The Best Country Albums of 1973, Part 1

David Cantwell on the top 21 country albums from fifty years ago.

This is the first of a three-part series. Be sure to check out Part 2 and Part 3.

I began by thinking I’d write up a “Best Country Albums of 1973” list, the way I’d previously summarized 1993’s best country discs. But as I did my research for this half-century anniversary, I kept jotting down the titles of country albums I knew I hadn’t heard all the way through in forever—dozens of them. Plus, I was discovering country albums I’d never heard at all—dozens and dozens of them. As the list of albums to check out kept growing, and as I was enjoying myself anyway, I had a thought: “Why don’t I try to listen to all of the 1973 country albums, more or less? Make it a kind of listening guide to the year in country albums.” I knew this was ambitious, but it was only when my lists had grown again by the dozens and dozens that I really began to wrap my fool head around what I was up against.

I decided to go ahead and take my 1973 plunge for several reasons. Like a lot of country fans, I’ve long wearied of the limited and limiting ways the music gets talked about. For starters, the most widely known narratives around country music remain all but purely white-people ones. That’s just the conventional wisdom within the industry and with much of the audience. And I’ve noted, too, that this way of engaging with country is nearly as common among the few critics who follow the genre—and make that triple for those critics who don’t give country music the time of day beyond popping in every now and then to condemn or deride it. One thing a sympathetic country critic might do to help here is to spread the word about all the country artists of color working today. Just as key, though, I’m trying to be much more intentional in desegregating and otherwise expanding the stories I tell about the music’s history. Maybe the multiracial, pluralist, sonically expansive country music so many of us are pulling for today has been here all along, if only we stop, look and listen for it. 1973, it seemed to me, might prove especially helpful for such a project. The year was full of variety, with country generating and absorbing all manner of new sounds and subgenres. 1973 also found country music as diverse as ever—but in ways maybe harder to miss than has normally been the case before and since. 

Another reason I wanted to take this on: Country music tends to be heard as a primarily singles-focused genre while country albums are typically dismissed out of hand. As a country fan and critic who once co-wrote a book (twenty years ago now!), telling the country story in 500 great singles, I understand the importance of singles and songs to the genre. But I also know that country artists release good to very good to great albums routinely. Those efforts tend to get whiffed on, critically speaking, for all the usual rockist reasons, starting with the longstanding critical bias that country albums usually don’t need to be listened to in the first place, let alone lived with.

This is a prejudice I’ve had to unlearn myself over many years. I love this era of country music, have heard many more of its albums than most listeners, even most country fans, and still I had missed out on so much good music—on albums I’d never heard before and, nearly as often, that I had never even heard of. In that sense, it’s been rewarding and just plain fun to have my heart, mind and ears opened to so much fantastic, new-to-me country music. I’m glad I can share some of that music with you, and I hope you’ll keep letting me know what I’ve missed.  

One more thing: I know country tends to be characterized as a small genre, hidebound and fenced in, and that such perceptions are too often correct. But as I’ve listened to country music through my adult decades, the more I’ve come to hear how wide-ranging its influences and its influence have been—and how capacious this by-definition synthetic pop genre really is. I’m calling all of the listing that follows “country,” but it might also be the blues, rhythm & blues, soul, country rock, southern rock, southern gospel, country gospel, country soul, easy listening, country-pop, country funk, countrypolitan, the Nashville Sound, bluegrass, rock and roll, rock, blues rock, folk rock, western swing, jazz, and… you get the idea. “Why don’t I try to listen to all of the 1973 country albums,” I asked myself, “more or less.” Well, I tried, and I couldn’t do it. Didn’t even come close…

Listening to all of 1973’s country albums—understanding that category generously, which is the way I now find most helpful and most fun—could be a life-long project, and I’d still fail. But even if I’d chosen to take on the genre in the most rigid, circumscribed ways possible, I’d still be unable to listen to all of it. I do still want to try though. The more I listen, the more I’m convinced that the genre does much of its work—creates meaning, establishes a repertoire, defines and redefines itself—with the music and musicians I call Non-Canonical Country: The radio hits that don’t get anthologized, even ones from big stars; the songs that get covered incessantly (Keep a lookout for how many times “Pass Me By” shows up!); the former mainstream radio staples you still can’t stream today; the artistic choices that seem weird from this distance but in the moment made sense to the artists making them; the countless acts who aren’t often tagged “country” but who cut country songs and even entire country albums; who influenced country singers deeply; who crossed over from other formats for country radio airplay; and so on and so on.

