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The Hit
Quite a few things came on either side of it - most of them meaning more to Roy Clark’s overall arc of considerable fame - but he charted biggest with 1969’s, “Yesterday When I Was Young.” A nostalgic tune about the fleeting promise of youth, even the music sounds borrowed from an earlier (and stodgier) time; think a Lawrence Welk take on country. The music actually works against the theme, because it tells the familiar tale of youth misspent, living fast, dying young, and so on. It packs all the verve of looking back from one’s mid-70s…which is suitable…
It was a favorite of the infamously hard-living baseball legend, Mickey Mantle, who loved it enough to ask Clark to request it his funeral.
The Rest of the Story
With Clark, the rest of the story is the story. Even when he talks about his more famous songs during a 2015 interview with the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority for its A Conversation with…[Roy Clark] series, “Yesterday When I Was Young” doesn’t sound any more or less meaningful than, say, “The Tip of My Fingers” or “Malaguena.” In fact, his comments on the latter give a clearer impression on Clark’s career: he used to talk over the song when he played it, pausing here and there to kid with the audience, until the day a stranger from the audience walked up, told him that he plays it beautifully and that his chatter took away from that. The Mantle connection clearly affected him, though, and Clark later recalled how nice it felt to receive a note from the original artist, Charles Aznavour (French; here’s the original), letting him know that he nailed his translated cover.
The greater portion of anyone who finds this post surely knows Clark from the same place I do: Hee Haw, the long-running, (later) Nashville-based variety show that was originally pitched as a summertime replacement program as Laff-In for the country crowd. The original episode and all the subsequent “replacement programs” rated high enough for CBS to pick up the show for, oh, 18 seasons, and that gets to something else about Clark: thanks to his work on The Beverly Hillbillies and a couple other daytime shows, he was hired to pair with Buck Owens on the grounds that Owens “came from music” while Clark “came from TV,” of which, yes and no.
Clark started in music, getting his first taste of the playing live at square-dance venues seeded around the Washington, D.C. area (Clark’s family relocated to D.C. from Virginia when he was little, which might account for that twang). He plugged away, backing into one opportunity after another, but he caught (arguably) his biggest break via country star Jimmy Dean, who made Clark one of his Texas Wildcats in the early-mid-1950s. That gave him his first taste of TV (if as accompaniment), and the arrangement held up for a couple years, only to end when Dean, a stickler for punctuality, finally ran out of patience with Clark’s failure to respond. He was 15 minutes late the day Dean fired him (the flat motorcycle tire excuse came too late), but, when he did, he put him arm around Clark’s shoulder and told him two things: 1) that he couldn’t afford him, and 2) that he was going to be big someday. The two remained friends, good ones too, and, when hosting The Tonight Show in the transition between Jack Paar and Johnny Carson gave him a week to do it, he called in Clark for a guest spot. With his week almost up (it was Thursday when he reached him), Dean caught Clark on the road in Arizona and asked him if he could make it to New York to tape the show. Dean took his best shot at making Clark as famous as possible in one night by squeezing in as many songs into one night as he could. The stuff with Jackson is less exciting: he played guitar for her Vegas show, but he still counts her "without peer" among rock-'n'-roll artists.
That’s it for a big picture. Clark was still touring as recently as that OETA interview and at a level that moved his manager to do some math and figure that he could shave off 25 days of travel by relocating to Tulsa, Oklahoma, so he did (where he was very happy). That puts Clark’s active years fairly close to his death in 2018. As much as anything else, Clark comes off as one hell of a nice guy, someone who succeeded in life and business through the friendships he had. I’m not a wild fan of his music - country’s often a challenge and Clark’s take on it raises the bar - but Clark seems likeable as all hell.
One thing that got lost in the bio: Clark had a reputation for “fast music” - e.g., guitar/banjo, etc. played very quickly - and he made a collection of that material titled The Lightning Fingers of Roy Clark (1963) his first solo release (I think). An oddball story follows from: when Capitol Records and Decca Records got involved in some business dealings, part of the negotiations involved sorting through each company’s catalog to divvy up the artists. Somewhere in there, Decca’s people got it in their head that Clark was a Black artist; when that seemed to pique their interest in taking Clark on, Capitol’s people didn’t say anything and generally kept ducking the question. They ran the game for as long as they could - all the way up to the point of putting Clark on a new record in silhouette to keep people guessing. Clark only confessed when Decca reps asked him directly…and that’s how weird that shit got back when.
About the Sampler
With so little to get excited about, personally - e.g., Clark’s country hits (see notes above), plus a lot of gospel and banjo - the motivation for making a sampler was…lacking. He clearly loved music, though, and played a lot of after-hours sessions with any artist who would let him join a circle in search of new sounds and ways to play them. Guitar was his first love and he has a soft spot for traditional Spanish music. I never found any of that (well, “Malaguena,” right?), and I’m not a huge fan of that either, so I sort of gravitated to The Lightning Fingers of Roy Clark whenever the sense of obligation to really listen to him really kicked in. You’ll like it or you won’t - this is a safe space - but songs like “Texas Twist”, “Drifter’s Polka” and “Dented Fender” give a fair taste of it.
Right. Till the next one.
