Old Flag” released this month 50 years ago.
The song focuses on water pollution and the singer tells his son to keep away from the polluted water and its dying fishes – “we’re torturing the Earth, and pouring every kind of evil in the sea, we violated nature and our children have to pay the penalty.” It came about five years after the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland caught fire… for the 13th time!
The single hit #31 on American country charts; the album #16.
It probably doesn’t rank high among his canon of greatest works, but it delivers a message loud and clear and has been adopted by various organizations as an Earth Day anthem. And indeed if the idea of the day itself isn’t enough to make you want to do something Earth-friendly today, maybe the thought of getting to the “Pearly Gates” and being met by an angry Johnny Cash might!
Happy birthday to an A-list musician who’s name somehow isn’t even B-list famous. Steve Nathan turns 73 today. The Buffalo keyboardist may be close to anonymous but the music he’s helped make is far from it, especially to country fans.
He grew up loving Bob Dylan and left snowy Buffalo for the South in the mid-’70s, briefly working with LeBlanc & Carr (the one hit wonder known for their song “Falling.”) The duo both had ties to the famous Muscle Shoals “Swampers”, so he followed them to Alabama. In 1977, he signed on to be a session musician at the Fame Studios there, run by Rick Hall. Hall was apparently so impressed the first time he heard Nathan he made him the top on-call keyboardist for their studios for the next 14 years. His ability and proficiency on instruments ranging from traditional piano through synthesizers made him very popular, as I would guess his seemingly low-key personality did. Nathan never made the records about him…but he sure did add to them, working on records by the likes of Dobie Gray, Bertie Higgins (including the hit “Key Largo”), Hank Williams Jr., Percy Sledge, Glenn Frey and Steve Earle (Guitar Town) there. In 1991, he moved a dash north, to Nashville and joined their famous “A Team” … the country music equivalent to L.A.’s Wrecking Crew. There over the next 20-odd years, he worked on albums by pretty much the who’s-who of country music artists – Vince Gill, George Strait, Lee Ann Rimes, Alabama, the Dixie Chicks (playing on their diamond-selling Fly record), Reba McEntire as well as other stars like Olivia Newton John, Spyro Gyra, Bon Jovi, Hootie and the Blowfish, Mark Knopfler and even the Atlanta Rhythm Section…a group who started out as a collection of studio musicians themselves. In 1995 alone, he had credits on 20 different albums recorded there. So respected was he that he’s been inducted into the Nashville Music Hall of Fame and was named Music Row magazine’s “Keyboardist of the Year” an unprecedented 13 times running.
Despite all that, there’s little to tell about Nathan from this end, because there’s surprisingly little info about him or his outside life posted anywhere, it would seem. He hasn’t been doing much session work in the past five years but his website does say he’s available to work as a producer. It’s one of the amazing quirks of music that millions remember the names of one-hit wonders like Tommy Tutone (Nathan worked on their hit album too) , yet there are people like Steve, Hal Blaine and Carol Kaye around who’ve played on literally dozens of hit records that are mere anonymous faces in the crowd to most fans.
Welcome back to Turntable Talk! This is our Silver Anniversary so to speak, our 25th round . If you’re curious, we have an index to past topics covered. By now all our regular readers know how this goes, but for any new readers, first off, welcome! And second, briefly, on Turntable Talk we have a number of guest columnists from other music sites, sounding off on one particular topic. This month, our topic is A Novel Idea For a Song. We asked our contributors to write about a novelty song they like. Or even hate!
To keep the fun going, today we have Christian, from Christian’s Music Musings. Growing up in Europe as he did, let’s see what caught his sense of whimsy:
Turntable Talk 25 it is, and the series is still going as strong as ever. This time, Dave’s proposition was to write about a novelty record we like. As usual, he was kind enough to give us some flexibility.
While I had heard the name “novelty song” before, I couldn’t come up with a great definition. Here’s how Wikipedia explains the concept: A novelty song is a type of song built upon some form of novel concept, such as a gimmick, a piece of humor, or a sample of popular culture. Novelty songs partially overlap with comedy songs, which are more explicitly based on humor, and with musical parody, especially when the novel gimmick is another popular song.
Based on the above, the first artist who came to mind is “Weird Al” Yankovic, but I figured he would be too obvious a choice or somebody might pick him. Then I strangely remembered a song titled “Gimme Dat Ding”, which my six-year-older sister had on vinyl. When looking it up in Wikipedia, I found it appeared in 1970 and was by The Pipkins, a British novelty duo.