Country music is a big country. How big? I’ll share the 66 country albums from 1973 that I’ve marked as “Honorable Mentions,” records worth spending time with, in Part 2 of this series. In Part 3, I’ll gather 63 more 1973 country albums that I’m saying are “Worth a Spin Anway…,” for one reason or other, plus more than 100 other albums (and counting) that I can only mark “For Further Study” because I couldn’t easily track them down or because I just ran out of time. It’s a lot of albums.

For Part 1, though… Here are my picks for the Best Country Albums of 1973, 21 of them, each of which I’d say belongs in conversations about the year’s best popular music. Let’s dive in!

*****

Hazel Dickens and Alice Gerrard Hazel & Alice – Pioneering women of bluegrass.  As author David Menconi puts it in his new history of Rounder Records, album cuts “My Better Years,” “Custom Made Woman Blues,” and “Don’t Put Her Down, You Helped put Her There” should be counted as “some of the angriest wronged-woman songs this side of Loretta Lynn.” That’s to the left side of Lynn, notably, since in 1973 the duo’s harrowing rendition of the traditional ballad “Two Soldiers,” driven to its tragic finale by Gerrard’s sobbing, shrieking autoharp, was an unmistakable protest against the war. And if there is a song that better captures how hard and how beautiful this world can be than the Appalachian a cappella of Dickens’ “Pretty Bird,” I am not sure I can stand to hear it.    

Stoney Edwards She’s My Rock – “It takes all kinds to make up the world now,” Edwards begins on “I Need a Believer.” Then, as a bassline taps its foot impatiently, “Some are born shackled, some are born free.” There are some I suppose who’d hear that and reckon it a bit too on the nose, but as this is country music, which favors the plainspoken, and since he’s singing to the country audience, which needs to hear it, Edwards’ opening makes the hair stand up on my neck. Among the black country acts signed after Charley Pride broke Nashville’s color line, Edwards landed one of his several minor hits with the track, but the entire record packs such a hard pop-country punch you can’t believe it didn’t knock out the whole pop world. Edwards, whose voice shares tone with Pride but is huskier, covers the country bases here, going fishing (he hates it), going out drinking, and going sentimental (He steps on his daughter’s “Two Dollar Toy” while sneaking out to cheat), and all of it has the hooks and backing choruses that should have put it in heavy rotation… if only. “She’s My Rock landed Stoney his only Top 20 hit.

Dobie Gray Drift Away – Gray would have a handful of low-level country hits in the eighties, but why wasn’t his “Drift Away” a big country hit in 1973, or a low-level one anyway?  Narvel Felts tweaked “rock and roll” to “country song” and scored his debut Top Ten with “Drift Away” that year, so it wasn’t the song, per se. And it certainly wasn’t the sound of Gray’s record, which fits perfectly with so much of the country-soul/country rock that was getting played on country radio then, much of it cut with the same studio pros—guitarist Reggie Young, drummer Kenny Malone, pianist David Briggs and pedal steel guitar player Weldon Myrick—who backed Gray, and so much of it, too, coming from acts crossing over to country radio from the pop charts. Success across formats can be complicated even when the aesthetic particulars line up as well as they do here, but surely there is some specific reason why Gray’s “Drift Away” didn’t cross over... It’ll come to me.  “Rockin’ Chair,” “Lay Back,” “City Stars,” “Eddie’s Song,” “We Had It All.”

