Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

Jamey Johnson – In Color (Live at Farm Aid 2021)

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

Introduction

Imagine sitting across from your grandfather as he unveils dusty, black-and-white photographs that capture the pivotal moments of his life. This is the evocative scene set by Jamey Johnson’s “In Color,” a song that not only shares personal memories but also paints a vivid picture of history through music.

About The Composition

  • Title: In Color
  • Composer: Jamey Johnson, Lee Thomas Miller, James Otto
  • Premiere Date: March 31, 2008
  • Album/Opus/Collection: That Lonesome Song
  • Genre: Country

Background

“In Color” offers a poignant narrative where an elderly man reflects on his life’s key events through photographs. Initially meant for Trace Adkins, Johnson’s own rendition became a chart-topper. It provides a musical bridge to past generations, particularly highlighting moments like World War II and the Great Depression, underscoring the depth of personal and historical experiences.

Musical Style

This country ballad is mainly acoustic, emphasizing the emotional depth of the lyrics through minimalistic production. The song’s arrangement allows the storytelling to take center stage, enhancing its nostalgic and introspective qualities.

Lyrics/Libretto

The lyrics serve as a gateway into the man’s life, with each photograph sparking a story of love, war, and survival. These narratives emphasize that the full color of life’s experiences can never be fully captured in black and white.

Performance History

Since its release, “In Color” has been celebrated widely, earning accolades like the Song of the Year at both the ACM and CMA Awards in 2009. It remains a significant piece in Johnson’s career and in the country music genre.

Cultural Impact

The song has left a lasting impression on both audiences and the music industry, evidenced by its use in various media and its powerful influence in narrative songwriting within country music.

Legacy

“In Color” continues to resonate with listeners, offering a timeless reflection on the human experience and the power of storytelling through music. It stands as a testament to Johnson’s artistry and the song’s universal appeal.

Conclusion

“In Color” is more than just a song; it’s a journey through a man’s life, inviting listeners to find the color in their own memories. For those looking to experience this piece’s emotional depth, listening to Johnson’s heartfelt delivery is highly recommended.

Video

Lyrics

I said, “Grandpa, what’s this picture here?
It’s all black and white, and it ain’t real clear
Is that you there?”, he said, “Yeah, I was 11”
“And times were tough back in ’35
That’s me and uncle Joe just tryna survive a cotton farm
In a great depression”
If it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just tryna save each other
You should’ve seen it in color
Oh, and this one here’s taken overseas
In the middle of hell in 1943 in the winter time
You can almost see my breath
That was my tail gunner ol’ Johnny Magee
He was a high school teacher from New Orleans
And he had my back right through the day we left
If it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just tryna save each other
You should’ve seen it in color
A picture’s worth a thousand words
But you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should’ve seen it in color
This one is my favorite one
This is me and Grandma in the summer sun
All dressed up the day we said our vows
You can’t tell it here but it was hot that June
And that rose was red and her eyes were blue
And just look at that smile, I was so proud
That’s the story of my life
Right there in black and white
And if it looks like we were scared to death
Like a couple of kids just tryna save each other
You should’ve seen it in color
Yeah, a picture’s worth a thousand words
But you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should’ve seen it in color
(Should’ve seen it in color)
Yeah, a picture’s worth a thousand words
But you can’t see what those shades of gray keep covered
You should’ve seen it in color

Related Post

Country Music

MEL STREET SPENT THE 1970S SINGING ABOUT CHEATING, LONELINESS, AND MEN WHO COULDN’T HOLD THEIR LIVES TOGETHER. THEN, JUST AS MERCURY GAVE HIM HIS BIGGEST LABEL OPPORTUNITY, HE DIED ON HIS BIRTHDAY. Mel Street had taken a long route to Nashville. Raised in southwestern Virginia, he worked as a radio-tower electrician, sang in clubs around Niagara Falls, then returned to West Virginia and opened an auto-body shop. From 1968 to 1972, he also hosted a local television show in Bluefield. His breakthrough came from a song he had written himself. “Borrowed Angel” was first recorded for a small regional label and later picked up for wider release. In 1972, it reached the country Top 10, giving Street his first national hit. “Lovin’ on Back Streets” followed and became his biggest chart record, reaching No. 5. The songs established his territory. Street specialized in men already standing on the wrong side of a decision: affairs, guilt, secret meetings, marriages breaking down, and the loneliness left afterward. “I Met a Friend of Yours Today,” “Forbidden Angel,” and “If I Had a Cheating Heart” kept that voice on country radio through the middle of the decade. But touring and family pressure were taking a toll. Accounts of Street’s final years describe serious depression and alcohol problems even as his career continued moving forward. In 1978, he signed a new contract with Mercury Records, a major opportunity that suggested another step up was still possible. On October 21, 1978—his birthday—Mel Street died by suicide at his home in Tennessee. Contemporary and later sources disagree over his exact birth year, but not the date: he died on the same calendar day on which he had been born. His career did not stop immediately on the charts. “Just Hangin’ On” and other recordings appeared posthumously, while “Borrowed Angel” continued growing into a honky-tonk standard. Street never reached the level of fame that George Jones, Merle Haggard, or Conway Twitty did. But his best records shared something with theirs: they did not ask whether the man in the song deserved sympathy. They simply put him in the room, closed the door, and let the consequences stay with him.