Since it’s kind of an annoying song, I didn’t want this to be my pick, so I ended up doing some research. I was really surprised to see how many novelty songs there are, though the boundaries between novelty, comedy and parody songs are fluid. Finally, I decided to pick a song, which if I recall it correctly was the first I heard by Johnny Cash:
“A Boy Named Sue.”
For some reason, I liked that song right away, even though I didn’t really get what it was about, since I didn’t understand English at the time. “A Boy Named Sue” was penned by American writer, poet, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, musician and playwright Shel Silverstein. “The Man in Black” first recorded the song during his February 24, 1969 gig at California’s San Quentin State Prison for his At San Quentin live album released in June of the same year.
Curiously, that live version of the song became Cash’s biggest hit on the U.S. pop chart the Billboard Hot 100 where it peaked at no. 2, marking his only top 10 single there. It also topped the country charts in the U.S. and Canada and climbed to no. 4 in the UK – his best showing there in a tie with his 1971 single “A Thing Called Love”.
According to SecondHandSongs, there are more than 60 versions of “A Boy Named Sue”. Here’s the original by Shel Silverstein. Not bad, but it’s hard to beat Cash’s coolness factor!
Here’s another live version by The Highwaymen, a country supergroup featuring Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson – quite a quartet! Their live rendition was included on an album titled Live: American Outlaws, which came out in May 2016.
Following are some additional insights from Songfacts:
This is about a boy who grows up angry at his father not only for leaving his family, but for naming him Sue. When the boy grows up, he sees his father in a bar and gets in a fight with him. After his father explains that he named him Sue to make sure he was tough, the son understands.
Shel Silverstein’s nephew Mitch Myers told us [meaning Songfacts ] the story: “In those days in Nashville, and for all the people that would visit, the most fun that anyone really could have would be to go over to someone’s house and play music. And they would do what one would call a ‘Guitar Pull,’ where you grabbed a guitar and you played one of your new songs, then someone else next to you would grab it and do the same, and there were people like Johnny Cash or Joni Mitchell, people of that caliber in the room.”
“Shel sang his song ‘Boy Named Sue,’ and Johnny’s wife June Carter thought it was a great song for Johnny Cash to perform. And not too long after that they were headed off to San Quentin to record a record – Live At San Quentin – and June said, ‘Why don’t you bring that Shel song with you.’ And so they brought the lyrics. And when he was on stage he performed that song for the first time ever, he performed it live in front of that captive audience, in every sense of the word.”
“He had to read the lyrics off of the sheet of paper that was at the foot of the stage, and it was a hit. And it wasn’t touched up, it wasn’t produced or simulated. They just did it, and it stuck. And it rang. I would say that it would qualify in the realm of novelty, a novelty song. Shel had a knack for the humorous and the kind of subversive lyrics. But they also were so catchy that people could not resist them.”
Shel Silverstein went on to write another song titled “The Father of the Boy Named Sue.” It’s the same story, but from the father’s point of view.
Johnny Cash performed this song in the East Room of the White House on April 17, 1970 when he and his wife were invited by President Richard Nixon. Nixon’s staff had requested the song along with Okie From Muskogee and a song by Guy Drake called “Welfare Cadillac,” but Cash refused to perform those songs, saying he didn’t have arrangements ready.
The Goo Goo Dolls named their 1995 breakthrough album A Boy Named Goo in a play on this song’s title.
In the 2019 animated film Missing Link, the main character, a male Sasquatch voiced by Zach Galifianakis, is named Susan.
Another for our list of One Hit Wonders, though if the record company had its way, he might have been a “zero hit wonder.” But four decades on, we remember him for a hit song, and having the only name in rock that sounded like a vehicle heating device. Randy Van Warmer was born on this day in 1955.
Van Warmer was born in the Denver area, but he and his mom moved to England when he was a young teen and he spent a decade there. Along the way, he apparently learned guitar (and other instruments – some of his later records featured him playing all instruments) and began writing songs. Upon moving back to North America, he settled in Woodstock, and signed to Bearsville Records. Evidently, they seemed to think of him more as a songwriter than singer or performer. Years after he hit the charts in 1979, he complained Bearsville didn’t promote his debut album, Warmer, much, didn’t want him touring at home (they did send him to do some concerts in Japan and other parts of the Far East) and in fact didn’t want to release his hit as a single.
That hit was the easy-listening “Just When I Needed You Most”, a song about the heartache of a breakup he’d written as a teenager, with a little help from Tony Wilson of Hot Chocolate no less. He says “nobody (at Bearsville) thought my version was especially good (they) just assumed mine was a demo for people to listen to (that would) cut the definitive version.” Demo or not, he got future-Rolling Stones drummer Steve Jordan on it and John Sebastian to play the auotharp between the second and third verses.
