Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town or The Angel Went

Having written about Honey in the previous post I'm now going to look at Ruby, Don't Take Your Love to Town by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition (above). 

There are some connections between the two numbers. Both are stories-in-song, much possessed by death, and whatever the pop/rock elements in their respective arrangements they are essentially country ballads, tales of woe.

But with one important difference - important, at least, to my childhood self. My elder brothers, ultimate arbiters in such matters, adjudged Ruby to be "cool" - or at least not "uncool", which amounted to the same thing. They didn't say so directly but I could tell because they withheld their mockery when Kenny Rogers appeared on our little TV screen, thereby granting permission for the song to be enjoyed, its sensational details savoured without embarrassment, by lowly younger siblings. Memory is cloudy but I don't think they extended the same privilege to Bobby Goldsboro's lament.

It's pretty clear why Ruby would have made the more favourable impact when my brothers and I first encountered the two songs on Top of the Pops. No string-laden backing, no cute Yuletide puppy, no fusty parlour song-type angels, only one of the putative Honky Tonky variety. Instead we found ourselves dropped straight into a film noir-type situation to freeze the blood, with talk of war, death, guns, maybe even murder: tailor-made for boys weaned on the Victor and those little Commando comics, as certain members of my household were.
 
We probably didn't catch all the story's nuances on that first hearing but the arrangement seized our attention - certainly mine, anyway. It was infernally catchy, racing along at quite a lick, yet somehow the tempo didn't undermine the terrible sadness of the man's plight. It's not a phrase I would have used at the time but I was aware that the guitar playing suggested a kind of brusque sympathy for this embittered and frustrated ex-soldier, and I'm sure we all got that the drums stood for the thud-thud-thudding of his heart as he made one final plea to that no-good, faithless woman.

If I only came to a full appreciation of Honey with maturity the reverse has been the case with Ruby. Well, -ish. I had certainly become a little snooty about one aspect of it in recent years until I was set straight. 

To begin at the beginning, here's what I wrote in a 2010 post:

Lines in the song such as

    The shadow on the wall tells me the sun is going down

seem on the money: the invalid forced to rely on such signs as that and

    the slamming of the door

rather than being able to walk over to the window to check the time of day or go and physically stop her leaving, but I'm never quite sure about the song's opening couplet. A masterpiece of concision, as I sometimes think, or overfussy?

    You've painted up your lips and rolled and curled your tinted hair
    Oh Ruby, are you contemplating going out somewhere?

If it's meant to be a question addressed to her, doesn't it contain a certain amount of  detail more appropriate for third person narrative? The couplet calls to mind a line in a spoof radio play by actor Timothy West highlighting the pitfalls of exposition for inexperienced writers:

    Whisky, eh? That's a strange drink for an attractive auburn-haired girl of twenty nine.

In short, why did Ruby's husband need to point out to her that her hair was tinted?

And there that annoying smirk on my face might have stayed had it not been for a chance exchange online. After Kenny Rogers' death his songs, especially Ruby, attracted attention on social media, and the author Ray Connolly wrote on twitter that there was "a whole movie in that terrific 3 minute song that rhymed 'crazy Asian war' with 'patriotic chore'." 

I tweeted my agreement but repeated the above question: why would he mention something self-evident? Rather than my attempting to paraphrase him I hope Mr Connolly won't mind if I reproduce the conversation which followed:

RC:

Probably because since he's come back from Vietnam, paralysed from the waist down, he's noticed that her hair isn't the same colour as when he went way. She's making herself look prettier. But not for him. He can't help noticing and being bitter & letting her know. It's his POV.

P:

Maybe. Though that reading would make the second line ( "... are you contemplating going out somewhere?") sarcastic rather than pathetic. Then again the tone does veer between self-pity and anger during the song so that could work ... I'm confused now.

RC:

Surely it's a string of consciousness story of a young Vietnam veteran who is terribly injured and in despair to see his wife about to go out on the town? He puts some of his thoughts into some dialogue for dramatic effect. He feels betrayed by country & wife.

P:

Ah. If these are all unvoiced thoughts that would remove the problem. Interesting shift in final verse as well: with the door slam, and all hope removed, the real rage and desperation comes out.

RC:

I think so. Good to discuss.

This view does make a lot of sense: the war vet watching helplessly, desperate thoughts churning away inside him, yet knowing they are not worth uttering because of his helplessness, and that whether she stays or goes will be entirely decided by her. That would certainly remove any niggles about the exposition having been insufficiently camouflaged by the songwriter. Or - and perhaps this is what Mr Connolly meant - the lyrics could be understood as the concentrated essence of the husband's side of conversations the couple have had in the lead-up to this climactic moment of rebellion.