Country Music

MARTY ROBBINS WAS RECORDING “DON’T WORRY” WHEN A CHANNEL IN THE NASHVILLE CONSOLE MALFUNCTIONED. GRADY MARTIN’S CLEAN SIX-STRING BASS CAME BACK AS A HARSH BUZZ—AND THEY KEPT IT. By 1960, Grady Martin was already one of Nashville’s most trusted session musicians. He had played the elegant Spanish-style guitar on Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” worked with Johnny Horton, Patsy Cline, Conway Twitty and countless others, and belonged to the group of studio players later known as Nashville’s A-Team. Then one malfunction changed the sound of popular music. During a July 1960 session for Robbins’s “Don’t Worry” at the Quonset Hut, Martin plugged his Danelectro six-string bass directly into the recording console. One of the console’s transformers failed while he played, turning the normally clean instrument into a thick, distorted growl. When engineer Glenn Snoddy and producer Don Law heard the playback, they did not erase it. They kept the damaged sound in the record. Released in 1961, “Don’t Worry” went to No. 1 country and No. 3 pop. Suddenly musicians were asking Nashville studios how they could get that strange distortion for themselves. Martin went back through the same faulty circuit for instrumentals including “The Fuzz.” But eventually the broken channel died completely. Snoddy then set out to reproduce the accident deliberately. Working with engineer Revis Hobbs, he built a transistor circuit that imitated the distorted signal and sold the design to Gibson. In 1962, Gibson introduced it as the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone. At first, the pedal barely sold. Three years later, Keith Richards used a Maestro Fuzz-Tone for the riff on the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Sales exploded, and fuzz became one of electric guitar’s defining effects. Grady Martin never needed the accident to establish his career; he was already one of Nashville’s elite musicians. But hidden inside a Marty Robbins country ballad was a sound that rock guitarists would spend the next several decades pushing louder, dirtier and further from the clean note Martin had originally intended to play.

Country Music

WITH LESS THAN AN HOUR LEFT IN TAMMY WYNETTE’S 1968 RECORDING SESSION, BILLY SHERRILL TOOK HER UPSTAIRS WITH A FEW UNFINISHED LINES. ABOUT 15 MINUTES LATER, THEY CAME BACK DOWN WITH “STAND BY YOUR MAN.” By 1968, Billy Sherrill had already found the singer he believed could carry his most ambitious productions. Tammy Wynette had arrived at Epic two years earlier after working as a beautician and singing on local television. Sherrill signed her, helped rename Virginia Wynette Pugh as Tammy Wynette, and guided hits including “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” “I Don’t Wanna Play House,” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” But her signature song did not arrive through weeks of careful writing. On August 28, 1968, Wynette was in a CBS recording session when Sherrill suggested they use a break to finish an idea he had started. He carried a few lines upstairs to his office. Wynette later recalled that they finished the song in no more than twenty minutes, then returned to the studio and recorded it. The song was “Stand by Your Man.” Sherrill built the record around Wynette’s emotional range: restrained verses giving way to a chorus that forced her voice upward into one of country music’s most recognizable vocal climaxes. His production used the lush strings and layered sound that had already begun separating his records from harder traditional country. Epic released the single in September. Five weeks later, it was No. 1 country. It stayed there three weeks, crossed to No. 19 on the Hot 100, and eventually sold more than two million copies. Then the argument began. Released as the women’s liberation movement was gaining national force, the lyric was attacked by some listeners as an endorsement of female submission. Epic itself intensified the reaction by marketing the record as Wynette’s answer to women’s liberation. Wynette repeatedly defended the song as being about loyalty rather than blind obedience. The controversy never left it. Neither did the record disappear. “Stand by Your Man” became Wynette’s defining song and eventually entered the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Sherrill went on to shape dozens of major records for Wynette, George Jones, Charlie Rich, Johnny Paycheck and others, pushing country production toward a larger, more dramatic sound. The striking part is not only that the song took roughly fifteen minutes to finish. It is that Sherrill understood exactly what to do with those fifteen minutes once the musicians came back from break: build a record big enough that Nashville would still be arguing about it decades later.