Quite a few things came on either side of it - most of them meaning more to Roy Clark’s overall arc of considerable fame - but he charted biggest with 1969’s, “Yesterday When I Was Young.” A nostalgic tune about the fleeting promise of youth, even the music sounds borrowed from an earlier (and stodgier) time; think a Lawrence Welk take on country. The music actually works against the theme, because it tells the familiar tale of youth misspent, living fast, dying young, and so on. It packs all the verve of looking back from one’s mid-70s…which is suitable…
It was a favorite of the infamously hard-living baseball legend, Mickey Mantle, who loved it enough to ask Clark to request it his funeral.
The Rest of the Story
With Clark, the rest of the story is the story. Even when he talks about his more famous songs during a 2015 interview with the Oklahoma Educational Television Authority for its A Conversation with…[Roy Clark] series, “Yesterday When I Was Young” doesn’t sound any more or less meaningful than, say, “The Tip of My Fingers” or “Malaguena.” In fact, his comments on the latter give a clearer impression on Clark’s career: he used to talk over the song when he played it, pausing here and there to kid with the audience, until the day a stranger from the audience walked up, told him that he plays it beautifully and that his chatter took away from that. The Mantle connection clearly affected him, though, and Clark later recalled how nice it felt to receive a note from the original artist, Charles Aznavour (French; here’s the original), letting him know that he nailed his translated cover.
The greater portion of anyone who finds this post surely knows Clark from the same place I do: Hee Haw, the long-running, (later) Nashville-based variety show that was originally pitched as a summertime replacement program as Laff-In for the country crowd. The original episode and all the subsequent “replacement programs” rated high enough for CBS to pick up the show for, oh, 18 seasons, and that gets to something else about Clark: thanks to his work on The Beverly Hillbillies and a couple other daytime shows, he was hired to pair with Buck Owens on the grounds that Owens “came from music” while Clark “came from TV,” of which, yes and no.
Clark started in music, getting his first taste of the playing live at square-dance venues seeded around the Washington, D.C. area (Clark’s family relocated to D.C. from Virginia when he was little, which might account for that twang). He plugged away, backing into one opportunity after another, but he caught (arguably) his biggest break via country star Jimmy Dean, who made Clark one of his Texas Wildcats in the early-mid-1950s. That gave him his first taste of TV (if as accompaniment), and the arrangement held up for a couple years, only to end when Dean, a stickler for punctuality, finally ran out of patience with Clark’s failure to respond. He was 15 minutes late the day Dean fired him (the flat motorcycle tire excuse came too late), but, when he did, he put him arm around Clark’s shoulder and told him two things: 1) that he couldn’t afford him, and 2) that he was going to be big someday. The two remained friends, good ones too, and, when hosting The Tonight Show in the transition between Jack Paar and Johnny Carson gave him a week to do it, he called in Clark for a guest spot. With his week almost up (it was Thursday when he reached him), Dean caught Clark on the road in Arizona and asked him if he could make it to New York to tape the show. Dean took his best shot at making Clark as famous as possible in one night by squeezing in as many songs into one night as he could. The stuff with Jackson is less exciting: he played guitar for her Vegas show, but he still counts her "without peer" among rock-'n'-roll artists.
That’s it for a big picture. Clark was still touring as recently as that OETA interview and at a level that moved his manager to do some math and figure that he could shave off 25 days of travel by relocating to Tulsa, Oklahoma, so he did (where he was very happy). That puts Clark’s active years fairly close to his death in 2018. As much as anything else, Clark comes off as one hell of a nice guy, someone who succeeded in life and business through the friendships he had. I’m not a wild fan of his music - country’s often a challenge and Clark’s take on it raises the bar - but Clark seems likeable as all hell.
One thing that got lost in the bio: Clark had a reputation for “fast music” - e.g., guitar/banjo, etc. played very quickly - and he made a collection of that material titled The Lightning Fingers of Roy Clark (1963) his first solo release (I think). An oddball story follows from: when Capitol Records and Decca Records got involved in some business dealings, part of the negotiations involved sorting through each company’s catalog to divvy up the artists. Somewhere in there, Decca’s people got it in their head that Clark was a Black artist; when that seemed to pique their interest in taking Clark on, Capitol’s people didn’t say anything and generally kept ducking the question. They ran the game for as long as they could - all the way up to the point of putting Clark on a new record in silhouette to keep people guessing. Clark only confessed when Decca reps asked him directly…and that’s how weird that shit got back when.
About the Sampler
With so little to get excited about, personally - e.g., Clark’s country hits (see notes above), plus a lot of gospel and banjo - the motivation for making a sampler was…lacking. He clearly loved music, though, and played a lot of after-hours sessions with any artist who would let him join a circle in search of new sounds and ways to play them. Guitar was his first love and he has a soft spot for traditional Spanish music. I never found any of that (well, “Malaguena,” right?), and I’m not a huge fan of that either, so I sort of gravitated to The Lightning Fingers of Roy Clark whenever the sense of obligation to really listen to him really kicked in. You’ll like it or you won’t - this is a safe space - but songs like “Texas Twist”, “Drifter’s Polka” and “Dented Fender” give a fair taste of it.
Right. Till the next one.
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