And it turned out his version was the definitive version; it was one of the big Adult Contemporary hits of ’79, topping those charts and going to #4 in the U.S. and #8 in the UK. It got him a gold single at home. The album itself garnered decent reviews, Billboard for instance comparing it to the less-disco-ey Bee Gees music, although it “lacked diversity” by comparison.
His time at Bearsville wasn’t all for nought however. Besides getting a gold, top 10 single, he also met his future wife working in the office there. He wrote the song “Suzi Found A Weapon” for her (odd title!) and while it just missed the overall American top 50, it did somehow hit #1 in Alaska!
Although he’d release nine more studio albums, none really took off much for him. However, he wasn’t exactly a One Hit Wonder per se – two of his songs became big country hits for others. “I’m in a Hurry” became a Country #1 hit for Alabama and “I Guess It Never Hurts To Hurt Sometimes” went to #1 on the same chart for the Oak Ridge Boys in 1984.
That prompted him to move to Nashville for some time and concentrate on country. Sadly Randy’s life was cut very short, dying at age 48 from leukemia.
Gone but not forgotten in any way. That would describe this lady and what better day than International Women’s Day to remember her. Olivia Newton-John hit #1 on Billboard this day in 1975, with a song initially inspired by just one word.
When Australian John Farrar, her long-time friend and frequent producer had been in California not long before that, he noticed a lot of the musicians there used the word “mellow” incessantly. From that, “Have You Never Been Mellow?” came about, and that became her second #1 hit in both the U.S. and Canada, a few months after “I Honestly Love You” had been her first. It helped her sixth album, also named Have You Never Been Mellow? hit #1 in the States – at that point her newly adopted home country – and earn her a gold record, as well as a platinum one in Canada. Her appeal was very wide at the time. Not only was it the top-selling single in the land, it was the #1 song on adult contemporary radio and #3 on country charts. It would win her a nomination for a Grammy for Best Female Pop Performance, an award she’d won the previous year for her first #1 song.
She’d go on to have three more #1’s in the U.S., two of them written by Farrar – “You’re the One That I Want” and “Magic.”, as well as “Physical”, which Farrar produced.
Newton-John passed away from cancer at 73 two years back, not long after publishing a best-selling autobiography, Don’t Stop Believing. By the way, although today is Women’s Day, if you’re a fan of the ladies of music, check in next week for the next round of Turntable Talk, in which we’ll look at some of the greats.
Dolly Parton did it, so too Glen Campbell. Today we remember one who became before them… perhaps the first female star to do cross over from pure country into the mainstream pop world, some six decades back. Patsy Cline put out her great “I Fall To Pieces” on this day in 1961.
Cline was at the time 28 and a fairly popular star at the Grand Ole Opry. Her second album, Showcase, saw the mass market catching onto what a talent she was. Her label, Decca, brought in some fine studio musicians for it, including the Jordanaires, the gospel singers who’d become famous working behind Elvis for much of the ’60s. This single was written by the then-popular writing duo of Garland Cochran and Harlan Howard. Howard would later write country hits like Melba Montgomery’s “No Charge” and “Heartaches by the Number”, a standard done by artists ranging from Bing Crosby to Willie Nelson and Dwight Yoakam through the years. They’d offered “I Fall to Pieces” to Brenda Lee who turned it down for being “too country.” It ended up on Cline’s desk.
She recorded it (although objecting to having the Jordanaires on it) and as Howard, who was in the studio said “once Patsy got into the groove, she just caressed those lyrics and the melody so tenderly that it was just like satin. We knew we had magic in the can.”
They did indeed. It became her first #1 hit on country charts and more impressively, got to #12 on the best-selling singles chart. Her followup, “Crazy” , written by a then young Willie Nelson, did a tad better even, hitting #9.
Although she was the master of hurting country songs (as Will Fulford Jones says of her, “Cline pretty much wrote the book on country music ballad singing…put into practise by everyone from George Jones to Trisha Yearwood”) , she seemed to be in a reasonably good spot in her life. After marrying young and divorcing soon after, she was remarried and apparently happy, and very popular in the music world. Nonetheless, she was injured in a car crash during the height of her career and at least some reports suggest her military husband was actually abusive to her. All her tears and frustrations must have dripped out onto the vinyl! Sadly though, like far too many musicians in that era, she died young in a small plane crash, returning home to Tennessee after perfroming in Kansas City, in 1963.