You Missed

Country Music

MEL STREET SPENT THE 1970S SINGING ABOUT CHEATING, LONELINESS, AND MEN WHO COULDN’T HOLD THEIR LIVES TOGETHER. THEN, JUST AS MERCURY GAVE HIM HIS BIGGEST LABEL OPPORTUNITY, HE DIED ON HIS BIRTHDAY. Mel Street had taken a long route to Nashville. Raised in southwestern Virginia, he worked as a radio-tower electrician, sang in clubs around Niagara Falls, then returned to West Virginia and opened an auto-body shop. From 1968 to 1972, he also hosted a local television show in Bluefield. His breakthrough came from a song he had written himself. “Borrowed Angel” was first recorded for a small regional label and later picked up for wider release. In 1972, it reached the country Top 10, giving Street his first national hit. “Lovin’ on Back Streets” followed and became his biggest chart record, reaching No. 5. The songs established his territory. Street specialized in men already standing on the wrong side of a decision: affairs, guilt, secret meetings, marriages breaking down, and the loneliness left afterward. “I Met a Friend of Yours Today,” “Forbidden Angel,” and “If I Had a Cheating Heart” kept that voice on country radio through the middle of the decade. But touring and family pressure were taking a toll. Accounts of Street’s final years describe serious depression and alcohol problems even as his career continued moving forward. In 1978, he signed a new contract with Mercury Records, a major opportunity that suggested another step up was still possible. On October 21, 1978—his birthday—Mel Street died by suicide at his home in Tennessee. Contemporary and later sources disagree over his exact birth year, but not the date: he died on the same calendar day on which he had been born. His career did not stop immediately on the charts. “Just Hangin’ On” and other recordings appeared posthumously, while “Borrowed Angel” continued growing into a honky-tonk standard. Street never reached the level of fame that George Jones, Merle Haggard, or Conway Twitty did. But his best records shared something with theirs: they did not ask whether the man in the song deserved sympathy. They simply put him in the room, closed the door, and let the consequences stay with him.

Country Music

MARTY ROBBINS WAS RECORDING “DON’T WORRY” WHEN A CHANNEL IN THE NASHVILLE CONSOLE MALFUNCTIONED. GRADY MARTIN’S CLEAN SIX-STRING BASS CAME BACK AS A HARSH BUZZ—AND THEY KEPT IT. By 1960, Grady Martin was already one of Nashville’s most trusted session musicians. He had played the elegant Spanish-style guitar on Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” worked with Johnny Horton, Patsy Cline, Conway Twitty and countless others, and belonged to the group of studio players later known as Nashville’s A-Team. Then one malfunction changed the sound of popular music. During a July 1960 session for Robbins’s “Don’t Worry” at the Quonset Hut, Martin plugged his Danelectro six-string bass directly into the recording console. One of the console’s transformers failed while he played, turning the normally clean instrument into a thick, distorted growl. When engineer Glenn Snoddy and producer Don Law heard the playback, they did not erase it. They kept the damaged sound in the record. Released in 1961, “Don’t Worry” went to No. 1 country and No. 3 pop. Suddenly musicians were asking Nashville studios how they could get that strange distortion for themselves. Martin went back through the same faulty circuit for instrumentals including “The Fuzz.” But eventually the broken channel died completely. Snoddy then set out to reproduce the accident deliberately. Working with engineer Revis Hobbs, he built a transistor circuit that imitated the distorted signal and sold the design to Gibson. In 1962, Gibson introduced it as the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone. At first, the pedal barely sold. Three years later, Keith Richards used a Maestro Fuzz-Tone for the riff on the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Sales exploded, and fuzz became one of electric guitar’s defining effects. Grady Martin never needed the accident to establish his career; he was already one of Nashville’s elite musicians. But hidden inside a Marty Robbins country ballad was a sound that rock guitarists would spend the next several decades pushing louder, dirtier and further from the clean note Martin had originally intended to play.

