Maybe I didn’t treat you / Quite as good as I should have / Maybe I didn’t love you / Quite as often as I should have / Little things, I should have said and done / I just never took the time / You were always on my mind, plays “Always on My Mind,” a classic that has proved time and again its ability to transcend genre. Name another song that can be a hit for Willie Nelson and the Pet Shop Boys.
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The highly covered standard endures today, having been given new life seemingly every year since its initial release, so where did it first begin?
Who Wrote It?
“Always on My Mind” was written by songwriters Wayne Carson, Johnny Christopher, and Mark James in 1971. The brainchild of Carson, who had been responsible for several of the Box Tops’ hits like “The Letter,” the song came to him one night while working in Memphis, Tennessee.
The project he was involved in there required him to stay in the Tennessee town 10 days longer than he had originally planned, forcing him to phone his wife back in Springfield, Missouri, and explain why he was going to have to stay.
“She was pretty damned irate about it,” Carson recalled to the Los Angeles Times. “So I tried to calm her down.
“I said, ‘Well, I know I’ve been gone a lot, but I’ve been thinking about you all the time’—and it just struck me like someone had hit me with a hammer,” he continued. “I told her real fast I had to hang up because I had to put that into a song.”
It was there in Memphis that he wrote the tune, spending days working on the song in acclaimed record producer Chips Moman’s studio. “I had been up, I don’t know how many days,” Carson shared. “I was at the studio 24 hours—sleeping on the couch in Chips’ office. He’d have meetings and just tell people, ‘Push him to one side and sit down.’”
After hitting a roadblock, the songwriter called one of his collaborators, Johnny Christopher, into the studio. Even together, the pair were struggling to complete the song when, like an unspoken prayer, Mark James walked past Moman’s office. Having then recently penned hits like “Suspicious Minds” and “Hooked on a Feeling,” James had become a highly sought-after success in Memphis.
According to the Los Angeles Times, James was reluctant to help. He, too, had been working around the clock and was on his way to see a movie when the unfinished tune captured his attention. By the fourth run-through of the song, the trio had finished it.
Originally recorded by rockabilly songstress Brenda Lee in 1971, but first released by Gwen McCrae in March of 1972, the song wouldn’t become the crossover hit we know it as today until Elvis Presley released his rendition in late 1972.
Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
