Some covers are more equal than others. Good, Better, Best looks at three covers and decides who takes home the gold, the silver, and the bronze.
In terms of commercial metrics, like the number of plays on US radio, or the number of cover versions released, John Hartford’s “Gentle on My Mind” is massively popular and always has been since its 1967 debut. And yes, the most successful version of Hartford’s hit is a cover: namely Glen Campbell’s arrangement, which he recorded with the Wrecking Crew in LA within months of Hartford’s original release.
Both Hartford’s version and Campbell’s version earned Grammys (in different categories) in 1968. Every subsequent cover of “Gentle on My Mind”–and there are several hundreds of them–is most likely a take on Campbell’s version. Hartford didn’t seem to have a problem with Campbell stealing his thunder–see this video in which the two artists perform “Gentle on My Mind” together on the Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour TV show. Both artists revisited the song multiple times through the decades to come; the best of these may be this one, in which Hartford convenes a few bluegrass and country music legends to pick and grin on it.
The song’s chances of success must have seemed thin in 1967 when Hartford first shopped it around. “It violates all the principles of songwriting,” Hartford told an interviewer in 1987. “It’s a banjo tune, it has no chorus. It has a lot of words so that it’s hard to sing.” Indeed, it’s too bare-bones, musically, to amount to much. There’s no chorus, no bridge, no catchy instrumental riff. Second, the song doesn’t slot into any particular genre–it’s not quite bluegrass, country, folk-rock, or pop–it’s all of the above and therefore none of them. Finally, Hartford breaks basic lyric-writing rules (and he breaks them beautifully). His verses are long-winded; his rhyme scheme is offbeat. He crams in janky words and phrases that are difficult to sing. Lines like “I dip my cup of soup back from a gurglin’ cracklin’ cauldron in some train yard” would have most vocalists calling for a rewrite. But this free-spirited prose poem is deeply American in the Walt Whitman/Jack Kerouac tradition, as is fitting for a song of the open road, a song of freedom. The song that shouldn’t work at all works perfectly.
If traveling the backroads and riding the rails and hanging out in hobo camps is the life, why is the song’s narrator always thinking of one special person back home? Who is the person whose door is always open and who is ever in his thoughts? Hartford himself never committed to one definitive interpretation of the song. He admitted that if he had been trying to write a hit song, he would have written it differently.
Hartford also revealed that this quintessentially American song was actually inspired by Doctor Zhivago, the epic Russian novel (and 1965 David Lean film) about the Bolshevik Revolution. And with that, comrades, it’s time to look at three interpretations of this undyingly popular song…
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The title More Than A Whisper – Celebrating The Music Of Nanci Griffith probably says it all, given the disproportionate heft of the footprint left behind by this self-effacing singer. Her mild and bookish persona, all ankle socks and cardigans, might suggest a small town librarian or primary school teacher, but what she gave, and what you got, was so very much more. A consummate writer of literate story songs (she called them folkabilly), Griffith could captivate any an audience with her Texas charm and sweet/sour voice, attracting the best musicians to play by her side. Both as a writer and an interpreter, she lived and breathed the characters in songs she made her own, several of which are well on the to becoming standards. Her run of albums, from her 1978 debut There’s A Light Beyond These Woods through to Storms, a decade and a bit later, was little short of astonishing, the traction of the one building on the next until she became quite the star. And if she became, latterly, drawn, or possibly led, more to the mainstream, with the country hayride honed down a little, still the songs remained the same, elegant constructions, meticulously put together. Illness quietened her workload this century, her last album made in 2012, before her death in 2021.
