Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

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Patsy Cline, Dear God

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

Introduction

“Dear God” by Patsy Cline is a poignant exploration of faith and human frailty. Wrapped in the simple elegance of country music, this song reflects a period of commercial uncertainty for Cline, contrasting starkly with her earlier successes.

About The Composition

  • Title: Dear God
  • Composer: V.F. Stewart
  • Premiere Date: December 13, 1958
  • Album/Opus/Collection: Released as a single
  • Genre: Country, with spiritual overtones

Background

Following her hit “Walkin’ After Midnight,” Patsy Cline faced a challenging phase with several unsuccessful singles, including “Dear God.” This song was part of an effort by Decca Records, encouraged by producer Owen Bradley, to diversify her musical offerings and perhaps capitalize on the spiritual genre during the holiday season. Despite these efforts, the song did not achieve commercial success.

Musical Style

“Dear God” is characteristic of the country genre with spiritual elements, featuring the plaintive, emotional vocal style that Cline is known for. The song’s arrangement is straightforward, focusing on the expressiveness of the voice against a traditional country backdrop.

Lyrics/Libretto

The lyrics of “Dear God” convey a narrative of personal reflection and repentance, typical of spiritual music, where the protagonist speaks directly to God, expressing feelings of unworthiness and seeking guidance.

Performance History

Despite its initial lack of success, “Dear God” has been revisited in various compilations of Cline’s work, reflecting its enduring appeal among her fans and its contribution to understanding her broader artistic journey.

Cultural Impact

Though not a hit, “Dear God” adds depth to Cline’s discography, showcasing her versatility and the emotional range she could convey, further cementing her legacy in country music.

Legacy

While “Dear God” may not have achieved commercial success, it remains a testament to Cline’s willingness to experiment with different styles and themes, adding a layer of complexity to her musical legacy.

Conclusion

“Dear God” is a reflective piece that invites listeners into a deeper, more introspective side of Patsy Cline’s music. For those interested in the intersections of country music and spiritual themes, this song is a must-explore

Video

Lyrics

I go to church on a Sunday
The vows that I make, I break them on Monday
The rest of the week, I do as I please
Then come Sunday morning, I pray on my knees
Dear God, I know I’m not worthy
But I need you so, please won’t you hurry
And help me turn back from the path I have trod
You’ll never be sorry, dear God
Each day we read in the paper
Of the carrying’s on of some of our neighbors
We’re sinnin’ and lyin’ and forgetting the faith
Then we have the nerve to ask, “Is it too late?”
Dear God, I know I’m not worthy
But I need you so, please won’t you hurry
And help me turn back from the path I have trod
You’ll never be sorry, dear God

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RODNEY CROWELL SPENT YEARS WRITING HITS FOR EMMYLOU HARRIS, WAYLON JENNINGS AND OTHERS. THEN IN 1988, *DIAMONDS & DIRT* GAVE HIM FIVE CONSECUTIVE NO. 1 SINGLES — THE ONLY FIVE CHART-TOPPERS OF HIS OWN CAREER. By the time *Diamonds & Dirt* appeared, Rodney Crowell had already spent more than a decade proving he could write songs other people could carry. He had played in Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band, written for Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash, produced Rosanne Cash and built a reputation around Nashville as a songwriter’s songwriter. His own solo career had been far less certain. Then Crowell made the most deliberately country record of his career. Released in 1988 and produced with Tony Brown, *Diamonds & Dirt* leaned hard into honky-tonk, fiddle, steel and tight Nashville rhythm playing. It also brought together musicians including Paul Franklin, Mark O’Connor, Eddie Bayers and Vince Gill. The first single, “It’s Such a Small World,” paired Crowell with Rosanne Cash. It went to No. 1. Then “I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried” did the same. So did “She’s Crazy for Leavin’.” Then “After All This Time.” Finally, Crowell covered Buck Owens’ “Above and Beyond,” taking that song to No. 1 as well. Over roughly seventeen months in 1988 and 1989, all five singles from the album topped Billboard’s country chart. At the time, it was an unprecedented run from one country album. “After All This Time” also won Crowell the Grammy for Best Country Song in 1990. The strange part was what happened afterward. Crowell never returned to No. 1 as a solo artist. Instead of spending the rest of his career trying to reproduce *Diamonds & Dirt*, he gradually moved away from the machinery that had finally made him a mainstream star. His later work became more personal, literary and increasingly associated with Americana rather than country radio. For seventeen months, Rodney Crowell had exactly what Nashville is supposed to promise. Then he spent the next three decades proving he did not need it.

