Dickie Lee Interview
Doug Burke:
Welcome to Back Story Song. I'm your host, Doug Burke. Dickey Lee is a pop and country singer songwriter who began his career in Memphis recording in the legendary Sun Studios during the birth of rock and roll. After writing and recording many early rock and roll and rockabilly songs, he migrated to Nashville where he focused on writing country hits. In Nashville, he found his home and has had over 30 chart topping songs including eight number ones. Earning Dickey induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1995. His songs have been recorded by music legends, including Elvis Presley, George Jones, George Strait, Reba McEntire, Emmylou Harris, Anne Murray, Connie Francis, and many others. Welcome to Back Story Song. Today we have the pleasure of sitting with Dickey Lee, a Nashville 1995 Hall of Fame inductee. Dickey, it's an honor and a pleasure to have you here.
Dickey Lee:
Doug's, good to be here. How are you doing?
Doug Burke:
I am fantastic. And I really mean that. I mean, you have written songs and performed from the birth of rock and roll through the age of modern country music till today and you're still performing and it's an amazing treat. It's wonderful to have you here on Back Story Song.
Dickey Lee:
Well, I'm getting pretty old and it's good to still be around here.
Doug Burke:
Why don't we start at the beginning, Dickey? When did you start writing songs and why did you start writing songs?
Dickey Lee:
Oh, wow. Well, I probably started trying to write when I was in about the eighth grade. The school I went to, it went all the way from first grade to 12th grade. When I was in the eighth grade, there was a guy who was a senior there. He was kind of Mr. Everything. He was a star on a football team and he played guitar. He would play his guitar sometimes on these assemblies on our Friday assemblies, and I thought, "Wow, man. I want to do what he does because he gets all the girls." So I went out for football and I started taking a few guitar lessons. That's what got me started.
Doug Burke:
I think getting the girls and losing the girls were a big theme in your songs that we're going to talk about. But your first chart success was She Thinks I Still Care.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah, as a songwriter I kind of ... It's really weird because I started off with probably the most successful song I've ever had as a songwriter. It started ... George Jones first recorded this song in 1963. And by 1975, I think we'd had about over 500 recordings on it, and it's still recorded today.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. Elvis Presley, Connie Francis, Leon Russell, Anne Murray changed it to He Thinks I Still Care. You had a lot of grates on that one. Tell me about the backstory on that song.
Dickey Lee:
Well, it's really funny that there was actually a real story to this song because there was a girl I was really ... Fell in love with. I was crazy about her, and she dumped me. So I wrote this song about her, but I'm really thankful to her today.
Doug Burke:
Is it a song of denial, right?
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. And I know her today. We're friends, so everything turned out really well.
Doug Burke:
You thank her for inspiring, being the muse behind the song?
Dickey Lee:
I have in the past, yeah.
Doug Burke:
That's great.
You actually started with your own group, right? Early on in your career, you worked with Allen, and you were at the Sun Records recordings in the 50s. I mean, what was that like? I mean, that's the beginning of rock and roll.
Dickey Lee:
Well, there was a disc jockey. I don't know if you've heard him or not, I guess you probably have. Dewey Phillips, who's the first accolade that ever played Elvis. This was about 1957. He played the first Elvis record. But then in '57, I went down to his studio. It was on from 9:00-12:00 at night, and I went down there one night and waited for him to get off. I asked him if I could play a couple of songs for him, and he said yeah, so I did. And he said, "Those are pretty good songs." He said, "You got a band?" I said, "No, I don't." He said, "Why don't you put a band together. And when you do, you call me and come back. I want to hear him with a band." So I got these guys together, and we practiced for a few months. And Allen Reynolds was one of the guys who ... At the time, I went to what was then Memphis State University and Allen went to Southwestern is now Rhodes College in Memphis. So I got these guys together, and then Allen got a couple of guys together over at Rhodes, and a couple other guys singing background. Then I got a rhythm section together. We rehearsed, went back, played it for Dewey and he loved it. So he recorded it right there in the ... It was WHBQ Radio, right there in their studios. He got it on a little fly by night label, it's called Tampa Records. It was a local hit, it was kind of a Mid South hit and it went all the way to number two on the local Memphis charts. It came out the same time that Elvis', All Shook Up came out, and we just followed him up the charts. He was always one slot ahead of us. And we never got to number one. He got to one and we got to two.
