1967 - Dim Lights, Thick Smoke And Hillbilly Music

Various - Country & Western Hit Parade

1-CD Deluxe album with 72-page booklet, 31 tracks. Total playing time approx. 84 mns.
'Dim Lights, Thick Smoke And Hillbilly Music 1967'
Country & Western Hit Parade 1967
It was the year that thousands of kids obeyed the invocation to go to San Francisco and wear some flowers in their hair. Civil unrest spread like a medieval plague: riots in the cities and violent protests on campuses. We've all seen the footage: draft-card burning, anti-war protests, hippies offering flowers to National Guardsmen. Seismic changes in society were reflected in music, with the notable exception of country music. Rock singles were no longer two-minute jingles, and albums supplanted singles as the preferred sound-carrier.
Lyrics tried to make sense of what was happening. A little of this made its way into country music, but only a little. The best country songs always had gritty blue collar poeticism, but a few new country songs, starting with John Hartford's Gentle On My Mind, tried to stretch the parameters of country songcraft. Some felt called to follow in Hartford's footsteps; few were chosen. Most carried on as if music and society were not realigning.
But 1967 saw significant shifts in the country music business. On March 1, Columbia's veteran country A&R chief, Don Law, retired. He'd started as a book-keeper for Brunswick Records in June 1926 before Brunswick was bought first by Warner Brothers and then by Columbia's parent, ARC. Law, though, didn't completely retire. He kept six Columbia artists, notably Ray Price, as production clients and started Don Law Productions from his apartment. Within a year or so, he scored a big hit with Henson Cargill's Skip A Rope on Monument (see 1968) and helped Price transform himself into a lounge act. Years of chain-smoking and hard drinking took their toll, and he died in Texas in 1982.
His former boss and fellow Englishman, Art Satherley, who had been forced out of Columbia in 1952, lived until 1986. Law and Satherley had been in charge of Columbia's country A&R from 1929 until 1967, in other words all but seven years of recorded country music history. In his autobiography written decades later, Texas honky tonk singer Johnny Bush said, "Do you know why A&R men like Don Law were so great? They kept their fucking mouths shut and left it to the musicians to work it out, and let the artist be the artist." One month after Law retired, the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum opened its doors (admission one dollar). Satherley was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1971 and Law in 2001.
Law's assistant, Frank Jones, expected to take over at Columbia, but Law had coasted to the finish line with artists he'd signed in the 1950s, leading Clive Davis and Ken Gallagher at Columbia in New York to go for some fresh thinking. They handed the job to Bob Johnston, who'd produced Bob Dylan, Simon & Garfunkel, and Leonard Cohen. Johnston's tenure at Columbia Nashville resulted in some of the worst country records ever made, none worse than Flatt & Scruggs' version of Dylan's Rainy Day Women #12 & 35. Some artists quit because Law was no longer there; others were dropped. Among those leaving were Little Jimmy Dickens, George Morgan, Billy Walker, and Marion Worth. "Rather than go about his work quietly," Columbia president Clive Davis wrote of Johnston, "building up a record of imposing artist signings, he kept giving interviews saying how he was going to shake things up in Nashville.
He was going to create waves and change everything." When Davis went to Nashville for a BMI dinner, Minnie Pearl was entrusted with the task of telling Davis that Johnston irritated everyone. "It was," wrote Davis, "quite refreshing to get a dressing down in such a warm, personal way. I looked at Johnston's operation. In contrast to what he was saying, very little was happening." Even with Johnny Cash still on his roster, Johnston was eclipsed by Billy Sherrill at Columbia's poor-relation label, Epic. In July 1968, Sherrill was named head of the entire Nashville operation, and remained in charge until 1985.
After twenty years at RCA as an artist, engineer, producer, and vice-president of Nashville operations, Chet Atkins drastically scaled back the number of sessions he produced, handing off some of his responsibilities to Bob Ferguson and Felton Jarvis. At year-end, he announced that Danny Davis would be transferring from RCA New York to take over as head of Nashville production effective January 1968. Jarvis and Ferguson would report to Davis. The death of Atkins' mentor, Steve Sholes, later in 1968 prompted him to cut back still further, producing only Hank Snow and Jerry Reed. His involvement in the day-to-day business of RCA Nashville ended altogether when he fell sick in 1973, although he still had an office and stayed as an artist until 1982.
At Mercury Records, Shelby Singleton, who'd more-or-less created the label's Nashville presence, left to start his own company. "My attorney in New York told me if I went into business for myself and did ten percent of what I did for Mercury I'd make a lot of money," Singleton told Walt Trott. At first, he tested the waters as an independent producer, scoring bigtime with the Hombres' Let It All Hang Out in May 1967. Singleton found that he had to promote the record himself, and decided that if he was to do that, it might as well be for his own label. His first releases on SSS were in the summer of 1967.
In May '68, he began issuing country records and moved his company to Belmont Boulevard in Nashville. The company remains there, now without Singleton who died in 2009. At Mercury Nashville, Singleton's longtime assistant, Jerry Kennedy, took over. It was a seamless transition because Singleton had been running country and pop A&R for Mercury, leaving Kennedy more or less in charge of Nashville for one week out of two. Like Atkins, Kennedy was an introverted musician thrust into the maelstrom of politicking, promotion, and administration, none of which came naturally to him, but he stayed until 1984.
At Capitol, the modest, self-effacing Ken Nelson became the longest-serving country A&R chief. He'd moved into country music in 1951, and his success with Buck Owens and Merle Haggard gave him all the job security he needed until his retirement in 1976. Journalist John Grissim met Nelson in 1969, and wrote, "He lives outside fashion, a consummate practitioner of his craft, a man at peace, and a benign presence in [Capitol's] Studio A. He hasn't been a country boy for years, but he does have $350,000 coming to him when he soon relinquishes his role as one of the best country producers in the business." At Decca, things were also unchanged. Owen Bradley had run the label's Nashville division as an independent fiefdom since 1958. He'd just taken a long shot on a former rocker, Conway Twitty, who would soon own the country charts with a vision rooted in country originalism. No fancy chords, no fancy words, no fancy instruments.