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DOC WATSON WAS BLIND FROM CHILDHOOD, HELPED REDEFINE LEAD GUITAR IN BLUEGRASS—THEN LOST HIS SON AND MUSICAL PARTNER IN A FARM ACCIDENT THAT GAVE RISE TO MERLEFEST. Arthel “Doc” Watson was born in the mountains of western North Carolina in 1923. Before festival stages, Grammy awards, and generations of guitar players studying his right hand, he was a blind boy in Deep Gap, learning music from family, radio, church songs, fiddle tunes, old ballads, and the sounds moving through the hills around him. Country music was never far from that world. It was in the Carter Family songs, the gospel harmonies, the dance tunes, and the old melodies people played because there was work to forget, sorrow to carry, and Saturday night to survive. In 1953, Doc joined Jack Williams’ country and western swing band in Johnson City, Tennessee, playing electric lead guitar. The band needed fiddle tunes for dances, but did not always have a fiddle player. So Doc began picking those fast melodies on guitar. What usually belonged to the fiddle started coming out of six strings with speed, clarity, and drive. Doc Watson did not make the guitar louder by making it flashy. He made it authoritative. In his hands, the acoustic guitar was no longer just rhythm behind the singer. It could carry the tune, answer the voice, cut through a band, and still sound like somebody’s front porch. The folk revival found him in the 1960s, but it did not invent him. By then, the music was already deep in his hands: mountain songs, blues, gospel, country, bluegrass, and swing under one roof. Then came the son beside him. Merle Watson became Doc’s musical partner, traveling and playing with him for years. Their sound was not built on show-business polish. It was father and son, guitar answering guitar, old songs moving through family blood. Then Merle died in 1985 in a farming accident. The loss hit Doc so hard that he stepped back from performing for a time. Out of that grief came MerleFest, founded in 1988 at Wilkes Community College in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. What began as a memorial became one of America’s great gathering places for folk, bluegrass, country, Americana, and roots musicians. Doc Watson never had to chase Nashville. The country was already there in the old songs, the church harmonies, the fiddle tunes, and the mountain roads running through his hands. He could not see the road in the ordinary way. So he left one in sound — clear, fast, humble, and still running through every picker who tries to make a guitar speak like it was born in the hills.

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BILL ANDERSON WROTE “CITY LIGHTS” WHILE LOOKING DOWN ON A GEORGIA TOWN WITH ONLY A FEW TRAFFIC LIGHTS. RAY PRICE TURNED THAT SMALL-TOWN VIEW INTO A 13-WEEK NO. 1. Bill Anderson was nineteen, working as a disc jockey in Commerce, Georgia, and still far from becoming one of Nashville’s defining songwriters. One night in 1957, he went up to the roof of the three-story Andrew Jackson Hotel with his guitar. Looking across the town below, Anderson began writing about a man surrounded by bright city lights while trying to forget the woman he had lost. Commerce was hardly the glowing metropolis the lyric suggested. Anderson later remembered his father joking that the town had only a couple of traffic lights and a drugstore sign bright enough to qualify as nightlife. But imagination supplied what the skyline could not. Anderson finished “City Lights” and recorded his own version for TNT Records. It attracted some attention, but the real break came when Ray Price heard the song. Price recorded it in 1958. His version spent thirteen weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart and became one of the biggest records of his career. More importantly for Anderson, Nashville suddenly knew the name of the young man who had written it. The success opened doors quickly. Anderson moved to Nashville, signed with Decca as an artist, and joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1961. His own soft, conversational singing style earned him the nickname “Whispering Bill,” while his songwriting became even more valuable. He wrote Connie Smith’s “Once a Day,” which spent eight weeks at No. 1. He also supplied major songs for artists including Jim Reeves, Lefty Frizzell and Jean Shepard, while building his own run of hits such as “Still,” “Mama Sang a Song” and “For Loving You” with Jan Howard. Over time, “City Lights” became less important for what Commerce actually looked like than for what Anderson had managed to see from that rooftop. A nineteen-year-old DJ looked down at a very small town and wrote a song large enough for Ray Price, Nashville, and generations of singers after him.

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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.