Then again, I suppose it doesn't matter too much. No one worries who Alan Bennett's Talking Heads are talking to: having a gateway into the character's mind is enough to compel our attention and make any thoughts about the artificiality of the situation recede into the background.

Since this piece was first posted Alwyn Turner has pointed out that

the six-bar lines are really striking - there's only really enough material for a standard four bars, but by inserting the additional two bars of vamping, it makes it much more unsettling.

This could be an argument for the words actually being spoken by her husband as the dolled-up Ruby prepares to go out: the extra bars have the effect of isolating each line of the lyric, as though the husband is flinging out a remark, waiting for a response, not getting it, then trying again. Or maybe it's just so hard for him to say these things - to acknowledge to himself that the cosy home patiently awaiting his return doesn't exist - that they have to come out piecemeal rather than as a solid slab.

As with Honey, several versions of Ruby were recorded before the song really hit big. Kenny Rogers and the First Edition made the charts in 1969, the year after Bobby Goldsboro's first success with Honey, although Waylon Jennings and Johnny Darrell had recorded Ruby a few years earlier and Darrell had a sizeable hit with it on the country charts. Bobby Goldsboro recorded it too, as did its composer, Mel Tillis.

First, let's hear Waylon Jennings, possibly the first released recording, followed by Johnny Darrell's country hit. Both have much to commend them. The idea of the guitars offering a kind of supportive commentary seems already present on both sides, although the backing on Jennings' record is generally jauntier, difficult to adjust to after Kenny Rogers. You could say the ache in Jennings' voice balances things out, but to my ears Darrell's flatter delivery is better suited to the song. He sounds wearier, more resigned, which seems in keeping with the idea of a man who knows or imagines he's already lost the game.

At the end of his record, unlike Jennings, Darrell begs Ruby to "turn around" - though rather than coming to a  halt, as Kenny Rogers would later do, he then repeats the title. This brings to mind the double underlining of "Don't take your guns to town" at the end of Johnny Cash's 1958 song of that title - a conscious echoing? The result in both cases is, I feel, bathetic: enough already, we get the point.






I'm not absolutely clear about recording, as opposed to release, dates for all the covers mentioned so can't be certain who influenced whom, though by the time the First Edition came to record it in 1969 they would have had a range of interpretations to draw on. That said, according to a 1998 article by Bill DeYoung,

Kenny had first heard the lonely, loping country tune on a Roger Miller album.

And when you compare this track to the other interpretations there does seems little doubt that this would have been the single most influential one. 





Mr DeYoung's piece on Rogers includes a quotation from a former member of the First Edition:

We always liked to joke that we were a cross between country and rock,” Mary Arnold says today. “We were a crock.”

The First Edition arrangement is indeed more rocked up than Miller but I'd describe it as a turbocharged version of his particular take on the song. All the essential elements can already be found on Miller's recording, including that section at the end where other instruments fall away and Ruby makes her exit to the sound of throbbing drums. Which is not to take away from Glen D Hardin's arrangement or Jimmy Bowen's production on the Rogers record, still sounding fresh and powerful however many times you hear it. But had I only heard Waylon Jennings' and Johnny Darrell's records I might not have realised that the First Edition hit is perhaps as much about what might be termed inspired consolidation as it is about invention.

Miller's drums-only farewell is not to be found on the other recordings mentioned, though drums are certainly prominent at the end of the Bobby Goldsboro version. As far as I know Miller's is also the first rendition to end with "For God's sake turn around!" rather than repeating the plea of the title. But it's that spare, affecting vocal which really crowns his achievement.

Before we hear that First Edition recording - better, it should be pointed out, than Rogers' later solo remake, which is what you get on a lot of compilations - let's take a listen to how Goldsboro handled it:




Quite a busy arrangement, I think, though an agreeable one, but his singing feels a bit exposed when listening to this immediately after Roger Miller. The plaintive quality doesn't quite cut it in this instance. It doesn't feel as though he is inhabiting the song to the same degree.

Alight, let us proceed, without delay or dismay, to the main deal: 

 



According to Mel Tillis, quoted in a piece by Rick Moore on the American Songwriter website, there wasn't a lot of forethought about the First Edition's recording of Ruby, and the composer wasn't involved.

"They were in Los Angeles recording their Something’s Burning album," he recalls. "The way I heard it, they had 15 minutes left on the clock. (Producer) Jimmy Bowen came out of the control room and handed ‘Ruby’ to Kenny. And you know the rest."

