MUSICAL DECADES - 1960s - Hard Luck Stories

Not everyone was born into the families we visited on TV every week in the 1960s such as “Father Knows Best”, “Leave It To Beaver”, and “Ozzie and Harriet”. On the radio, we were exposed to “the other side of the tracks” in a series of stories about far different kinds of childhoods.

Clarence George Carter (born January 14, 1936) is an American blues and soul singer, musician, songwriter and record producer. His most successful records included "Slip Away", "Back Door Santa", "Too Weak to Fight", "Patches", and "Strokin'".

The song, “Patches”, tells a story about how a boy born and raised in poverty in Alabama "on a farm way back up in the woods" took over responsibility for his family from his dying father. The blind blues singer said: "I heard it on the Chairmen of the Board LP and liked it, but I had my own ideas about how it should be sung. It was my idea to make the song sound real natural..." Initially he thought "that it would be degrading for a black man to sing a song so redolent of subjugation" but was persuaded to do so by record producer Rick Hall, who told him that it related to his own personal history as he was growing up.

The Supremes were an American female singing group and the premier act of Motown Records during the 1960s. They were the most commercially successful of Motown's acts and are, to date, America's most successful vocal group with 12 number one singles on the Billboard Hot 100.

"Love Child" is the second single and title track from their album Love Child. It became the Supremes' 11th number-one single in the United States. The record took just three weeks to reach the Top Ten which it then topped for two weeks before being dethroned by an even bigger Motown single, Marvin Gaye's "I Heard It Through the Grapevine". "Love Child" also performed well on the soul chart, spending three weeks at number two (stuck behind Johnnie Taylor's "Who's Making Love"). It paved new ground for a major pop hit with its then-controversial subject matter of illegitimacy. It is also the single that finally knocked the Beatles' "Hey Jude" off the top spot in the United States after its nine-week run.

O.C. Smith (June 21, 1932 – November 23, 2001) was an American musician. His recording of "Little Green Apples" went to number 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968 and sold over one million records.

In 1961, Smith was recruited by Count Basie to be his vocalist, a position he held until 1965. He also continued to record with different labels, but a hit remained elusive. By 1968, Smith's then label, Columbia Records, was ready to release him from his recording contract, when he entered the charts for the first time with "The Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp", which reached number 2 in the UK and also broke the Top 40 in the United States.

Roberta Lee Streeter (born July 27, 1944), professionally known as Bobbie Gentry, is an American singer-songwriter notable as one of the first female country artists to compose and produce her own material. Her songs typically drew on her Mississippi roots to compose vignettes of the Southern United States.

Gentry rose to international fame with her intriguing Southern Gothic narrative "Ode to Billie Joe" in 1967. The track spent four weeks as the number 1 pop song on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and earned her Grammy awards for Best New Artist and Best Female Pop Vocal Performance in 1968. Gentry charted eleven singles on the Billboard Hot 100 and four singles on the United Kingdom Top 40. Her album Fancy brought her a Grammy nomination for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

Kenny Rogers and The First Edition was a rock and roll-based band formed in 1967, who also performed R&B, folk music, and country music.

As the 1960s counterculture was heating up, The First Edition signed with Reprise Records in the summer of 1967 and had its first big hit in early 1968 with the pop-psychedelic single "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" (US number 5). After only one more chart hit, "But You Know I Love You" (US number 19), the group, newly billed as "Kenny Rogers and the First Edition", once again hit the top ten, this time in the summer of 1969 with the topical "Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town" (US number 6, UK number 2).

A man Kenny at first took to be a rude fan first pitched "Reuben James" to him at a golf match. The man, who turned out to be a song pitcher for American songwriter Alex Harvey followed him around the greens singing the song until he listened. Kenny loved the song's look at a black man raising a white boy and agreed to record it. "Reuben James" turned out to be another daring record; though not as big a hit as "Ruby (Don't Take Your Love to Town)", it made a big impact on the First Edition's now sizable fan base.

Cher (born Cherilyn Sarkisian, May 20, 1946) is an American singer and actress. Sometimes referred to as the Goddess of Pop, she has been described as embodying female autonomy in a male-dominated industry. She is known for her distinctive contralto singing voice and for having worked in numerous areas of entertainment, as well as adopting a variety of styles and appearances during her five-decade-long career.

Cher gained popularity in 1965 as one-half of the folk rock husband-wife duo Sonny & Cher after their song "I Got You Babe" reached number one on the American and British charts. By the end of 1967, they had sold 40 million records worldwide and had become, according to Time magazine, rock's "it" couple. She became a television personality in the 1970s with her shows The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour, watched by over 30 million viewers weekly during its three-year run, and Cher. She emerged as a fashion trendsetter by wearing elaborate outfits on her television shows. While working on television, she established herself as a solo artist with the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart-topping singles "Gypsys, Tramps & Thieves", "Half-Breed", and "Dark Lady".

This ends Musical Decades for this week. Thanks for listening and I hope to see you here next time.

(The information used in this post is from Wikipedia.)

Dominique "Nik" Petersen is an aficionado of "oldies" music and the author of Dr. Hook and Me: A Fan's Journal/ Scrapbook. Read about it and her other books at the website: 

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