August 16, 2024 —– Chart #259
Hello Music Friends,
Hey folks, welcome to another edition of Chart of the Week. This week we are going with a beautiful country song released in 1977. “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” is a song written by Richard Leigh, and recorded by American country music singer Crystal Gayle. It was released in June 1977 as the first single from Gayle’s album We Must Believe in Magic. For those who do not know this, Crystal Gayle is the younger sister of Loretta Lynn. If I need to tell you who Loretta Lynn is, just skip to the video.
Friends, with all due respect to Linda Ronstadt, Crystal Gayle is one of the most beautiful singers you will ever see and hear. A small-town Kentucky girl with natural beauty and her trademark long straight hair that at times in her career almost reached the ground.
“Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” composer Richard Leigh had been responsible for all three of Crystal Gayle’s previous Top Ten C&W hits, the third of which “I’ll Get Over You” had reached number 1. According to Gayle’s regular producer Allen Reynolds, he was advised by Leigh’s landlady, songwriter Sandy Mason Theoret, that Leigh was “a little down in the dumps lately because nothing much [was] happening” after the success of “I’ll Get Over You”. At Theoret’s suggestion, Reynolds visited Leigh to cheer him up. Reynolds explained, “we were sittin’ on the floor…singing songs to one another. [Leigh] mentioned a song that his publisher was gonna get to Shirley Bassey…[and] sang it for me: ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’. I said, ‘Shirley Bassey my ass, I want that song!'” Reynolds recalls that when he played “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” for Gayle “she was just as excited [by the song] as I was.”
The track was recorded at Jack’s Tracks recording studio in Nashville on October 27, 1976. As Reynolds’ regular session keyboardist Charles Cochran had suffered a stroke with some resultant numbness in his hands, Reynolds hired Hargus “Pig” Robbins to play keyboards, and Robbins instantly devised the song’s signature acoustic piano riff; Cochran was also featured on the session playing the horn parts on a Wurlitzer. Reynolds noted “it was just one of those charmed sessions…[After] we presented the song to the musicians…it was about the third time running that song that we ran tape…[Gayle] sang wonderfully. It came so fast that she wasn’t sure that she had done her best job. I had to let her try to sing it again on two or three different occasions until she was comfortable with the original, and that’s what we went with. Everything on that recording was the original take as it went down, except the string section I added later.”
In a 2004 Country Music Television interview, Gayle stated that Leigh wrote the song because his dog had one brown eye and one blue eye. However, in a 2016 interview, Richard Leigh set the record straight and said that this was not the case. His dog, Amanda, a terrier, had two brown eyes.
In 2024, Rolling Stone ranked the song at #109 on its 200 Greatest Country Songs of All Time ranking.
Here she is performing her song at the Grand Ole Opry in March 2022 at age 71. She’s still got it!
I hope you enjoy this number and try playing it on your guitar or keyboard. See ya next Friday!
Keep Rockin’,
Stan Bradshaw