Doug Burke:
What was the name of that song?
Dickey Lee:
It's called Dream Boy/Stay True Baby. It was a two sided hit. They played both hits, and I'd written both of the songs. Elvis kept us from going to number one, but the record was in the charts there for about 19 weeks. Because of that record, Dewey got me on Sun Records.
Doug Burke:
Okay. So you met some of the legendary people at Sun Records?
Dickey Lee:
I met most of them, yeah.
Doug Burke:
What was that like? Sam Phillips and those guys?
Dickey Lee:
That was great. Yeah, Sam Phillips. And Elvis when I got on Sun, he just left. He'd gone to RCA the previous year. But there was Johnny Cash ... Let's see Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison.
Doug Burke:
All you guys hanging out in the Sun Studios.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
And Allen Reynolds, for our listeners, went on to produce many of Garth Brooks' hits, right?
Dickey Lee:
All of them.
Doug Burke:
Among other things -
Dickey Lee:
We came to Nashville together in about 1969, and we came up here to write. When I was at Sun Records ... Let me preface that. When I was at Sun Records, Jack Clement was my engineer and producer. He later left Sun and we got to really be good friends, Jack and Allen and myself. So when he went to Nashville, he got us to hang along with him. He stayed in touch. Then about 1961, he moved to Beaumont, Texas. He met a guy named Bill Hall, who was a manager of ... Oh wow, The Big Bopper, a couple other guys and they went down there together in Beaumont and built a studio and got Allen and me to come down there and that's where I recorded my first national hit, Patches. And that's what got me started really going.
Doug Burke:
And that was written by someone else.
Dickey Lee:
Barry Mann and Larry Kolber, they were New York writers.
Doug Burke:
Right. Right. And you had Laurie (Strange Things Happen) as well. Sort of teenage tragedy songs.
Dickey Lee:
Well, it's funny, Doug, that the Laurie song, Allen and me and another guy, his name was Mitt Addington. He was a professor. He was a psychology professor at Memphis State. We wrote together some. Allen and me didn't write this song, but we had a little songwriting session one night in the back of his house. His own little woodshed, we'd hang out in it. I was a big Stephen King fan, and I read everything Stephen King wrote. And one night, we were just talking about writing stuff and then I said, "What do you think it'd be like to have a ghost story on a record?" And we had to kick that around a little bit and nothing happened. But about a month later, Mitt comes over to his house one night and he's written the song, Laurie. Make a long story short, we played around and we eventually recorded it, and it was a big record for us.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. Patches was banned because of its suicide theme by the radio stations, but it's sold over a million copies, which is-
Dickey Lee:
Well, when the record first came out, we were down in Beaumont. This was about 1962, '63. The record came out in the latter part of '61 I think. But nobody would play it because of the double suicide and the record was out for about four months before it got any play at all. And Bill Hall, he got this disc jockey in Beaumont finally to start playing it. And as soon as he played it, the phones went wild. And from there, Houston got wind of it. When it started off, it bounced around from city to city. But everybody when they first start playing it, would just go crazy.
Doug Burke:
You're writing these rock songs in this era, it's fair to say your pre country era.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
And your first big charting song was, I Saw Linda Yesterday. Tell me about this. You wrote this with Allen.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. Allen and I wrote this song. We were trying to write ... George Jones had recorded She Thinks I Still Care, and we were trying to write a followup song for him and we started the song called I Saw Her Yesterday. And then they were talking to us, they said, "We need to get another record ready for you guys to follow Patches up with." The way that song was, I didn't want to really get categorized as singing the death song. I wanted to do something really up tempo. We changed I Saw Her Yesterday into I Saw Linda Yesterday and made it ... And picked a tempo for it.
Doug Burke:
You gave her personification. You got the Dum dee dum Dee Dee, can you do that for me?
Yeah. I know Gary U.S. Bonds had Quarter to Three in the charts around this time, very similar. What inspired that kind of sound?
Dickey Lee:
We were just playing around with it. We were just having fun when we started off, it was a ballad. And then we just started playing with it and picking up the tempo, and just doing all kinds of crazy stuff. We'd sing these dum dee da lee things. I mean, at first I probably didn't even realize that would be a part of the song. We liked what we were fooling around with so we said, "Let's see if we can do something with this thing."
Doug Burke:
This is about another brokenhearted guy, right? There's a lot of these brokenhearted guys in your songs here, right? This is your first.
