On this day (August 14) in 1976, Waylon Jennings was at No. 1 on the Top Country Albums chart with Are You Ready for the Country. It retained the top spot for 10 nonconsecutive weeks, making it one of Jennings’ most successful albums on the chart. While it received mixed reviews, it was popular enough with fans to earn a Gold certification from the RIAA.
Jennings wrote four songs for the 10-track collection, including the acclaimed “I’ll Go Back to Her.” Most of the album, though, consists of covers of pop and rock songs. For instance, the title track and album opener was a Neil Young track from his 1972 album Harvest. Jennings also recorded a cover of the Marshal Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See.”
Videos by American Songwriter
Waylon Jennings Revived a Richard Harris Hit
The most interesting cover on Are You Ready for the Country is “MacArthur Park.” Richard Harris released the Jimmy Webb-penned Grammy winner in 1968. Waylon Jennings was one of many artists who tackled it over the years.
Then, much like now, the average country song was around three minutes long. The same is true for this album. Most of the tracks fall short of the three-and-a-half minute mark. “MacArthur Park,” though, clocks in at 6:39.
According to Songfacts, Webb wrote the song after his relationship with Suzy Horton ended. They would meet in MacArthur Park for lunch, because she worked nearby. “It’s clearly about a love affair ending, and the person singing it is using the cake and the rain as a metaphor for that,” he said. “Okay, it may be far out there, and a bit incomprehensible, but I wrote the song at a time in the late 1960s when surrealistic lyrics were the order of the day,” he added.
“Those lyrics were very real to me–there was nothing psychedelic about it to me. The cake, it was an available object. It was what I saw in the park at the birthday parties,” Webb said of one of the song’s most memorable lines.
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