{"id":3226,"date":"2022-12-14T12:43:59","date_gmt":"2022-12-14T12:43:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=3226"},"modified":"2022-12-15T18:54:07","modified_gmt":"2022-12-15T18:54:07","slug":"recalling-charlie-rich-who-would-have-turned-80-today","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/?p=3226","title":{"rendered":"Charlie Rich loved the blues more than country music"},"content":{"rendered":"

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By Ray Bennett<\/p>\n

LONDON \u2013\u00a0Charlie Rich, who was born on this day ninety years ago, was one of the biggest names in country music. His recordings of \u2018Behind Closed Doors\u2019 and \u2018Most Beautiful Girl\u2019 made him an international smash on country and mainstream charts. He won major awards, appeared in Clint Eastwood movies and headlined in Las Vegas.<\/p>\n

I came to know him as my father-in-law when I married his eldest daughter, Ren\u00e9e. Charlie was a big man, handsome and imposing, whose impressive white locks had earned him the nickname the Silver Fox. Ren\u00e9e\u2019s mother, Margaret Ann, was a gifted writer of songs such as \u2018Life Has its Little Ups and Downs\u2019.\u00a0When Ren\u00e9e took me to Tennessee to meet them, they welcomed me into their spacious and elegant home called Foxwood on a few acres of gated land on West Cherry Circle in Memphis.<\/p>\n

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Margaret Ann and Charlie Rich in their prime<\/p><\/div>\n

While I knew Rich as a confident performer, I soon discovered that also he was very shy. Margaret Ann was the gregarious one. Married young, they had barely turned 20 when they had Ren\u00e9e, followed by Allan (Charlie Rich Jr.), Laurie and Jack.<\/p>\n

Born in Colt, Arkansas, he was taught the piano by his mother Helen, a church organist, he studied music at university and played in a jazz band with Margaret Ann as the vocalist when he served in the U.S. Air Force. Regarded as the musician\u2019s musician, he played piano and sang in honky-tonks and clubs for twenty years before hitting it big.<\/p>\n

Charlie had several hits on the country charts and Ren\u00e9e told me that when Kenny O\u2019Dell\u2019s song \u2018Behind Closed Doors\u2019 came along, her dad worried that it was too risqu\u00e9. Producer Billy Sherrill insisted he record it and Ren\u00e9e said \u2018it was like the ceiling opened and money poured in\u2019.<\/p>\n

By the time I met him, Charlie was comfortable and pretty much retired having invested lucratively in Wendy\u2019s hamburger restaurant franchises. Long known as a heavy drinker, his preference by then was a little weed but in all the times I saw him, he never touched alcohol. He had sold his airplane, a Vickers 798D Viscount with his Silver Fox logo on the fin, but one of his pilots had taught him how to fly. Proudly, he showed a video of his first solo flight in a single-engine plane.<\/p>\n

On July 25, 1995, Charlie Rich died peacefully in his sleep of a blood clot in his lung in a Hammond motel with Margaret Ann beside him. They were in Louisiana to see Allan perform in New Orleans. Charlie hadn\u2019t had a drink in years and had seldom looked better.<\/p>\n

One of the most appealing things about Charlie Rich was his shyness. Before a concert one night, he confessed to me how nervous he was before every performance. I told him that John Gielgud threw up every time he was about to go on stage and that cheered him up immensely. He and Margaret Ann were very gracious and generous to me but my most treasured recollection of him is of the time he invited me to listen to a jam session in his well-appointed studio called \u2018the garage\u2019 from the early days,<\/p>\n

Charlie sat at a piano next to a Hammond organ with a group of Memphis session players on drums, guitar, bass, saxophone and trumpet. \u00a0He became popular playing country music but his real loves were jazz and blues. I sat sipping some excellent bourbon, entranced until almost daybreak while he went through extended classics such as \u2018Bye Bye Blackbird\u2019, \u2018Am I Blue\u2019 and \u2018Mood Indigo\u2019. In 1992, he released a wonderful album based on those sessions called \u2018Pictures and Paintings\u2019.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Sam Phillips, the Memphis record producer who discovered Elvis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins, told me, \u2018Charlie was the best commercial jazz pianist that I ever heard. He was the most diverse musician I ever worked with.\u2019 When Charlie spoke, the sound was of crushed gravel. When he sang, his voice moved Bob Dylan to call him his favourite ballad singer.<\/p>\n

Herbie Hancock and Randy Newman both told me how much they admired Charlie especially his piano playing. George Jones saluted him along with Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis in his paean to country music greats, \u2018Who\u2019s Gonna Fill Their Shoes?\u2019 After Kris Kristofferson finished a press conference for a forgettable TV miniseries called \u2018Amerika\u2019, publicists surrounded hiim and tried to rush him away. I called out, \u2018Hey, Kris, Charlie and Margaret Ann say hello.\u2019 He stopped and when he saw who had spoken, he brushed off his handlers and came over to shake my hand. \u2018Tell \u2018em hello for me, please,\u2019 Kristofferson said. \u2018I love those guys.\u2019<\/p>\n

Charlie grew up with a hard-scrabble sharecropper\u2019s view of the world with Mississippi Delta blues in his veins and yet he won success in the world of country music.\u00a0All he ever wanted to do was sit at the piano and play the sorrowful blues and jazz tunes that moved him although he responded gratefully when audiences clamored to hear his biggest hit, \u201cBehind Closed Doors\u201d. In 1973, the song earned him a Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance and in 1998 the track won the Grammy Hall of Fame Award.<\/p>\n

Only six artists have won back-to-back Country Music Association (CMA)\u00a0Best Album of the Year Awards: Johnny Cash, Ronnie Milsap, Garth Brooks, George Strait (twice), Tim McGraw and Charlie Rich. All of those are in the Country Music Hall of Fame except Charlie.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>In 1974, he was named CMA Entertainer of the Year. \u00a0The following year, he appeared on the awards show to announce his successor. Opening the envelope, he read the name John Denver and, pulling out his Zippo lighter, set fire to the card. Many in the worldwide audience roared their applause, but the Nashville community was outraged and never forgave him.<\/p>\n

Rich did not make happy music \u2013 he hated it \u2013 and what sets him apart from every other country singer is that he never whined in his songs. The best song he ever wrote was \u201cFeel Like Going Home\u201d, which has been recorded by innumerable artists and featured in many films and TV shows. It displayed the unvarnished honesty that he brought to his life and to his music.<\/p>\n

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Charlie pictured with (l-r) me, Ren\u00e9e, Keith Lee (husband of Laurie Rich) and Jack Rich.<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Ray Bennett LONDON \u2013\u00a0Charlie Rich, who was born on this day ninety years ago, was one of the biggest names in country music. His recordings of \u2018Behind Closed Doors\u2019 and \u2018Most Beautiful Girl\u2019 made him an international smash on … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1263,8,2257],"tags":[5285,5286,5287,434,435,5288,1805,819,1009,1806],"class_list":["post-3226","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-memory-lane","category-music","category-recalling","tag-behind-closed-doors","tag-most-beautiful-girl","tag-pictures-and-paintings","tag-charlie-rich","tag-charlie-rich-jr","tag-country-music-association","tag-keith-a-lee","tag-margaret-ann-rich","tag-renee-rich","tag-sam-phillips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3226","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3226"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3226\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10627,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3226\/revisions\/10627"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3226"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3226"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecliffedge.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3226"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}