Dickey Lee:
This is kind of a happy uptempo brokenhearted song.
Doug Burke:
But there was no Linda in your life.
Dickey Lee:
My wife's name was Linda, but I met her later and it had nothing to do with that name. It was just a coincidence.
Doug Burke:
And when you met her, did she know you had written this song, I Saw Linda Yesterday and said, "Hey, I'm your Linda."
Dickey Lee:
I actually met her before I wrote the song, and we got married later on. Everybody thought I wrote the song for her, and she knew I didn't do.
Doug Burke:
Did you play the song at your wedding?
Dickey Lee:
No. No.
Doug Burke:
No? No? Okay.
Doug Burke:
Another one of your songs that has had enormous legs. I don't even know if you know how strong the legs are on this song. But Ruby Baby was covered by Dion. Tell me about this.
Dickey Lee:
I always liked that song. Way before Dion cut it, I liked it. I would play around with it a lot and just sing it. I started messing around with it and got a little different type feel on it. It was a fun song to sing, so I sang it a lot before I ever even thought about recording it. And everyone thought, "Well, let's record it and see what happens."
Doug Burke:
Was there a Ruby you made up ... Just tell me about the song. Where did Ruby Baby come from? What inspired it?
Dickey Lee:
Well Ruby, I'm trying to think of a ... Boy, I should have been prepared for this but it was a group, they were ... I think they weren't Atlantic Records way back in the fall in the early '50s had the song Ruby Baby. Dion had a record on it. Three years after that, we did it.
Doug Burke:
Did you know it was part of the Steely Dan repertoire because Donald Fagen put it on the Nightfly album?
Dickey Lee:
No, I did not know that.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, you got to go look at that.
Dickey Lee:
All right.
Doug Burke:
And listen to that. That's why I say this has had more legs than you even know about. Because it's so classic that people don't even recognize its origin, it's just become part of musical vernacular, I think.
Dickey Lee:
Oh, I know. And it's killing me I can't think of the original artists. It was a Black group in a Black quartet.
Doug Burke:
From the '50s?
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. Uh-huh.
Doug Burke:
It has that kind of Doo-wopy sound, right? Is that-
Dickey Lee:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
Classic Dion sound. And did it go far for Dion? I don't remember.
Dickey Lee:
I think it was a pretty big record for him, I'm not sure exactly. I always loved Dion. I was a Dion fan growing up too.
Doug Burke:
But he was from New York. He was from a different place, but had a kind of a Memphis sound. At this point, would you say you are this Memphis sound? I mean ... Because what I want to talk about is your song, Memphis Beat, which I love.
Dickey Lee:
This is a really funny story. This is a song that Allen and I, and Mitt Addington ... the professor I was telling you about, we wrote this song. I think it was around 1966, still living in Memphis and Jerry Lee Lewis recorded it then he named his band The Memphis Beat.
Doug Burke:
Wow.
Dickey Lee:
Actually, he put the song in an album. He didn't even have a single with it. He just put it in an album, named his band The Memphis Beat. After that, we forgot about it. So fast forward all the way to about 2015, which I'm talking we're 50, 60 years later. All of a sudden, I started getting royalties for Memphis Beat. BMI royalties and I was thinking, "What's going on here?" Because the royalties were pretty good. I was thinking, "How did this happen? Who's playing this thing? Did somebody else record it?" But I checked it out and I finally found out, there was a TV show they got started about that time and it's called Memphis Beat. It was a cop show. In their background, they use Southern rock music. And the Memphis Beat turned out to be the theme song for the TV show. I don't even know how they found it. I just figured maybe they went to the archives and found a song with the same title of their cop show. So they liked it, and they did it. So that was pretty weird.
Dickey Lee:
And not only that, about that same time, they had a contest in Memphis for the most popular song that had ever been written about Memphis. And you know there are a lot of them like Chuck Berry's Memphis, and all. And they picked the top 100 most favorite songs written about Memphis and Memphis Beat came in number one.
Doug Burke:
Wow. It's a classic. So it starts, "Down the Mississippi where the water gets muddy, 44 school where the kids don't study." 44 school, where's that? I tried to look that up, I couldn't find it.
Dickey Lee:
44 school. I don't know, I guess I figured it out there were about around 44 schools in Memphis.
Doug Burke:
And none of the kids study there because there was too much music going on at the time, is that-
Dickey Lee:
That was kind of a thing.