Although she was silenced far too soon, her reputation soared posthumously. In 1973 she became the first female inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Jessica Lange starred as her in a 1980s biopic film and her Greatest hits album is certified diamond in the U.S.
Charlie Rich was getting a bit richer 50 years ago today. Starting 1974, he was hanging onto the #1 spot on the Canadian singles chart with “The Most Beautiful Girl”. It had spent two weeks on top in the U.S. in December ’73 before being displaced by Jim Croce’s posthumous “Time in a Bottle” (which would in fact also knock Rich out of the Canadian top spot a week later.)
Rich was on top of the world at the time, it would seem. Nicknamed “the silver Fox” for his whitish hair, he got a jump on the “Urban Cowboy” trend that came at the decade’s end, spearheading a form of music then-termed “Countrypolitan”… a sort of country/pop blend that managed to do well on both types of charts and radio stations. He’d paid his dues along the way, having started as a Sun Records artist at the tail-end of the ’50s who also was an in-house studio guitarist and pianist there, performing on a number of their records including some Elvis ones. Through the ’60s he’d had minor successes as a country singer, but his star lifted off with the release of his 1973 album, Behind Closed Doors. The title track had been the first of five-straight country chart #1 hits for him and had introduced him to hit radio/pop music fans, but this one really established him as a star.
“The Most Beautiful Girl” is a bit different than many love-lost songs in that it addresses the listener, imploring them to tell his beautiful girlfriend who’d walked out on him that he was sorry and he needed her. It came about in a bit different than normal fashion too. It’s credited to three writers – Norro Wilson, Rory Bourke and Billy Sherrill. The first two were successful Nashville songwriters, Sherrill was a well-respected country producer who was indeed producing Charlie’s album. It might seem his role in the song-writing was more of an advisory one. It was largely based on Wilson & Bourke’s song “Hey Mister”, but that didn’t quite succeed on its own. Sherrill suggested they adopt some of the chorus from another song of Wilson’s, “Mama McCluskey” and put together, they merged into the gold-seller for the silver Fox. For that, Bourke says they have some female record office workers to thank. “The girls over at Columbia (the owner of the Epic label Rich was then with) at the time just ragged on him”, the “him” being Sherrill who apparently didn’t like the finished song, even though he’d given himself a writing credit. The ladies in the studio offices however, did. “Until finally, he put it out. And the rest is history.”
The history is that it was a #1 for him in North America and also a top 5 hit in places like the Netherlands as well as the UK. It pushed the album to 4X platinum at home, by far his biggest-selling non-compilation one. It’s been helped along in its enduring popularity by use in a handful of movies, and TV shows like King of the Hill, Malcolm inthe Middle… and Seinfeld, on which George tries singing his own version of it.
Rich’s time in the spotlight wasn’t lengthy however. Although he’d continue to do well on country radio for over a year more and score three more crossover top 20 songs, this was his last real big hit . Perhaps that was because, ironically given his profile as a country-pop crossover artist, he appeared to slag another such artist on a big stage. At the 1975 CMA Awards, he was giving out the Entertainer of the Year award. Unfortunately, according to his son, he’d mixed too many gin-and-tonics backstage with prescription pain pills and came out, noticeably impaired, opened the envelope, and pulled out a lighter, setting fire to the card with the winner’s name. After a bit he sarcastically announced the winner as “my friend, John Denver.” He’d won the award himself the year before; maybe he was miffed that he wasn’t nominated this time, maybe he just couldn’t stand Denver. Either way, many found him boorish and disrespectful and it would seem that his career spiralled downward from there. By the end of the ’70s, he’d all but retired from music and tried, with limited success his hand at acting. He passed away in 1995 at age 62, so sadly we never got to hear his take on Taylor Swift winning the Country Entertainer of the Year award – twice.
We have a “suspicion” many people have forgotten about Terry Stafford, so it’s a good time to remember him on what would have been his 82nd birthday.
Stafford was a bit of a mystery man, and is largely considered a One Hit wonder, though in reality he was a two hit wonder…if not three. Born in rural Oklahoma, his family moved to Amarillo, Texas when he was young and he grew up there – and later immortalized the city in song – he fled to L.A. not long after high school, with dreams of becoming a rockabilly star. It didn’t pan out quite like that for him, but he did put out an album in 1964 which made him famous for its title track. “Suspicion” was a song originally done by Elvis Presley but with it only a b-side (in North America at least, it did chart for him in Scandinavia) Terry took a go at it and made it a big hit. It reached #3 in the U.S., and #4 in Canada and earned him a gold record. It sat at #6 on April 4, 1964 on Billboard, which is noteworthy only because the top 5 songs, ahead of his, were all by the Beatles that week!
