Drinking Lonely Wine with Mickey Gilley

• Listen to this song on youtube: Lonely Wine
• Listen to these 45s in a Spotify playlist here  with other 45s from the blog (though note, spotify doesn’t have all / many of the songs featured on the site so some playlists may be incomplete or feature slightly different versions than the original 45s I’m referring to here.
• This song is available on Musical Episode #016: Singles Mixer v. 5

Today’s entry takes a slight detour along our well worn paths of soul 45s and heads out to the country for a little drive.  A principle tenet of this blog and my feelings about music – specifically of this period- is that the divide I was just acknowledging between “country” and “soul” is actually much more mutable than we may believe.  The path from Gospel and Jazz into R&B and blues then exploding onto the scene as “soul” is pretty commonly told story.  Not to say I’m some contrarian, I’ve read many of those biographies and histories and follow the narrative but a thread that is often overlooked or under appreciated is the connection between rural music – say folk and country- and the development of soul.  Places like Memphis, Houston and New Orleans have strong connections to Country, Rockabilly, Swamp Pop, Zydeco and more. 

Look no further than the story of King records, or Stax’s Jim Stewart, the session players at Muscle Shoals, the output of labels like Sun and Excello or Ray Charles’ ultra popular country album.  The connections are long and deep and were much more obvious at the time than they may be as we look back and expect a clear and clean historical picture.

One of the figures that sat in an interesting position of intersection is Roy Orbison, probably not a coincidence I love him so!  Throughout his career Mickey recorded a lot songs performed or written by Orbison, in fact the flip of this 45 “Down the Line” was written by Roy.  This is an instance where Mickey’s powerful take on the song and limited instrumentation, rather than feel like a pale imitation really bring the song to another level.  The wonderfully clean guitar sound is almost harp-like complimented by the piano flourishes at the end the song manages to imply an almost tropical tone.  Almost demure backing vocals give center stage to Gilley’s remarkable performance.

Gilley’s career is long and outrageous, cousin of Jimmy Swaggart, childhood friend of Jerry Lee Lewis, owning a rough and tumble juke joint that became the inspiration for the Travolta film Urban Cowboy and a solid career in music and entertainment is doing a disservice to his bountiful biography.  In this case there’s plenty of information out there about him so if you’re curious, take a peek, I was mostly interested in highlighting this beautiful slab of vinyl for you all here!

Hope you enjoy half as much as I do,

-Snack Attack / George

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