Doug Burke:
No one likes to brag about studying in elementary and high school, right?
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. Everybody was rocking and rolling down there.
Doug Burke:
And then you say, "Ridin' on a Honda from Arizona, Houston, Boston, Kansas City. We got New Orleans and a doo wa diddy." What's a doo wa diddy?
Dickey Lee:
Beats me, but it sounded good.
Doug Burke:
It rhymed.
Dickey Lee:
It rhymed.
Doug Burke:
Well, talk about the Bo Diddley beat. I was wondering if someone could tell me what that is. I know it when I hear it, but I just want to hear someone explain to me what it is.
Dickey Lee:
It's just kind of the -
Doug Burke:
And that's the Do-Wah-Diddy? Is that the Do-Wah-Diddy too? Or is the Do-Wah-Diddy different than the Bo Diddley beat?
Dickey Lee:
I would call that the Bo Diddley beat.
Doug Burke:
That's been used in so many songs.
Dickey Lee:
Oh, man. I know. I know. Jerry Lee's record, his wasn't quite ... Mine was more of a Bo Diddley beat than his was. His was a little more straight, just rock and roll.
Doug Burke:
So Jerry Lee named his band after the song, did he include this in his set list almost religiously?
Dickey Lee:
I have no idea.
Doug Burke:
No idea.
Dickey Lee:
I doubt it. I don't know. But he didn't name his band after that, the Memphis Beat.
Doug Burke:
You started writing more in the country vein. I mean, Jack Clement is also in the Hall of Fame.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. In fact, Jack Clement is in that Hall of Fame. He's also in the Country Music Hall of Fame. He was inducted about three or four years ago.
Doug Burke:
Legend of course. Let's talk about some of your country songs from this era. You want me just throw names out?
Dickey Lee:
Sure. Yeah.
Doug Burke:
I've Been Around Enough to Know.
You wrote this with Bob McDill.
Dickey Lee:
Bob is a guy that Allen and I met when we were down in Beaumont, Texas. We were down there from about '62-'64. We stayed in a hotel down there, and they had this little tap room down there and people would come in and sing a lot. Bob would come in, and he had a little folk group and they were there on weekends. In fact, Janis Joplin used to hang out down there. That was just a little before me, but they said she would come in there and do her homework while she was listening to these bands play. We hit it off with Bob, got to be good friends. And then when Allen and I got moved up to Nashville by Jack, we got Bob to move too. Well, actually we moved from Beaumont to Memphis, to Nashville. We got Bob to move up to Memphis. And then Jack got us to move on from Memphis to Nashville, and we got McDill to move on up there. We said, "Man, come on. Come on up here and we'll write some country songs." And McDill said, "I can't write country songs. I don't do that." But-
Doug Burke:
He was wrong.
Dickey Lee:
Oh wow. He was very wrong. So we all ended up in Nashville.
Doug Burke:
Been there ever since, thank goodness. So I've Been Around Enough to Know, one of your songs wrote with Bob. Another song about a guy in denial.
Dickey Lee:
This song's got ... It's got a story, I guess all of them do. But we wrote a song for a girl. We thought this was a girl song. When we wrote it, the publishing company gave it to a guy. There was a Cajun singer by the name of Jo-El Sonnier. I don't know if you're familiar with him or not?
Doug Burke:
Yeah. Yeah. J-O -E-L?
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. Yeah. Jo-El Sonnier. He recorded the song, they put it out. And his record, it was ... If you never heard it, you got to check it out. It was great. And he sang some Cajun French on the song. We thought it was going to be a smash, and it really didn't do very much. Bob and I loved this song, we just thought it was a hit. We pushed it around for years trying to get somebody to do it. And about eight years after the Sonnier record, a guy named John Schneider came into our office one day in the publishing company and he had some modern success with RCA. He was a pretty good singer. He wanted to go country. I mean, he loved country. He came in looking for stuff and I wasn't even there that day he came in, but they were playing him songs and played them for a while and he didn't hear anything. He said ... I'll tell you what he said, "Play me something that you would never even think of me doing. Just play me some songs that you guys like." And the guy who was running the publishing company at the time, Bob Carse, he pulls out I've Been Around Enough To Know. He plays it for Schneider, and John says, "Man, I love that song." He records it. And when they put that song out ... This is funny. There are a lot of pop singers if their careers burnout or whatever, they try to sing country with the thinking of, "Well, I can't make it in pop. I'll just record country." Which country disc jockeys didn't like that. This is going to happen, when John Schneider puts his country record out as good as it is, they're not going to play it because they're going to have that attitude. So when they put the record out, it was on Warner Brothers. Instead of the writer's name, they just put a big question mark on all the DJ promotion copies.