That sounds a little too neat to be true, like the story of Stand By Me being a happy afterthought knocked off in the last twenty five minutes of a Ben E King session. (When I had the chance to raise this directly with Leiber and Stoller during a Q&A they were quick to make clear that all the arrangements had been written out already.)


But if Ruby was indeed recorded quickly that may have been to its advantage. Bill DeYoung says that the solo success which Rogers enjoyed with his self-titled second album came about because of his producer at UA:

 Larry Butler knew what to do with the voice. "Kenny put everything he had into it in the first couple of takes," Butler says. "After that, he felt it was redundant. And a lot of Kenny’s vocals were live vocals on the sessions."

Might Jimmy Bowen have been aware of this too and held that final song back from the group deliberately, in order to ensure the freshness of Rogers' delivery? But whatever the degree of premeditation it is a finely judged vocal performance, with the the emphasis on "performance": there are moments where the voice is slightly strained, but that's the character's strain. At  times he is flat and resigned; at others the emotion glints through, as in the line:

But it won't be long, I've heard them say, until I'm not around

Though even then I think there's a sense of the character holding back, which helps support Ray Connolly's idea of the song being an inner monologue: that what we are hearing is not the broken soldier's attempt to harangue Ruby but the sound of his edging himself forward, with understandable reluctance, in order to contemplate the abyss ahead. And if Rogers did model his vocal approach on that of Miller it's more pointed, dynamic, as befits the percussion-heavy setting.


But however it came about , and whatever it may or may not owe directly to Roger Miller, the record was, is, and evermore shall be, a stone classic.

In the service, of  course, of a classic song. Which, as it happens, was based on a true story, as Tillis told Rick Moore. Some readers will already know that "that old crazy Asian war" is a reference to Korea, not Vietnam, the time of Rogers' hit, but may not be aware that the original inspiration dates from further back:

"Ruby is a real life narrative about a soldier coming home from World War II in 1947 to Palm Beach County, Florida," says Tillis, himself a Florida native. "The soldier brought along with him a pretty little English woman he called 'Ruby,' his war bride from England, one of the nurses that helped to bring him around to somewhat of a life. He had recurring problems from war wounds and was confined mostly to a wheelchair. He’d get drunk and accuse Ruby of everything under the sun. Having stood as much as she could, Ruby and the soldier eventually divorced, and she moved on."

So why did Tillis choose Korea? "That had been his era," Bill DeYoung writes - and goes on to explain the First Edition's success:

Kenny Rogers’ gauzy reading of Ruby in 1969 came just as many in America were questioning the logic of the Vietnamese conflict, and rush-released as a single, it became something of an anthem (especially after it closed the Huntley-Brinkley Report one night, over news footage of that week’s carnage in Vietnam). 

The vagueness of the phrase "crazy Asian war" feels right: the song may have struck a chord in 1969 America but it could be about a casualty of any conflict, which helps account for its longevity.

But finally I have to go back to the power of the language, and a line already quoted. Like Bobby Russell's Honey, this is simply a superbly crafted song. You cannot get more compact, surely, than:

The shadow on the wall tells me the sun is going down

Rick Moore's piece concludes by giving credit where it is most due: to the songwriter, without whose vision and application no hit record would have cause to exist:

In this day of writing by committee, “Ruby” stands up as an excellent example of what can happen when a lone craftsman gets an idea and works it and polishes it by himself until he knows it can’t get any better.

Which seems like a good point at which to let those ominous drums recede into the distance and hand the song back to its composer, who sings it for himself on Porter Waggoner's TV show in 1967, "just like you did it when you first wrote it, just with a guitar," as Waggoner requests. I'm not sure of the precise date of transmission but I'm guessing that the applause is partly in acknowledgement of the success of Johnny Darrell's hit version.






Which just about wraps things up, except to say that in the last few days I have been in email contact with my sister in law, my eldest brother's wife; utilising such vestiges of my dominie training as remain, I have been trying to select poems she might enjoy reading. At one point our exchanges were rudely interrupted by her husband who, in what seemed like a spooky rerun of Autumngate almost fifty years on, passed judgement on our endeavours in this wise:

poetry nonsense, threr [sic] is enough in music

I have a sneaking feeling he may be right.



Links:

Post about Honey and The Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp here and here.

Some other versions of Ruby on youtube: Waylon Jennings here; Johnny Darrell's hit version here. 

Darrell also recorded The Son of Hickory Holler's Tramp, subject of an earlier post here.


Kenny Rogers: Built to Last by Bill DeYoung can be found on the author's website here.

Behind the Song: Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town by Rick Moore is here.

Ray Connolly is the writer of That'll Be The Day and much else; his website is here.