Country Music

WITH LESS THAN AN HOUR LEFT IN TAMMY WYNETTE’S 1968 RECORDING SESSION, BILLY SHERRILL TOOK HER UPSTAIRS WITH A FEW UNFINISHED LINES. ABOUT 15 MINUTES LATER, THEY CAME BACK DOWN WITH “STAND BY YOUR MAN.” By 1968, Billy Sherrill had already found the singer he believed could carry his most ambitious productions. Tammy Wynette had arrived at Epic two years earlier after working as a beautician and singing on local television. Sherrill signed her, helped rename Virginia Wynette Pugh as Tammy Wynette, and guided hits including “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” “I Don’t Wanna Play House,” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” But her signature song did not arrive through weeks of careful writing. On August 28, 1968, Wynette was in a CBS recording session when Sherrill suggested they use a break to finish an idea he had started. He carried a few lines upstairs to his office. Wynette later recalled that they finished the song in no more than twenty minutes, then returned to the studio and recorded it. The song was “Stand by Your Man.” Sherrill built the record around Wynette’s emotional range: restrained verses giving way to a chorus that forced her voice upward into one of country music’s most recognizable vocal climaxes. His production used the lush strings and layered sound that had already begun separating his records from harder traditional country. Epic released the single in September. Five weeks later, it was No. 1 country. It stayed there three weeks, crossed to No. 19 on the Hot 100, and eventually sold more than two million copies. Then the argument began. Released as the women’s liberation movement was gaining national force, the lyric was attacked by some listeners as an endorsement of female submission. Epic itself intensified the reaction by marketing the record as Wynette’s answer to women’s liberation. Wynette repeatedly defended the song as being about loyalty rather than blind obedience. The controversy never left it. Neither did the record disappear. “Stand by Your Man” became Wynette’s defining song and eventually entered the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Sherrill went on to shape dozens of major records for Wynette, George Jones, Charlie Rich, Johnny Paycheck and others, pushing country production toward a larger, more dramatic sound. The striking part is not only that the song took roughly fifteen minutes to finish. It is that Sherrill understood exactly what to do with those fifteen minutes once the musicians came back from break: build a record big enough that Nashville would still be arguing about it decades later.

Country Music

“THIRD RATE ROMANCE” WAS ON A JESSE WINCHESTER ALBUM BEFORE THE AMAZING RHYTHM ACES EVEN HAD THEIR HIT VERSION. TWO OF WINCHESTER’S SIDEMEN THEN LEFT, BUILT A NEW BAND AROUND RUSSELL SMITH — AND TOOK THE SONG TO BOTH COUNTRY AND POP RADIO. In the early 1970s, bassist Jeff Davis and drummer Butch McDade were working with Jesse Winchester in Canada as members of his backing group, the Rhythm Aces. Winchester was still living outside the United States after leaving for Canada in 1967 rather than submit to the military draft. Unable to freely build a conventional American touring career, he developed his music north of the border with musicians around him who would eventually create a story of their own. In 1974, Russell Smith joined them in Montreal during the sessions for Winchester’s Learn to Love It. Smith brought songs. Two of them ended up on the album: “Third Rate Romance” and “The End Is Not in Sight.” Smith even sang “Third Rate Romance” on Winchester’s recording. Then the personnel began moving in another direction. Davis and McDade left Winchester’s orbit and joined Smith, keyboardist Billy Earheart, multi-instrumentalist Barry “Byrd” Burton and pianist James Hooker in Memphis. The new group mixed country with rock, blues, R&B and Southern soul. They became The Amazing Rhythm Aces. For their 1975 debut album, Stacked Deck, they went back to Smith’s “Third Rate Romance.” This time it carried their own name. The band did not expect much. In a 1976 interview, they recalled hoping the record might receive some regional attention. Instead, it escaped Memphis. “Third Rate Romance” reached No. 11 country and No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, an unusual crossover for a band that did not fit cleanly into either format. In Canada it went all the way to No. 1 on both the country and general singles charts. Their next single, “Amazing Grace (Used to Be Her Favorite Song),” reached the country Top 10. Then they returned to another Russell Smith song that had already appeared with Winchester: “The End Is Not in Sight (The Cowboy Tune).” Their recording earned the Amazing Rhythm Aces a Grammy for country vocal performance by a group. The band never became easy for the industry to classify. Their records could sound country, Memphis soul, blues or rock within the same album. Later releases earned critical respect without reproducing the commercial breakthrough, and the original run eventually ended in the early 1980s. But “Third Rate Romance” still had another trip ahead. In 1994, almost twenty years after the Aces’ version, Sammy Kershaw recorded it again and carried the Russell Smith song back onto country radio. A song that had passed through Jesse Winchester’s Canadian exile, a Memphis band and 1970s crossover radio had found its way into another generation of country music.