Doug Burke:
So they wouldn't know it was a pop singer.
Dickey Lee:
And they started playing it and it's like people went crazy. The song, it got such play, it started selling. And then of course after they started playing it, they found out who it was. But that song was actually in the singles charts for 58 weeks.
Doug Burke:
Wow. Wow.
Dickey Lee:
And a number one record with it. But anyway, talk about a story of a song. Started out eight years ago with a record that didn't make it and culminates with John recording it and having a smash with it.
Doug Burke:
But I find it interesting. It was written with your intention of having a female vocalist do it, but it's kind of better that it's the guy who knows that the woman doesn't love him but really is begging for her to keep him in some ways. Is that-
Dickey Lee:
Once he had a hit with it, it definitely sounded like a guy should do it.
Doug Burke:
You can't think of a woman doing it now, right?
Dickey Lee:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
There's no personal experience on this one, right?
Dickey Lee:
No, we just wrote it. We thought we had a pretty good song.
Doug Burke:
I really like these songs. I may jump around timeline wise here. But In a Different Light, this is the office fantasy.
Dickey Lee:
That's one of my favorite recordings of all time as far as any song I had anything to do with. The record itself was one of my favorites. It was reproduced by Doug Johnson and on Doug Stone. And the way this song originated was, at the time, Bob McDill, and myself, and another friend of ours, songwriter Bucky Jones ... We wrote a lot together. We wrote for Polygram at the time. And Polygram, we thought we had some of the best looking women who worked in our office. We thought we had the best looking women in town in our office. So one day I said, "You know what? We ought to write an ode to the girls of Polygram." This is what it turned out to be, In a Different Light.
Doug Burke:
Yeah. And now in the #MeToo era, this would get you in a lot of trouble maybe but-
Dickey Lee:
Oh gosh.
Doug Burke:
... I think it's okay, because I think a lot of people do meet their spouses at the office even to this day. I mean, you have in general a lot in common. You're working in a company that-
Dickey Lee:
We were with a big company, but we had a small group and it was like family there. The writers, and all the girls, all the staff, and everything. Everybody was just crazy about everybody, it was just a fun thing. They got a big kick out of it too.
Doug Burke:
Oh, the girls did because they knew it was about them?
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. Yeah. That was a compilation of the girls at Polygram.
Doug Burke:
Okay. There's no one specific woman here that gets the attribution, huh?
Dickey Lee:
Oh, yeah.
Doug Burke:
You're the First Time I've Thought About Leaving. Big song for you. Reba recorded it?
Dickey Lee:
Yeah, Reba recorded it. And gosh, it was either her first or second number one record. That's when she had just started. I wrote that with a buddy of mine, a really good songwriter, Kerry Chater. We were just trying to write a song. This is probably ... As far as hit songs, this is probably the quickest ever written one because we wrote this song and it took three hours. And just to show you how smart I am. At the time, Reba, she was recording for Mercury Records and she was produced by a guy named Jerry Kennedy. When they were looking for songs for Reba and I had another song ... I can't even think now what the song was, but I thought, "Oh Reba's going to love this." So sent it over to their office but I thought, "We just wrote this song, You're the First Time I've Thought About Leaving, I'm just going to stick this song on there too. I don't think anything will happen with it, but I'm going to stick it on there." So they get back to us and say, "Hey, we love this song. I think we're going to do it with Reba." And I said, "Oh, that's great. You're going to do so and so?" And they said, "No, we're doing You're the First Time I've Thought About Leaving." And I thought about leaving, "Oh." So anyway, that shows you how smart I am.
Doug Burke:
This is a song about someone thinking about having an affair?
Dickey Lee:
Yes. Well, the old cheating songs.
Doug Burke:
Cheating song. Okay.
Dickey Lee:
I don't write songs like that anymore. Since I become a Christian, I quit writing cheating song.
Doug Burke:
Did you? Christianity drove the cheating song out of you? You could still write them, can't you?