He turned to songwriting and acting after that in the ’60s, having a little success with a song he’d written that Buck Owens had a hit with, “Big In Vegas.” Terry then put out one more album in ’73 – Say Has Anybody Seen My Sweet Gypsy Rose? He did a countrified version of the Tony Orlando & Dawn song, and had a bit of success with it on country radio, as he did with another song on it. But that one would change his fortunes later on. “Amarillo By Morning” was a song he wrote and put out; it did moderately well on country charts. However, budding country superstar George Strait recorded it in 1982 and it exploded. Although it only got to #4 at the time on country charts, it had staying power and went triple platinum as a single and has been voted among the top 10 Country tunes of all-time by USA Today readers.
Presumably he was happy with the popularity of George’s version, or at least with the royalties from it, but by then he’d all but disappeared. He left the music business in the mid-’70s and apparently split his time between Amarillo and L.A., marrying in 1972 along the way. However, he remained far from the spotlight until he died at age 54 from liver failure.
So, our suspicion is you know just a wee bit more about a ’60s Elvis-soundalike “one hit wonder.”
Perhaps the flaming building in the background of the cover represented Blue Rodeo‘s idea of approximately trashing the old model and rising like a Phoenix from the ashes? Pure speculation on that, but there’s no question the Toronto alt-country or roots rock band shook things up a little for their fifth album, Five Days in July. The album which came out this day in 1993 at home (American fans had to wait the best part of a year before it was released in the U.S.) tried out a new lineup and a new way of making the record. Evidently it worked. It became their best-seller, in their native Canada at least, and seems to be one of the most-beloved still by the group and its fans.
Blue Rodeo had been one of the most unexpected Canadian music success stories of the ’80s, carving out a niche for their music on both pop and country radio despite initially being told they were too country for rock or pop and too pop for country. Their first two albums were regarded as masterpieces of Americana music, going multi-platinum in their homeland. Their third,’90’s Casino, was a hit and generated several well-loved singles, but had them working with Dwight Yoakam band member Pete Anderson in the States to record, and they figured it came out too glossy or slick-sounding. Which led to working with another American producer for their fourth album, LosTogether, which coincided with co-leader Greg Keelor having problems with prescription pain-killers and internal fighting with keyboardist Bobby Wiseman. The result was an album which fell off in sales and wasn’t highly regarded in most circles. So for this, their fifth record, they shifted gears, dropping Wiseman and bringing in a new keyboardist, James Gray, and producing the album themselves after recording it in a very casual setting at Keelor’s farm in the hills east of Toronto. Although the album was at first only going to be demos, they and Warner Bros. liked the sound and the relaxed feel of the songs and ended up working on those original takes to make Five Days in July.
The result was a solid collection of 11 low-fi love and love-loss songs, ten originals written by Keelor and Jim Cuddy, with the first cover song they’d recorded added in, “Til I Gain Control Again”, a Rodney Crowell song originally done by Emmylou Harris. Also new to the album were a handful of backup singers, most notably Sarah McLachlan who added her voice to a trio of the songs including “Dark Angel.”
The album itself topped out at #8 in Canada, fourth in a string of 12-straight to hit the top 10, but with its long chart-life it ended up 6X platinum, best of any of their studio albums. “Bad Timing” made the top 20 but the two standouts were the semi-title track, “Five Days in May” (written loosely about Cuddy’s own romance with his wife) and “Hasn’t hit Me Yet”, both top 10 hits. The trio brought them to nine top 20 singles in their homeland in a matter of six years.
As recently as early last decade, they were still playing at least half the album at every concert, which shows how well it’s aged with their fanbase. They say no matter where they are, a loud cheer goes up when Keelor mentions “Lake Ontario” in “Hasn’t Hit Me Yet”; seems there are always Canadians following them around no matter how far afield.
Allmusic rated it 4-stars, which perhaps was a bit low given that they gush over it, calling it their “best album”, with the “band at its most epic, brave and experimental”, a “pretty mellow affair” offering “proof positive as to why they have remained Canada’s all-time best group since.” Vice magazine likewise loved it, noting the similarity in feel to Neil Young’s Harvest and reminding readers that Hank Snow was Canadian. “There’s a space between the heartbreak of classic country and the puppy love of modern pop and its name is Blue Rodeo,” they add. Guess you could say Blue Rodeo “harvest”ed a pretty good crop from that one week on the farm!
A Sound Day 