Faded love

[colonel snow]

Deleted due to doubts about the information.



colonel snow

[Colin B]

Elvis recorded Faded Love on 7th June, 1970 [having done a 36-second try out on 4th].

The first release was on the 1971 album: Elvis Country.

[Suspicious Minds]

From the Facebook page of Classic Country Music Stories

https://www.facebook.com/ClassicCountryMusicStories/

The Story Behind The Song:
“Faded Love”
(written by Bob Wills & Johnnie Lee Wills)

Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys (#8, 1950)
Patsy Cline (#7, 1963)
Leon McAuliffe (#22, 1963)
Tompall & The Glaser Brothers (#22, 1971)
Willie Nelson and Ray Price (#3, 1980)

One of the first pieces of music Bob Wills remembered hearing as a child in Kosse, Texas was a fiddle instrumental based around a 19th-century folk song called “Darling Nelly Gray,” written in 1856 by Benjamin Hanby. Bob’s father had developed an original melody and adapted it to the fiddle. John Wills often played the old tune at night, long after everyone else had gone to bed. Some thought that the elder Wills’ song had such a mournful sound that as it drifted across the dark countryside, it must have even caused the stars to weep. Yet, John’s son could hear only a peaceful beauty in the fiddler’s strokes, and that was why this unnamed Wills family original became one of the first tunes the young child learned after he picked up his father’s bow.

By the time Bob Wills began forming his own fiddle bands and striking out in station wagons to play dances across the Southwest, John Wills’ piece had a name, “Faded Love.” Year after year, Bob taught it to his various group configurations, and rarely a day went by that he didn’t play the number himself. When Wills formed the Texas Playboys, the song became one of their standards. But just like Bob’s other trademark song, “San Antonio Rose,” it lived without lyrics. For decades “Faded Love” was what it had been when his father first started playing it, a simple little fiddle tune.

By early 1948, Wills and his group had left the Columbia label and signed with MGM. Their tenure with MGM started out promising with the #4 hit, Cindy Walker’s “Bubbles In My Beer” (which became a classic of sorts in the Wills catalog), but the Playboys’ career was starting to wane by the late 1940s and MGM, like Columbia before it, was beginning to lose faith in Wills’ brand of music. With the record-buying public’s tastes changing after World War II, the Playboys’ style of dance music seemed old and outdated. Solo acts were now ruling the charts, and most of the hot artists were a good deal younger than Wills (who was in his mid-forties at the time). The days of swing music seemed numbered, and MGM doubted that Bob could or would change the Playboys’ sound to conform to country music’s new direction.

Wills, too, could see that his place in country music was shaky. Other swing acts were either fading from the national spotlight or trying to change their sound. The kids who had once come to dance to his group’s music were now seeing their own children heading out to see Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb and Eddy Arnold. The band leader was keenly aware that changing times often meant the changing of the guard, but yet he felt that there was still a bit of magic left in his swing music.

Sitting down with his brother Johnnie Lee, Bob began to jot down words to fit his father’s old fiddle tune. In short order, the two siblings had given a new look to the family anthem. With Rusty McDonald now supplying the lead vocal (replacing Tommy Duncan) and the Playboy trio hitting background harmonies, Wills returned to the MGM studios. He had a much smaller band than when he cut “San Antonio Rose” a decade before, but the sound that had earned Bob the title “King of Western Swing” was still there. So maybe, he thought, they did have a chance of scoring another winner.

In retrospect, it’s hard to realize that “Faded Love” would not immediately become the nation’s best-loved fiddle ballad. In late 1950, Bob helplessly watched as his father’s old tune struggled up the country charts, peaking at only #8. In an era when Hank Snow’s “I’m Movin’ On” stayed on the Billboard survey for almost a year (including 21 weeks at number one alone), the Playboys’ “Faded Love” managed just five weeks total. Even before the record finished its short run and radio stations stopped playing the song, MGM dropped the act. It would be ten years before Bob Wills’ name appeared once again on the charts.

For all practical purposes, “Faded Love” should have been forgotten, yet it wasn’t. The combination of the song’s beautiful old melody and the newly-added heartfelt lyrics wouldn’t let it die. It began to gain fresh life almost as soon as Bob’s record fell from the playlists. Within months, “Faded Love” was appearing not only on country albums, but in big-band and solo pop releases too. “Faded Love” remained alive via LPs and concert sets for over a decade. Then the song really began to bloom.

Patsy Cline had just come off her best year, and was expecting even more great things in 1963. Cline was about to go back into the studio to try to follow up her biggest hit, “She’s Got You,” when she heard folk-rocker Jackie DeShannon singing “Faded Love” on her car radio (DeShannon’s version barely tapped the pop chart at #97). As Patsy listened, she got caught up in the old song’s potential. She was determined to convince her producer Owen Bradley to let her record it. In what was to be her final recording sessions (a three-day period between February 4th and 7th of 1963), Cline laid down a dozen tracks. The first song she completed on the 4th was the Bob Wills swing standard, only she did it in her own torchy style, on which she was incomparable. Her emotional rendering of “Faded Love” is a haunting one, especially the finish of the song when it seems that she’s about to break down at the end, pausing and taking a deep, audible breath before singing the last note. Many thought the track was ruined, but producer Bradley did not ask for a re-take, a prophetic decision considering the plane crash that took Patsy’s life a month and a day after she recorded “Faded Love.” In the weeks that followed Patsy’s death, her distraught husband Charlie would constantly listen to her take that breath at the end of “Faded Love” and exclaim, “She’s not dead! Here she is living, breathing!”