Dickey Lee:
No. It's a slice of life. It's not like you're promoting it, it's just it happens.
Doug Burke:
You go from writing teenage tragedies to-
Dickey Lee:
Cheating songs.
Doug Burke:
Here's one. Let's Fall to Pieces Together, George Strait.
That was ... Do you remember Johnny Russell? He was a country singer, he's a star. He's a good friend of mine and a guy named Tommy Rocco. We wrote that song and George Strait did that one. I remember saying, "Let's just write a really downhome country song." This just came out. I said, "Pardon me, you left you tears on the jukebox." I thought, "Wow. That's crazy. Let's try to do something with that." So we did and George Strait later recorded it. I like this because this is a rebound love song. This is not a breakup. I mean, it's about two broken hearts who meet crying over the jukebox.
Dickey Lee:
Right. Yeah. See, I was ... Even though I started my career as a rock and roll singer, I grew up, I loved country. I was a hillbilly way back, but I was influenced by Elvis at the time and that got me away from the country a little bit as far as what I was doing and what I was writing until I got back to Nashville and started writing these songs. But country songs, even the sad songs, they're just fun. They're fun.
Doug Burke:
Tell me about the musical part of your country songwriting. I mean, we've been talking about the lyrics, but you're quite a performer. How do some of the melodies come to you?
Dickey Lee:
I and pretty much everybody that I write with, we never wrote the lyric and then tried to put a melody to it, or vice versa. We just start strumming around with our guitars and singing lines, and getting something we liked and go from there. But the melody and the lyrics, they were devolved together.
Doug Burke:
Interesting.
Dickey Lee:
A lot of people don't write like that. A lot of people, they will write the lyric, and then they'll put a melody to it or vice versa. But I never did that.
Doug Burke:
In my conversations, I have learned that there's almost no rule for that. Almost no rule by song, or some people have a methodology that they do use, it works for them almost in an intuitive inspirational way.
Dickey Lee:
Sometimes I'd be writing and I'd always keep my door shut because if people heard me, they'd think I was crazy. I just sing all these crazy kind of melodies with crazy kinds of words and everything else, I always kept my door shut.
Doug Burke:
I like some of your other more love songs. I'll Be Leaving Alone, Charley Pride.
Dickey Lee:
Well, that one's got a story. A buddy of mine, Wayland Holyfield who's a Hall of Fame songwriter. We wrote that song. We wrote that over at my house. Gosh, it took us ... We spent a few days on it I guess. But we were trying to finish it up one night, and we were drinking wine and trying to finish this song up. I remember I had a little bar in my office, we were writing, using the bar as a counter. We were both just dead tired, and we were one line away. We were trying to finish up, this is probably about two o'clock in the morning. All of a sudden Wayland said, "I got it. I got it." I said, "Great. Great." So he's got his head in his hand like he's really thinking, and all of a sudden I'm waiting for this great line and all of a sudden I hear, "Zzzz." We did finally finish it, and then we both recorded for RCA. Charley and his wife were really good friends, so I got the song to him. Charley said, "They like it at RCA, but it's going to an album cut though." And back then ... It completely turned over time. Back in those days, you wanted a single, that's where all the money was on albums. Later on it was just vice versa. But Charley said ... Well he said he's going to be on the album, and this is a true love song.
Doug Burke:
This is a true love. This is about avoiding infidelity.
Dickey Lee:
Exactly.
Doug Burke:
The anti-cheater song.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. So anyway, where Charley's from and he's from Dallas, where he really is from, well, the problem was used Tulsa. And Charlie's wife, Rozene, she said, "Dickey." She said, "I want that word changed. I want that town change from Tulsa to Dallas." She said, "If you do that, we'll make it a single." I said, "Okay, Rozy. Whatever you say." So anyway, I get a call from Charley one morning about seven or eight o'clock and he says, " He says, "Going to be a single, baby." I said, "Awesome." So anyway, that's a great way to wake up.
Doug Burke:
I like this song's chorus, and it's similar to She Thinks I Still Care, in that it's a one line chorus. "I'll be leaving alone." That's it, that's the chorus.
Dickey Lee:
Great line. Yeah, great line.
Doug Burke:
The hook line is the chorus, and it's like there's nothing else that needs to be said.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. Yeah, that's true. It was also fun song to write.
Doug Burke:
You don't seem to be focused on a verse, verse chorus structure.
