Song 197: Today I posted Crazy by Willie Nelson, on the playlist -- a song that Willie also wrote. Not too long ago, I realized that I had gotten well into my second 100 songs on this list without including a single one by Waylon, Willie, Merle Haggard or Charlie Pride, and since I mention them all in the chorus of my song As Long as Merle is Still Haggard, and I listen to their music quite a bit, I decided to start adding some of their songs to the list, starting with Waylon's Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way? (Song 190) and Merle's Mama Tried (Song 191). This song marks Willie's first appearance on the list, and as it gets longer, more of his songs will certainly show up here. A couple of years before the Beatles turned my whole world around, I was hearing mostly folk and country during the times when my parents would play the radio in the car, which they didn't often do. The Ohio relatives we visited and stayed with in the summer during those years had a nice stereo and a good collection of country LPs, and during our visits they would let me play the records I liked. One record I played quite a bit was a double album of then-current country classics, and it included the Patsy Cline version of Crazy, so I got to hear it quite a bit then, and I liked it a lot. I didn't know anything about the story behind it, of course, and how Patsy couldn't even do the vocal on the first session, when she was still recovering from a car accident, and that she had to come back a week later to finish the vocal track, which she did in one take. I also didn't know that apparently Patsy didn't like the song a whole lot when she first heard it, that her producer talked her into doing the recording, and that she was surprised and amazed at how well the record did, all of which you wouldn't know from listening to the single. On another level of Crazy, one of the crazier things I did for a few years in the 1980s while living in Berkeley, CA, involved playing bass for a country bar pick-up band, and I can confirm that the audience always loved to hear this song. In places where the club had a juke box, very often the Patsy Cline single of Crazy would get played during breaks, so it didn't surprise me to learn that, according to the Amusement and Music Operators Association, as reported on Songfacts.com, PC's Crazy tops the official list of most-played juke box records -- after all, they'd be Crazy to pick a different song. On a side note, you can find the song video for As Long as Merle is Still Haggard by clicking on the title.
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