It’s been 53 years since some of country music’s most successful hitmakers released some of their biggest songs. But even though they are more than five decades old, some songs sound even better today. We picked three of our favorite country songs from 1972 that sound better than ever in the 2020s.
Videos by American Songwriter
“Chantilly Lace” by Jerry Lee Lewis
There’s a beautiful, nostalgic feel to Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Chantilly Lace“. The song was first released as a rock song by The Big Bopper in 1958. But the version most people remember is Lewis’s, included on his The Killer Rocks On album.
When recording “Chantilly Lace”, Lewis crammed 10 musicians and six background vocalists in the studio to record the uptempo track.
“He wanted everybody there,” producer Jerry Kennedy recalls in the Lewis biography, Hellfire. “He didn’t want anything overdubbed later. It was a mess. We had an acre of people there—voices, strings, everything. And, as always, Jerry Lee started changin’ keys, and the arranger was goin’ crazy, havin’ to rewrite stuff for the string section.”
“I Can’t Stop Loving You” by Conway Twitty
“I Can’t Stop Loving You” by Conway Twitty has a beautiful, nostalgic feel, but could also just as easily work today with a few tweaks to the production. Twitty had a No. 1 hit in 1972 with “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” written by Don Gibson.
The heartbreaking song begins with “I can’t stop loving you so I made up my mind / To live in memories of old lonesome times / I can’t stop wanting you, it’s useless to say / So I just live my life in dreams of yesterday.”
The song is such a hit that numerous other artists have also recorded it, including Ray Charles, Kitty Wells, Anne Murray, and Martina McBride, among others.
“Rocky Mountain High” by John Denver
There might not be a more classic song from any year in the 70s than John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High“. Written by Denver and Mike Taylor, the song is the title track of Denver’s sixth studio album, inspired by his love of Colorado.
“I remember, almost to the moment, when that song started to take shape in my head,” Denver recalls (via Wide Open Country). “We were working on the next album, and it was to be called Mother Nature’s Son, after the Beatles song, which I’d included. It was set for release in September. In mid-August, [Denver’s former wife] Annie and I and some friends went up to Williams Lake to watch the first Perseid meteor showers.
“Imagine a moonless night in the Rockies in the dead of summer, and you have it,” he adds. “I had insisted to everybody that it was going to be a glorious display. Spectacular, in fact.”
Photo by David Redfern/Redferns/Getty Images
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