Six months after the death of Patsy Cline, Decca released her version of “Faded Love.” Debuting on Billboard’s country singles chart on September 14, 1963, the record climbed to #7 and slightly nudged the pop chart at #96 (it should have gone much higher on both lists). Bob Wills called Patsy’s rendition of “Faded Love” his own favorite, and as time would prove, it was the most-remembered. That same year, Leon McAuliffe, one of Bob’s original Texas Playboys, cut a swing version of “Faded Love” that reached #22 nationally. Eight years later, the tune reappeared by Tompall and the Glaser Brothers. The boys had grown up listening to the music of Bob Wills. By the early ‘70s, as part of the country “outlaw” movement, they often toured with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Yet, they never completely separated themselves from country’s old sounds. In fact, the Glasers often embraced them. With their easy harmonies and smooth instrumentation, they re-created old classics as well as anyone in Music City. More than most, the brothers seemed to realize that the power of a good song never dies.

In 1971, Tompall and the Glaser Brothers’ version of “Faded Love” was recorded in a fashion that came close to capturing the sound of John Wills’ lonesome fiddle drifting out across the Texas Panhandle night. By adding just one instrument at a time, the Glasers built their rendition into a heartfelt tribute to Bob, whose health was failing by that time. Their record became a huge favorite in the Lone Star State and it climbed to a respectable #22 on Billboard’s country singles chart (the same peak as McAuliffe’s ’63 version). As the years went by, “Faded Love’s” hit power got even stronger when, in 1980, Willie Nelson and Ray Price teamed up to take the song to #3, its strongest showing yet.

There are some standards whose classic status can never be fully explained. These songs are so great and their sound so peerless that they give off a special aura. Such is the case with “Faded Love.” Bob Wills had a host of songs that were bigger hits than his father’s old fiddle tune, but he never produced another which so captured the beauty of the music once known as “Texas Swing.” Yet, time has proven that “Faded Love” is much more than just a swing tune. It’s more than a fiddle standard. This is one of the rarest of songs that can reach out and touch listeners in any style and in any era. – JH

[Suspicious Minds]

The tune of ‘Faded Love’ was apparently based on / inspired by ‘Darling Nelly Gray’. Please see previous post. Here’s a bit more about ‘Darling Nelly Gray’.

The song Darling Nellie Gray has been credited to several authors, most often to Benjamin Russell Hanby (1833-1867). The song was written around 1856. Some sources say that the song came to Hanby after he read an article in a newspaper about a Kentucky slave named Nellie Gray, who was sold away from her husband to a Georgia slave owner. Another version of the story is that Hanby wrote the song after hearing of the misfortune of escaped slave Joe Selby, who died not too long after crossing the Ohio River, having left his sweetheart Nellie Gray still enslaved in Kentucky. The story goes on to say that Hanby sent the song to a publisher and received six free copies of the song while the publisher received thousands of dollars from the sale of the famous song. The title and spelling of the song has varied over time.

https://nkaa.uky.edu/nkaa/items/show/2596

A bit more plus lyrics:

Hanby was born in 1833 in Rushville, Ohio, into an antislavery family that had ties to the Underground Railroad. Hanby wrote "Darling Nelly Gray" as a sophomore in college. The song was based on an incident when he was a child. When Hanby was nine years old a runaway Kentucky slave named Joseph Selby stopped at the Hanby home for assistance. Selby arrived ill with pneumonia and died while attempting to recover there. Before passing away Selby told the story of his "Darling Nelly Gray" who had been sold to Georgia and left him brokenhearted. Being distraught Selby attempted to make his way to Canada and freedom.

The song's sad lyrics are as follows:

There's a low green valley
On the old Kentucky shore,
There I've whiled many happy hours away,
A-sitting and a-singing
By the little cottage door,
Where lived my Darling Nelly Gray.

Refrain:
Oh! my poor Nelly Gray,
They have taken you away,
And I'll never see my darling anymore,
I'm sitting by the river
And I'm weeping all the day,
For you've gone from the old Kentucky shore.

One night I went to see her,
But she's gone the neighbors say,
The white man bound her with his chain,
They have taken her to Georgia
For to wear her life away,
As she toils in the cotton and the cane.

Refrain:
My canoe is under water
And my banjo is unstrung
I'm tired of living anymore;
My eyes shall look downward
And my songs shall be unsung
While I stay on the old Kentucky shore.

Refrain:
My eyes are getting blinded
And I cannot see the way,
Hark! there's somebody knocking at the door,
Oh! I hear the angels calling
And I see my Nelly Gray,
Farewell to the old Kentucky shore.

Oh! may Darling Nelly Gray,
Up in heaven there they say,
That they'll never take from me anymore,
I'm a coming, coming, coming,
As the Angels clear the way,
Farewell to the old Kentucky shore.

http://randomthoughtsonhistory.blogspot ... y.html?m=1

816FEFDB-544F-4AEF-9438-26D38BBE841A.jpeg

Source: Hanby, Benjamin Russel, 1833-1867. “Darling Nelly Gray / B.R. Hanby.” Digital Gallery. BGSU University Libraries, 16 Oct. 2018, digitalgallery.bgsu.edu/collections/item/34035. Accessed 4 May 2019.

[Suspicious Minds]

To compare the tunes:

Faded Love (Bob Wills)

https://youtu.be/6qASxTCIC3c

Darling Nelly Gray

https://youtu.be/5zIfpWakl4M