Al Green Call Me –Green is hardly limited to his country affinities here, but at this point a hicked-up version of the country-soul he and so many others perfected had been country music’s basic go-to groove for years: Drummer Al Jackson Jr. eschews fills in his timekeeping like a soul Buddy Harman. Also seems worth mentioning that two-thirds of Rev. Al’s backing vocalists are Sandy and Dusty Rhodes, aka the Lonesome Rhodes, marketed by Nashville as a female Everlys and kin to Porter Wagoner bassist Speck. Green’s take on ol’ Hank’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” is surpassed, maybe, only by ol’ Hank himself, while his version of Willie’s “Funny How Time Slips Away” transforms that country-pop standard’s bitterness into something both angrier and more forgiving. I can imagine Waylon Jennings, say, or Sammi Smith or Chris Stapleton (or pick your favorite country-soul country artist) singing all of the Green originals here, too, “Call Me” and “Here I Am” most of all.  

Merle Haggard I Love Dixie Blues… So I Recorded “Live” in New Orleans – Merle’s third live album in four years—and my favorite. The penultimate track is his most energetic, most fun “Okie from Muskogee” yet, and along the way his “Everybody’s Had the Blues” (a #1 hit that inched to #62 pop) sounds like a long-lost midcentury pop standard. Ditto for the live version of his “The Emptiest Arms in the World.” Merle’s sincere appreciation of the New Orleans-style “blues” throughout finds him uncharacteristically garrulous. His framing of Emmett Miller as a country influence fact checks as true, but I’d say his failing to mention Miller was a blackface act is part of my problem with country music, and yours. His rollicking “Big Bad Bill” and “Lovesick Blues,” with hot-jazz horns, sound like Merle Haggard.  

Tom T. Hall The Rhymer and Other Five and Dimers – The Rhymer, aka the Storyteller, sure could write a song—and really saw his characters, himself included. “Ravishing Ruby” (#3) grants a young waitress a touching backstory. “Spokane Motel Blues” imagines his country celebrity friends’ side of the fence as way greener than his. “I Flew Over Our House Last Night” is a gut-punch separation song, “Another Town” one hell of a complicated road song, and “The Man Who Hated Freckles” an anti-racist parable so blatant even the racists in his audience couldn’t miss it. Songs aside, the underrated key to Tom T.’s power as a recording artist is his slightly nasal, amiable, nearly spoken singing voice. Makes me feel like he’s really seeing me, too.

Ivory Joe Hunter I’ve Always Been Country – The title’s telling the truth. Hunter was a black R&B act covering country hits (“Jealous Heart,” “It’s a Sin,” “I’m Sorry for You My Friend,” “Worried Mind,” “City Lights”) years before Ray Charles made that move into a modern sound. His own songs (“I Almost Lost My Mind,” “Empty Arms”) have been covered by dozens of other country singers, and his midcentury piano ballad style (“Since I Met You Baby”) is a major antecedent of the Nashville Sound. In 1973, his “San Antonio Rose” swings joyously and, thanks to drummer Kenny Malone, lightly and hard at once. He nails country standards associated with George Jones and Bobby Bare, but I’m partial to the opening “Today I Started Loving You Again,” a Haggard song that sounds like a descendent of Hunter’s own songbook.

Waylon Jennings Lonesome, On’ry and Mean –Jennings’ first album after gaining creative control of his work, so it’s interesting to see that he still chose to include a few pre-freedom tracks: His Johnny Cash cowrite “Going to Denver,” from back in 1970, crashes its way across the Great Plains driven (I’m pretty sure) by Nashville Cat drummer Jerry Carrigan; “You Can Have Her” (#7), from just before he inked his new deal, is swimming delightfully in backing vocals. Most of the time, though, he foregrounds those thrillingly static signature bass lines and old running mate Richie Albrights’ kick drum. Steve Young’s title song is what flashes for me when I think of Waylon the singer—as a country vocalist, he’s up there with George Jones or Patsy Cline or Ray Price, an all-timer—and on the Willie-penned “Pretend I Never Happened” (#6) he’s hypnotic, as if he’s casting a spell.  

Lavender Country Lavender Country – Patrick Haggerty’s recording is important because it’s the first gay country album, but what I want to stress is that it’s also fucking great, full of randy ditties, pissed revolutionary battle cries and clever, catchy singalongs. Haggerty, who died just last year on the heels of his belated second album, riffs “Back in the Saddle Again” into a blues impulse “Back in the Closet Again,” and he is just so invitingly big-hearted, horny, and humanist throughout that he even gets me joining in on the fight against straight men everywhere—and loving it. Give or take Woody’s Dust Bowl Ballads, the genre’s greatest protest album.

