Understandable,
when you consider what Page's success meant to country music. As
Bob Allen and Pete Loesch wrote in The Blackwell Guide to Country
Music: "At the outset of the '50s, country music was still
very much a rural cult music in terms of its...'demographic appeal.'
Even in the late '50s, sales of 25,000 on a country hit were deemed
respectable. Yet at the same time, artists like Patti Page and Rosemary
Clooney were having million-sellers with country songs...recorded
in a pop style. Thus the sound of ringing cash registers and the
allure of the more lucrative pop-crossover market became the inspiration
for the 'Nashville sound'...[which] shaped the course of country
music ever since."
With her new album, Page was not trying
for anything so grand. "Our aim was to be contemporary while
remaining true to what Patti is and has always been as a vocalist,"
says Vezner. "She's just an honest singer. She isn't about
vocal gymnastics; she just gets in there and sings."
For
proof, Page offers a breakdown of her November 1999 recording schedule.
"I had one day in the studio," she says, chuckling. "We
put down most of the songs that day. They were really surprised
that I did it like in the old days. You just do it. Now, they spend
weeks in the studio. But they didn't have to spend any time making
me sing in tune." She laughs. "So it was quite a thing
for them. The first song we recorded was 'Tennessee Waltz.' And
I did it in the same key as I did it 50 years ago."
One
of k.d. lang's favorite summer songs is Groove Armada's "At
the River" from the techno group's 1999 album, 1 Vertigo. Of
the song, which samples Page singing "Old Cape Cod," her
homage to sand dunes and salty air, lang told the 1 Minneapolis
Star Tribune, "It's so beautiful." Page would probably
agree; of her more than 160 singles--hits as diverse as "With
My Eyes Wide Open I'm Dreaming," "Confess," "Mockin'
Bird Hill," "Allegheny Moon," and "Doggie in
the Window"--"Old Cape Cod" was her favorite.
Nevertheless,
she acknowledges that the song that made her, that made history,
is "Tennessee Waltz," the namesake of her new album. "Tennessee
Waltz" is the third-highest selling single of all time, behind
Elton John's "Candle in the Wind 1997" and Bing Crosby's
"White Christmas," and the song, co-written by Redd Stewart
and Frank "Pee Wee" King, was adopted as Tennessee's state
song. It's been performed by hundreds of artists, everyone from
Pee Wee himself to Sam Cooke, all of them smitten with a simple
song about love lost.
Most surprising, it was a B-side. In 1950,
Mercury Records suggested that Page, who'd had a few big chart hits
for the fledgling Chicago label, record a Christmas tune at her
debut performance at the Copacabana. The tune was "Boogie Woogie
Santa Claus." As flip-side filler, she recorded "Tennessee
Waltz." Shortly thereafter, concert crowds began screaming
at her to "play the waltz!"
"At first," Page
says, "I had no idea what they were talking about."
They
were talking about a phenomenon, a song that went to No. 1, stayed
on the charts for 30 weeks, and made Page a crossover sensation
in the C&W world. In his book "Country Music USA",
C&W historian Bill C. Malone goes even further than "The
Blackwell Guide", citing this song in particular as having
revolutionized the pop/country industry, saying, "The 'Tennessee
Waltz' alone must be given much of the credit for country music's
commercial surge and the future integration of America's popular
music forms."
To this day, her success annoys as many as
it enchants. Because, so conventional music-crit wisdom goes, it's
unfair that a songstress who preferred strings and lush melodies
to real hillbilly stylin's should be the one who made country music
mainstream. Her entire career is often cited as an example of the
evil scourge of white folk who bleached all the soul out of heretofore
devilishly good tunes. She is, to them, the icon of a plastic age.
Now,
at this point I should note that I am slightly biased, since Patti
Page is my great-aunt. She is my grandmother's sister, the grandmother
who helped raise me, the sweetest woman God ever put on this planet.
So, I'm not exactly a neutral figure in this discussion. That said,
such opinions amuse me. Their subtext is that Patti Page, because
she sings in a lovely vibrato and prefers beautiful jewelry and
gowns and speaks with a perfectly clipped mid-Atlantic accent, is
some sort of aristocrat making money off the hardscrabble souls
who penned songs about love gone bad and such. That is less
than funny, because Page was a typical Depression-era small-town
Okie: She was dirt poor. She was born Clara Ann Fowler, a young
girl who would sometimes have to walk to school barefoot, to save
her one pair of shoes for Sunday. When times were tough for the
family, they would return for a brief time to the cotton fields,
according to my grandmother, where Mrs. Fowler had once worked.
Much of their food came from their garden, and during the summer
they would can hundreds and hundreds of quarts of corn and peas
and peanuts to eat in the winter. When they needed to bathe, they
would draw water from a well, heat it on the stove, and then pour
it into a larger container so that they could all hurry in and scrub
before the water turned cold. Such an upbringing went a long way
toward keeping Page humble. But, she says, the thing that prevented
her from succumbing to the trappings of success was that the media
still dismissed her even when she was on top. "I was never
a media favorite," she says. "No one made me a big star
who no one can talk to. And I feel sorry for these people who can't
even move. I saw that very close up with Elvis. Elvis, Frank Sinatra,
and the Beatles. All through that, all those boy stars had the girls
swooning. But now, with television and the hype and the media, the
girl singers can't move. I doubt if Britney Spears can go outside
her own door." It's a status she has mixed feelings about.
"I'm very glad of it, yes. Because I got to lead a quasi-normal
life, and I got to be a normal person. You do that, and you get
to enjoy it, and the accolades don't go to your head. And what I've
accomplished in this business, I'm very proud of. "But yes,
I should get more recognition for it, but I haven't. I was there
in the beginning, and the innovative things I did, I felt I was
rewarded for at the time." Page was the first to "multitrack,"
or record herself singing backup on her own songs. "Still,
people seem to forget. "And if you think about it, they don't
call Barbra Streisand 'antiquated.' And she has the same type of
songs. And all the time that Elvis was on the chart--well, on the
same chart were songs like 'Allegheny Moon.' And I think this is
where I get a little angry that the media has not given me the credit
that was due me for some of the things that I did." That's
as close as Patti Page comes to approaching upset. Even her Web
site has a courtesy title--www.misspattipage.com. She is as
her music has always been: refined, polite, on the mark...and remembered
most for one song. For it is "Tennessee Waltz" that brings
her full circle, that closes her new album and reaches back five
decades into a post-war bliss to which she gave her voice. It brought
her last year to the storied Ryman Auditorium in Nashville, where
she debuted the songs on " Brand New Tennessee Waltz"
for the appreciative crowd. She had never done a solo show
there. Oh, she had performed on that stage, on the Johnny Cash television
show, years ago. But never a concert. The crowd made loud during
all her songs, the old ones and the new. But at concert's end, when
she began singing the waltz, that's when they jumped to their feet.
"I got something in my throat at the end," Page says,
laughing. "They were applauding at the beginning of the song,
in the middle. ...It was quite emotional. "You know,"
she continues, "I've never stopped thinking about the magic
of this song, because I've never stopped performing it, and people
still ask me about it wherever I go." Because they remember.
And so does she. She remembers when crowds used to rise like that
when she sang, all those touching, welcome memories. She remembers
that it was these people who blessed her life. But also, she remembers
that of all the songs Clara Ann Fowler sang, "Tennessee Waltz"
was her father's favorite. It was, it is, her everlasting gift.
dallasobserver.com | originally published: January 18, 2001