Dickey Lee:
Back then, it would be verse, verse, bridge, verse. Or verse, chorus, verse, chorus. And I didn't give too much thought to those things until we actually got an idea first and played around musically with it a little bit. And sometimes, it'll kind of take you there. I just rather than trying to plan it out before you do anything, if you just follow what's coming out of your mouth in your head, it'll just take you where it needs to go. At least that's the way I worked, and most of the guys with me did the same.
Doug Burke:
And how do you know when a song is done, Dickey?
Dickey Lee:
I've always been kidded about my guys. They say, "You can never finish a song." They're putting me down. They said, "You never can finish it." They said, "Even when we finished it, even one of the songs was released, you're still trying to write the song." I guess, well, if you got a verse, the chorus, the verse, the chorus, I guess that's enough.
Doug Burke:
You need a bridge in there, and then another chorus and you're done.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. That's a good question.
Doug Burke:
Well, I think every song is different so it's not fair to say a song is done when you do X, Y, and Z. It depends on the song I think.
Dickey Lee:
You just feel like, "Well, there's nothing else to say."
Doug Burke:
Well, here's a story song that you wrote, The Door is Always Open, recorded by Dave & Sugar and Waylon Jennings.
Dickey Lee:
That was a song that Bob McDill and I wrote, that was Dave & Sugar's second number one record. There is no real story there, we just wrote it in. I was at RCA as an artist at the same time, so it was easy to get to the artists over there. You didn't have to go through a lot of stuff. We gave it to Jerry Bradley, who was recording Dave & Sugar at the time and they liked it, recorded it, and had a really big record with it. You wouldn't call it a cheating song, but-
Doug Burke:
No, it's not. But it is an open door invitation I guess to cheat. If you ever get tired of your -
Dickey Lee:
Right.
Doug Burke:
I find the Dave & Sugar version very different than the Waylon version because they got the male and female parts in their version.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. And made it almost a different song, a whole different feeling. Jamey Johnson also did it. I think he heard Waylon's version, that's what got him to do the song. I know he was a big fan of Waylon's. We've had a few cuts on it. Some of them I can't remember who did it, but those were big ones. But the Dave & Sugar record was by far the ... As far as sale, that was the big record.
Doug Burke:
Did you have number one parties back then together? Number one party on these things?
Dickey Lee:
Yeah, the companies would have them. Like RCA, if their artists had a number one record, they might have a number one party. And then BMI and ASCAP, if they had a song and it was a number one, they would have a party. So there were are parties around Nashville all the time.
Doug Burke:
Do you remember your first number one party?
Dickey Lee:
I really don't. I've been three or four of them.
Doug Burke:
Must've been good parties.
Dickey Lee:
Well, my first number one was George Jones, and there was no number one party then. That was-
Doug Burke:
They didn't do them back then, huh?
Dickey Lee:
But they always ... Nashville looks for an excuse to have a party.
Doug Burke:
Yeah, it sure does. It's like 24 hours there these days. Party never stops. You go on Broadway, it's crazy.
Dickey Lee:
Well, you're not kidding.
Doug Burke:
Everybody's Reaching Out for Someone, The Cox Family.
Dickey Lee:
Even before The Cox Family, there was a girl by the name of Pat Daisy, brand new artist. I guess she was in her early 20s, really pretty girl. They were trying to get her start it. Well, she was the first one to record the song and she had a big hit with it. What's funny, she told RCA after she had this record, she quit the business. She had a small child and she said, "This music business is keeping me away from my little boy, and I want to raise him. I want to be there to raise him." So she actually ... You got to admire somebody that does that. She quit the business, probably a pretty lucrative business it would have been for her too. But she did quit, stayed home and she was really a sweet girl. But anyway, then The Cox Family did it. That's a great story too because The Cox Family, I didn't know any of them, but they were ... I love that group. Kind of a gospel group. Alison Krauss produced this album on them, and the title of the album was Everybody's Reaching Out For Someone. It got Bluegrass Album of the Year.
Doug Burke:
And when you heard that version, were you like, "Wow." I mean, they took your song in a different direction. You and Allen wrote this, Allen Reynolds.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah, I love it. That's one of my favorite records that I had anything to do with.
Doug Burke:
What's it like when you ... A lot of your songs, you've written and performed as your own artist and then you hear someone reinterpret them. What's your favorite version where you heard it and you're like, "Wow, I almost like that better than my own version."?