Jerry Lee Lewis The Session Recorded in London with Great Guest Artists –Those “great guests” include Albert Lee, Rory Gallagher, and Peter Frampton, but whether Jerry Lee is familiar with their resumes or not, he is clearly in show-off mode here, always a good sign. Is Jerry Lee playing rock and roll or is he playing country? Yes! A hurtling “Early Morning Rain,” a mother-humpin’ “No Headstone on My Grave” (“I want a monument!”), a “Trouble in Mind” for the ages. And that’s barely scratching the surface of this double album.  

Loretta Lynn Entertainer of the Year – I love the title’s not-at-all-humble brag, celebrating her recent big CMA triumph, the first woman to ever win the award. I also love that she spends a little of her newfound cultural capital on “Rated X,” a controversial single until it became another chart topper instead. My sense is that Lynn was rarely a great album artist, but this is one of her better efforts, and one of her sexiest, too, thanks to “Till the Pain Outwears the Shame,” “Legend in My Mind,” “I Need Someone to Hold Me (When I Cry),” and “Hanky Panky Woman.”

O. B. McClinton Obie from Senatobie – Today we know many mainstream country stations have directives limiting the number of women’s voices programmed in an hour. In 1973, were there similar rules, official or otherwise, to make certain Charley Pride, Stoney Edwards and Obie McClinton records were never played too near one another? With superstar Pride getting spins every hour, there wouldn’t be much time left for McClinton—yet he somehow still charted four singles off Obie from Senatobie. And it’s telling, as my man Charles Hughes notes in his “‘I’m the Other One’: O. B. McClinton and the Racial Politics of Country Music in the 1970s,” that “McClinton’s biggest success on the country charts came with two… countrified versions of contemporary soul hits.” Those were “Don’t Let the Green Grass Fool You” and “My Whole World Is Falling Down,” which both cracked the Top 40. At the same time, McClinton’s title track riffs on that one infamous Haggard song to show off his own downhome bona fides, and he turns Hag’s “Today I Started Loving You Again” to his own purposes by folding in a regretful original recitation. Just a fantastic country album. “Six Pack of Trouble,” “I Wish It Would It Would Rain.”

Gram Parsons GP – Country-rock pioneer Parsons wanted to get Merle Haggard to produce but had to settle for Hag’s engineer (Hugh Davies) and key men from his studio lineup (James Burton, Glenn Hardin, “Fightin’ Side” drummer Sam Goldstein). As I’ve noted elsewhere, “GP is a gem of a record, laconic and anguished, tight as a drum but pleasantly rag-ass when it needs to be and what it lacks in tragicomic vision, it embraces entirely by being very, very serious… I do sometimes wish it swung, grooved, or rocked as hard as… Merle’s records,” but Emmylou Harris’ harmony singing, her greatest skill set and still the genre standard, is unassailable. “Streets of Baltimore,” “She,” “The New Soft Shoe,” “How Much I’ve Lied.”

Charley Pride Sweet Country – Pride is probably the most underrated country singer of them all. His song choices often tend to be darker and more complicated, if that’s your thing, than he’s given credit for (“Along the Mississippi”) while his unironic love songs are fun sonically and not so trad’ at all: “Love Unending” is one of his earliest island-rhythmed numbers. And his readings of country standards always reveal things to me about songs I thought I knew (“Pass Me By”). “Don’t Fight the Feelings of Love” and his great version of Merle’s “A Shoulder to Cry On” were country #1’s.

Charlie Rich Behind Closed Doors – Long before I understood their grown-ass themes, and long before I’d ever heard of producer Billy Sherrill, I loved this album’s big radio singles. That both “Most Beautiful Girl” and “Behind Closed Doors” were in heavy rotation on the Top 40 station I liked and on my dad’s country station made an impression on me, too, as did my later realization that they are probably the least great tracks on the album. If you don’t know this one beyond the crossover hits, you’re in for a treat. Singing like a soul-country cross between Elvis Presley and Ivory Joe Hunter, Rich inhabits the devotion of “I Take It on Home” (a Top Ten country-only hit) and wife Margaret Ann’s “A Sunday Kind of Woman,” and he exudes bitterness on “You Never Really Wanted Me” and much more on his own thrilling “Peace on You.” Behind Closed Doors topped the country album chart for a total of 21 weeks, and honestly if I were picking just one Best Country Album of 1973, this would be it.

