Favorite BIG #1 HITS Through the Years: 1976 Country

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Like popular music, country was going through a "phase" in the mid-70s, and it wasn't very pleasant. The "countrypolitan" pop sound had so overtaken country music that people like Olivia Newton-John and John Denver were beating out Loretta and Conway for country music awards (prompting Charlie Rich to set fire to the envelope announcing John Denver was the CMA "entertainer of the year" during a telecast [which is funny, because Rich was hardly "traditional" country]). Then along came Jones.....oh, wait, wrong song. Along came 1976. Here's the #1 song I picked from that year in country music. 1976 (Country): Good-Hearted Woman - Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson Then along came the outlaws! It wasn't a genre of music, it was an attitude: the attitude of "Hey, get that pop crap off my country radio stations!" A compilation album, Wanted! The Outlaws, featuring previously-released songs by Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Jennings' wife, Jessi Colter, and Tompall Glaser, became country music's first platinum album. Here Waylon and Willie re-recorded a song that Jennings had already had a hit with (in 1972) on his own. Adding fake crowd noise (an "outlaw country" staple of that era: Jerry Jeff Walker's ¡Viva Terlingua! and Bobby Bare's Lullabys, Legends, and Lies also featured "enhanced" crowd noise over studio recordings (not so much in Walker's case, though), this "live" song hit the top of the country charts and the top 30 in the pop charts. The next year, Waylon and Willie and the boys would top both charts with "Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)" (ironically, the town where the aforementioned ¡Viva Terlingua! was recorded). This song was written during a poker game, according to Picky Wedia: Waylon had seen an ad for an Ike & Tina Turner concert, billed as a "good-hearted woman and her two-timing man." He found Willie, who was playing poker, and joined the game. With Nelson's wife taking down the lyrics that they traded as freely as poker chips, a classic was born. It solidified both Waylon and Willie not just in country music, but in American music. Good Hearted Woman Written by Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson Recorded by Waylon Jennings & Willie Nelson Released as a single, 1976 #1 for three weeks A long time forgotten: