One Hit No More, No. 66: Vicki Lawrence Turns Out the Lights In Georgia. Briefly.

Vicki in her natural milieu.

The Hit
I don’t know if remember Vicki Lawrence’s double gold hit, “The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia,” or if it just feels like something I should remember. The fact it dropped in 1973 puts it a few years ahead of my time, but commercial radio also has this thing about playing a song more than once, which means it depends on how far the echo carried.

The song clearly comes from the 70s, only with a couple genres passing through it. It has a 70s singer-songwriter body and the same production, but the chorus - not to mention the song’s theme/title - has a southern twang. It squeezes a story of betrayal, revenge, then more betrayal into under four minutes - it even gets in a plot-twist, so it’s pretty solid work.

The story behind the song is a little better. Vicki Lawrence’s first husband, Bobby Russell, actually wrote the song, but he couldn’t get anyone to either buy or sing it. A producer Russell worked with, Snuff Garrett, tried steering it to a couple heavy-hitters. As Vicki Lawrence recounted to Classicband.com’s Gary James:

“Snuff wanted it to go to Liza Minnelli. He said, ‘I want to work with her.’ I said, ‘She is so not right for this song.’ Then he decided to send it over to Cher and Cher never heard it. Sonny said, ‘It will offend the South.’ That's how I ended up having one huge, big hit. I was married to the guy who wrote it for ten minutes.”

Long story short, either Garrett or Russell said, “screw it, we’ll have Vicki sing it,” and the next thing she knows, Carol Burnett is handing Lawrence her gold album in the final episode of season six of the Carol Burnett Show. Recording it came and went like a breeze, they dual-tracked her vocals to create the harmony, and she’s still unsatisfied with the top part. She also notes that recording the song killed off her dying marriage to Russell. In a 2016 interview with Smashing Interviews Magazine, she hints that her hit single played a role:

“Honestly, it did become the device of an already doomed marriage. That song became a hit, and the whole marriage just went downhill.”

The Rest of the Story
As I said in the plug for this post, yes, this is about that Vicki Lawrence. People who already know who she is already knows the rest of the story - e.g., a cast member on the legendary Carol Burnett Show (1967-1978; Lawrence being the only cast member to go wire-to-wire), star of the spin-off “sit-com” Mama’s Family (just ’83-’85, surprisingly, but also syndication), and I swear she was on, like, half of the goddamn Love Boat episodes (she was not). She picked up a couple more gigs after that, a short-lived Talk Show (Vicki!), walk-ons for shows like Laverne & Shirley, Major Dad and Hannah Montana (recurring on the latter) - and, for those interested, both the Classicbands and Smashing Interviews articles cover that in exhaustive, and professionally consistent detail. [Ed. - It took this project to learn how many celebrities have a body of canned answers and anecdotes for interviews.] Before moving on, and to share a personal favorite, I liked the origin story of Mama’s Family:

“They were beautifully written characters by two of the writers on Carol's show. They both hated their mothers. (Laughs). So they created this beautiful homage to their dysfunctional families and then Carol decided she wanted to do it Southern 'cause it's like Tennessee Williams gone nuts, so we have to do it Southern.”

No one expected it to work, so of course it did. But I’m here to write about Lawrence’s singing career, obviously…

…though I basically already have. Either Lawrence or her label tried to follow it up with a song titled, “He Did With Me,” a bitter (yet easy-lisenin') torch-song directed at the woman who came after, or the wife he returned to, but that fizzled at No. 75 (though it rose to No. 20 on the adult contemporary chart). Funny story: that song killed in Australia. She was even able to follow that up Down Under with the single/album, “Ships in the Night,” both of which charted. Her States-side career died, though, but it’s not like she didn’t have a fall-back.

For anyone wondering about Bobby Russell, he had a couple more hits in him. He scored one on his own with “Saturday Morning Confusion,” but someone else sang most of his hits - e.g., (from Wikipedia) “Little Green Apples” for a guy named O. C. Smith (a song Lawrence recorded as well), “Do You Know Who I Am” by Elvis Presley, “The Joker Went Wild” for Brian Hyland and Nancy’s Sinatra’s “Anabell of Mobile.” Most of those play in the pop vein, by the way, and Russell's big single has a sense of humor. Related, if only to the divorce, most of those hits came in the 1970s and Russell’s discography craps out in 1974. It’s not so much a case of, you do the math, than you can see a way it adds up.

The funny thing is, Vicki Lawrence doesn’t have a great voice - e.g., you can hear it crap out early in her stab at “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves.” (Cher, our paths cross again, I see.) While she wasn’t trained in…well, anything (though straight-up legend Harvey Korman mentored her in comedy), but she did put in some time during high school with a touring musical ensemble called The Young Americans (sort of a trip, btw). She didn’t even audition for Carol Burnett, at least not directly. What happened was, an LA reporter wrote a story about a 17-year-old who entered the Miss Fireball of Inglewood, noting she looked like a young Carol Burnett. With a nudge from her mom, Vicki Lawrence wrote a fan note to her with a clipping of the article enclosed. Burnett, who was looking for someone to play her sister on her show, called Lawrence’s father, wound up crashing the show and handing Lawrence the ribbon. Or the sash. Wikipedia says crown, but given who ran the thing, it could have been anything. Anyway, the rest is history…

About the Sampler
Because Spotify only has The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia(Deluxe Edition), I had no sampler to compile - though they do have a couple strays on the side, and may I recommend “There’s a Gun Still Smokin’ in Nashville”?

As much as I mean no disrespect to someone who thrived for years in a ruthless industry, The Night the Lights Went Down in Georgia sounds like what it is - i.e., a cash-in on surprise single. Every song on it is competent, Lawrence’s voice is good enough and, as an actor, she can sell what she's singing, it listens smoothly enough, but you just sort of know you’re not hearing the best possible version of anything on it - something that really comes through when she takes a run at a song someone else made famous (yes, even "Little Green Apples"). It’s worse on “Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves,” but no one’s going to sit through her version of “Killing Me Softly With His Song” when they can dial up the original.

I actually linked to most of the album in the above, but the album does a solid job of repping the times and what people thought would sell. For example, the broad theme of “It Could Have Been Me” is timeless, but some of the ideas and phrasing would never seen vinyl after, say, 1990. And the ending of “Sensual Man” alone probably pushed that into parody at the time.

That’s it for this one. Not that anyone but me cares, but I’ve got to skip next couple listed in the source material, if for different reasons. Till the next one.