"Jackie Blue," the Ozark Mountain Daredevils
With their measured Midwestern-Southern rock, their Missouri roots, and their old-timey name, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils were the least likely band to have a big hit single in 1975, the year of KC and the Sunshine Band and the rise of disco. But "Jackie Blue," a song Daredevils drummer and singer Larry Lee had written about a small-time drug dealer and bartender who abused his wares, was a huge hit, peaking at number three on the Billboard singles chart after being released as a single fifty years ago this past February from their 1974 album It'll Shine When It Shines.
Glyn Johns co-produced that album, and after the the Ozark Mountain Daredevils - Lee, Steve Cash, John Dillon, Randle Chowning, Michael Granda, Jerry Mills, and Buddy Brayfield - completed rough tracks for all of the album's potential cuts, they left Missouri for Los Angeles to mix the favored tracks at Sunset Sound Studios. The exception was "Jackie Blue," which had only been recorded as an instrumental. At Sunset Sound, after Johns overdubbed the studio's grand piano on the one Lee played at the ranch, Lee sang Johns the male-focused lyrics. Johns protested, as Lee would recall: "No, no, no, mate. Jackie Blue has to be a girl." Johns then had Lee and Cash step out to "re-gender" the lyrics. Cash later said, "We started over with some of [Lee's] lyrics, switched them around, and I wrote a couple of verses." Larry Lee said, "We just knocked some new lyrics out in about thirty minutes. [From] some drugged-out guy, we changed Jackie into a reclusive girl."
This wasn't the first time a male character of a song was turned in a female character, nor would it be the last. The Beatles tune "Sexy Sadie" had originally been about the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and a year after "Jackie Blue" was a hit, Daryl Hall and John Oates produced a song about a man they both knew called "Rich Boy" but changed it to "Rich Girl" because they thought that sounded better.
Hearing the completed track, Cash realized that "Jackie Blue" could afford the band a "radio song:" "It was completely different than [most] of the music we [had] played up to that point, Cash recalled It had something; it had a [catchy] hook." Band member Jerry Mills would concur: "'Jackie Blue' sounds commercial [because] it has a certain structure that happens to sound good on a car radio." "Jackie Blue" was the first of the band's singles to feature Lee on lead vocal.
The song was timed at 4 minutes 11 seconds on the LP, but the single was almost a minute shorter. This clip, my Music Video Of the Week, features the Daredevils presenting the entire 4:11 song on the BBC's "The Old Grey Whistle Test." Enjoy.
Posts
