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Hardcore C&W was the heart of the show, as well as acting as a springboard to explore other musical tangents. The show also supported local and touring musicians by regularly hosting live, on-air sessions and interviews. Some notable guests included Neko Case & Carolyn Mark aka The Corn Sisters, O Susanna, Cousin Harley (Paul Pigat), Linda McRae, and Dan Boekner (Wolf Parade). My favourite and most frequent musical guest was Victoria's own Clay George.
An annual feature of Hillbilly Heaven every February, was Johnny Cash Month. All Johnny, all month, leading up to a big live show featuring a diverse cross-section of local musicians covering Cash.
I had a thought when I started this blog a month ago, that maybe I'd make February Johnny Cash month. I'm not so sure now.....don't want to plan that far ahead, enjoying seeing what percolates up. This week though, it's Johnny......Sunday Morning Coming Down
Sunday Morning Coming Down
This song, strongly associated with Johnny Cash, was penned by Kris Kristofferson. The original version of it was recorded by Ray Stevens in 1969. At the 2009 BMI Country Awards, at which Kristofferson was honoured as an icon, he recalled how when he was struggling, still a very unknown songwriter, Stevens took a chance on his tune: "Nobody had ever put that much money and effort into recording one of my songs. I remember the first time I heard it - he's a wonderful singer - I had to leave the publishing house and I just sat on the steps and wept because it was such a beautiful thing."
Stevens added that he was drawn to the song because he felt Kristofferson had a "spark."
"He was very talented, very smart and right on time with his style," Stevens recalled. "A lot of people since then have copied those songs that he put out so at this point in time it doesn't seem all that different. It still is of course. There are very few writers who get that spark at the right time."
Here is Ray Stevens version of Sunday Morning Coming Down. It skillfully walks the line between beauty and cheese. I especially like the choir in the background singing "Bringing In The Sheaves" at the beginning of the second verse.
Kristofferson had almost got fired from his job as a janitor at Columbia Studios when he interrupted a Cash recording session to give him some demo tapes. Cash later said he accepted them, but never remembers listening to them. The story of Kristofferson landing a helicopter on Johnny Cash's Hickory Lake property to give him the demo tape of Sunday Morning Coming Down is the stuff of legend, and as is the way with legends, there are many variations of the story.
June Carter says she heard a horrendously loud sound and ran to wake Johnny up telling him that the tourists were now "....coming by air." Kristofferson emerged from the cockpit clutching a tape that included Sunday Morning Coming Down. Cash met him as he walked across the yard, took the tape, angrily pitched it into the lake, and ordered Kristofferson to get the hell of his property.
Says Kristofferson of the incident: "I knew John before then. I'd been his janitor at the recording studio, and I'd pitched him every song I ever wrote, so he knew who I was. But it was still kind of an invasion of privacy that I wouldn't recommend. To be honest, I don't think he was there. He had a whole story about me getting out of the helicopter with a tape in one hand and a beer in in the other. John had a pretty creative memory but I would never have disputed his version of what happened because he was so responsible for any success I had as a songwriter and performer. He put me on the stage the first time I ever was, during a performance at the Newport Folk Festival."
Cash did eventually hear the song and decided he wanted to perform it on his network television show - only the network censors objected to the line "On a Sunday morning sidewalk , I'm wishing, Lord, that I was stoned." Kristofferson attended the rehearsal where the producers and Cash debated the line, and the producers offered the singer alternate lines. Cash said he'd have to think about it - and the producers told him they couldn't air the song if he didn't change it. Kristofferson sat in the Ryman balcony during the taping, and when Cash reached the line, he looked straight at Kristofferson and sang the line as it had been written. It was featured in the TV show and to everyone's surprise, the live version from the TV show became Kristofferson's first #1 hit.
Here's a sweet version of 70's era Johnny and a young Kristofferson performing Sunday Morning Coming Down.
Sunday Morning Coming Down
(There are a few variations on the lyrics....this is the way I sing it)
Well I woke up Sunday morning with no way to hold my head that didn't hurt
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad, so I had one more for dessert
And I fumbled through my closet, through my clothes and found my cleanest dirty shirt
Washed my face and combed my hair, stumbled down the stairs to meet the day
I'd smoked my mind the night before with cigarettes and songs I'd been pickin'
But I lit my first and watched a young kid cussin' at a can that he was kickin'
And from a window above came the Sunday smell of someone frying chicken
And it took me back to something I lost somewhere, somehow along the way
Chorus
On a Sunday morning sidewalk, Lord, I'm wishing I was stoned
Cause there's something about a Sunday that makes a body feel alone
And there's nothin' short of dying that's half as lonesome as the sound
As a sleeping city sidewalk, and Sunday morning comin' down
In a park I watched a daddy with a laughing little girl he was swinging
And I stood by the Sunday school and listened to the song they were singing
And I walked across the street and somewhere far away a lonesome bell was ringing
and it echoed through the canyons, like the disappearing dreams yesterday.
Chorus
To read a highly entertaining, well-written, and anecdote-laden article about Kris Kristofferson's career, check this link out
and here's a brief bio of his early career.....
There is no archetype for a country and western songwriter, but if there were, I feel certain the biographical arc of Kris Krisotfferson's early life would not be a template. The son of a two star Air Force general, Kristofferson attended Pomona College where he was a star athlete - boxing, rugby, track and field - and studied literature, specializing in the writing of William Blake. While at Pomona, he drew attention with a series of short stories published in the Atlantic Monthly and went on to win a Rhodes scholarship to attend Oxford University where he received a masters degree in English literature. While in England, promoted as "a Yank at Oxford," he recorded an unsuccessful album with Top Rank Records and performed under the name Kris Carson. Returning to the U.S.A. Kristofferson bowed to family pressure and entered the army, achieving the rank of captain, training as a parachute jumper and helicopter pilot, and becoming a veteran of the elite Airborne Rangers. When his tour of duty in West Germany ended in 1965, he was offered a position as professor of English Literature at West Point. The week he was to assume his new job, he informed the military and his family that he had decided to move to Nashville to become a country and western songwriter, a decision that would tear an irreparable rift between him and his family. His mother wrote him to say no one over the age of 14 listened to the kind of music he wrote, "and, if they did, they weren't the kind of people we would want to know." The story goes that these words of William Blake - "Use what talents you possess; the woods would be very silent if no birds sang there except those that sang the best." - were an inspiration and a comfort to Kristofferson at the time.
After moving to Nashville with his young family (he had married his high school sweetheart and had two kids) Kristofferson struggled for several years, held an assortment of jobs, was divorced, and had established a reputation as a guy who liked to drink and party hard. By the spring of 1969, three chart placings (Vietnam Blues - Dave Dudley, Jody and the Kid - Roy Drusky, From the Bottle to the Bottom - Billy Walker and the Tennessee Walkers) and a failed single (Golden Idol backed with Killing Time) was all he had to show for four years in Nashville.
He got a break when Roger Miller decided to record a song Kristofferson had co-written with Fred Foster, Me and Bobby McGhee (viewed as being a hobo ballad in the same vein as King of the Road, but with more of a "hippie slant") and also recorded two other Kristofferson compositions, Best of All Possible Worlds and Darby's Castle. Soon after, Ray Steven's recorded Sunday Morning Coming Down and Kristofferson's star began to rise.
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