Johnny Rodriguez All I Ever Meant to Do Was Sing – Johnny Rodriguez brought a sexy youthful energy to the early seventies’ country scene, and his habit of delivering select lines or verses in Spanish was thrilling as well. His interpretations of genre standards, like those from his heroes Lefty Frizzell (“That’s the Way Love Goes,” #1) and Mere Haggard (“Love and Honor”), are peerless, and he wrote great originals (“Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico” (#1) and “I’ll Just Have to Learn to Stay Away from You”) that ought to be standards themselves. Put him in the Hall of Fame already! “Release Me,” “I Really Don’t Want to Know.”

Joe Simon Simon Country – Simon’s pleading tenor was always well-suited to country material. In 1969, he topped the R&B chart with Harlan Howard song/Waylon Jennings hit “The Chokin’ Kind,” for example, and Simon Country proved a perfect marriage of singer and songs. Nothing from the album charted, either country or R&B, but there’s nothing here that—sonically, thematically, emotionally—couldn’t have succeeded in either format. Just kind of a perfect record—and a perfect example of country music’s boundlessness. “Do You Know What It’s Like to Be Lonesome,” “Five Hundred Miles from Home,” “You Don’t Know Me,” “To Get to You,” “Before the Next Teardrop Falls,” “Kiss an Angel Good Morning.”

Sammi Smith Toast of ’45 – The title track from Smith’s fourth album on Mega—she plays an aging film star accepting drinks from a fan who quickly tires of her company—was only a middling chart hit but is one of the great singles of the decade. Similarly, “I Miss You Most When You’re Right Here” works the hushed three a.m. loneliness that was her specialty. Producer Jim Malloy said their sound together was inspired by old Julie London sessions he’d engineered and recent Bread hits he’d liked.  At the same time, Smith’s reading of “City of New Orleans” reminds that she was an important if unheralded early Outlaw who Waylon dubbed “Girl Hero.” Throughout, Smith’s rusty smoker’s alto hugs you close.

Tanya Tucker What’s Your Mama’s Name – I’m so glad new Country Hall of Famer Tucker is getting her flowers now, but I wonder if she isn’t still underrated, particularly as a country album artist. The song selection on her third effort is once again sturdy-to-brilliant, and producer Billy Sherrill’s country-soul production is state of the art. As always, though, the key to it all is Tucker herself, a distinctive and emotionally intense singer, and an especially sympathetic narrator of story songs, even back when she was still too young to drive. The tragic title-track tale, Tanya’s first #1, is like a country music version of Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands.” Her follow-up single and second #1, “Blood Red and Goin’ Down,” is traumatic. “The Chokin’ Kind,” “Teddy Bear Song,” “Horseshoe Bend,” “California Cottonfields,” “Pass Me By.”

Conway Twitty You’ve Never Been This Far Before / Baby’s Gone – The sexy play-by-play of “You’ve Never Been This Far Before” (“pum-pum-pum”) was a sensation— a country #1, pop #22 and easy listening Top 40 that was somehow both preposterously poppy and look-away intimate. #2 country hit “Baby’s Gone”—Conway describes the house where his lover has left him in such sensual detail you may suspect he’s about to rub one out—was nearly as good. Also: With apologies to Ted Daffan, Conway’s growling, barely moving “Born to Lose” is the best “Born to Lose. His best album.

Various Artists Bean Blossom – An amazing bluegrass document, Bean Blossom showcases Bill Monroe live on stage at his own festival, plus five-song sets from son James Monroe, Jim & Jesse, Lester Flatt, and Jimmy Martin—the entire lineup in its musical (if not commercial) prime. This double album ends with a series of all-star jams led by Mr. Mon-roe, but it’s Martin who, not for the first time, steals the show. His “Sunny Side of the Mountain” and “Free-Born Man” achieve the bluegrass version of riotous.

*****

Coming tomorrow: Part 2 - The Honorable Mentions… More than five dozen runners up!

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