Chart entered : 19 February 1972
Chart peak : 48
Jim Reeves died on July 31 1964 after deciding he knew better than the air traffic controllers who were trying to direct him away from a storm over Tennessee and lost control of his plane. It crashed into a wood killing him and his business partner. Since his death his widow Mary masterminded a posthumous release programme that lasted far longer than those for Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran by mixing previously released material with what was in the vaults to produce a string of "new" albums. And it worked. The 1966 single "Distant Drums" was a monster which topped the UK chart and hung around for half the year.
Self-evidently this post- mortem career could not be sustained indefinitely and in the UK at least his audience was turning away by the start of the new decade. I don't know when "You're Free To Go" was recorded but it sounds so similar to his first hit "He'll Have To Go" that it hardly matters. It's an utterly generic country ballad about calling time on a broken marriage with Jim doing his usual close-miked caress of the lyric. At least it's brief at two minutes flat.
The follow-up in September 1972 was "Missing You" written by Red Sovine who also had his biggest hit posthumously. "I'd Fight The World" came out in June 1974 and "You Belong To Me " in August 1975 before RCA called time on the programme in the UK. There are no surprises with any of them, just typical examples of Jim doing his thing.
In the USA the programme carried on with Jim having country hits right up until 1984 though there was some real barrel-scraping towards the end including a medley and two "duets" with the even longer deceased Patsy Cline stitched together from separate recordings , the two having never evinced any inclination to work with each other in life.
Jim remains a reliable seller of albums in the UK. No less than seven compilations have charted between 1975 and 2009, the first one "40 Golden Greats" actually topping the chart .
While Patsy Cline seems to have maintained credibility over the years since her death (being namechecked in Hornby's "High Fidelity", for instance), I'm not sure I've ever met anyone who owned a Jim Reeves record. He seems to crop up in various branches of Oxfam on a regular basis, though.
ReplyDeleteMy mum bought a Christmas EP by him from a second hand shop when we first got a record player in 76 but it went to a jumble sale decades ago,.
ReplyDeleteI remember Neil Innes saying when he was a student he and his mates used to put "Old Tige" ( B side to "Distant Drums" ) on the jukebox to wind up the locals. Have a listen and you'll see what he meant !