Dickey Lee:
Yeah, there have been some. I like all of them better than my versions when I hear them, but it's really great. There's something you never get over when somebody records your song and it really comes off well, and you hear it for the first time. It's just like everyday is Christmas, it's just like magic. I have been so lucky to have had so many really great recordings on some of my songs. You never get over that thrill when you hear your song for the first time signed by somebody else when it's really good.
Doug Burke:
Well, tell me about some of those thrills. I mean, you don't have to rank them and say, "This was the best one." But tell me some of the ones that you really love the version that they did.
Dickey Lee:
Oh god. Well, I'll tell you what just flat knocked me out was Tracy Byrd's, Keeper of the Stars.
Doug Burke:
Well, that ... Let's talk about that to finish, because that was the last song I really wanted to cover.
This is a great love song, Dickey. This is a really all time great love song.
Dickey Lee:
That's really funny because it was like when we wrote the song for George Strait, a friend of mine, Danny Mayo, who was a writer on this ... He died a few years ago. But he came over to my house one night and he said, "I got this title. I don't know what to do, but I love the title." And I said, "What is it?" He said, "The Keeper of the Stars." And I said, "Wow." And back when he said it, I said ... I don't know how these little things pop out, but I said -
Doug Burke:
That came right to you. He said, "The Keeper of the Stars." And that line, the opening line in song, came to you.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah.
Doug Burke:
That's like that.
Dickey Lee:
Yeah. When he said it, I'll bet it wasn't ... A minute didn't go by that I just said that. We got stuck. We were having problems with the chorus and Danny got this friend of his, Karen Staley ... good songwriter. She came in and she wrote the chorus practically, and just saved us. Saved us and the song. She really completed it and made it a great song. So anyway ... I remember you asked me one time, you said, "Are there any songs you have that you would love to ... If you could get somebody to record one today, what would be the songs?" I'd love to get a great pot cut on Keeper of the Stars.
Doug Burke:
Oh, yeah. Like who? Which pop star's voice would you want on that?
Dickey Lee:
Oh, man. I don't know. Like ... I mean, well, this is ... There's so many. Golly, there's just so many great pop stars. I don't keep up with music as well as I used to. I mean, we're going back now like 20 years, but like a Michael Bolton type thing.
Doug Burke:
Or like even a Michael Bublé, or I could even see like your Christina Aguilera type. A Gwen Stefani, she's there in Nashville. Maybe you can get in front of Gwen to do it, or get Gwen and Blake to do it together. You know?
Dickey Lee:
But I just think it could be a great pop record because-
Doug Burke:
I agree.
Dickey Lee:
I think the material, I think it's timeless. That lyric “go forever.”
Doug Burke:
I personally think it's a lot harder than most people think to write a great love song. But here, you've done it. Tell me about that. I mean, am I right or wrong? What inspires a great love song?
Dickey Lee:
You're right. I think it's just the way you think. I mean, I'm a romanticist anyway. I even love some of the old Hallmark movies, man. But here's the thing, every time you write a song like that ... For me, anyway, I go through this little terror thing. I'm thinking, "I don't know where that came from. God must have given it to me, and I'm afraid I'll never be able to write anything else like that." I always go through a terror period. But you get through it.
Doug Burke:
Well, you've written a great love song. You've written so many great hits over the years of all kinds of stories from the original rock era of Sun Records in Memphis to Nashville. We're grateful to have you still performing. Dickey, are you going to be touring once this coronavirus ends and we're allowed to get out on the road again?
Dickey Lee:
I hope so. I've had four weeks of tours canceled. I mean, four shows canceled this month in July. They said, "Don't think of it as cancellation, we're just postponing it." So I don't know. But I've got one show that just got booked. It's the first week of December, I think, in Gonzales, Texas.
Doug Burke:
Okay.
Dickey Lee:
That's my next show that I know about. We'll see what happens.
Doug Burke:
I want to thank you for coming on Back Story Song, And I want to thank our recording engineer, DJ Wyatt and the booth, our social media Director, Cameron Grace, and all the people who are following us on Twitter, and Instagram. And thank you to our listeners here on Back Story Song. And thank you especially Nashville Songwriter Hall of Fame writer, Dickey Lee.
Dickey Lee:
Well, hey Doug, I want to thank you for having me on. I hope I did okay.
Doug Burke:
You did great. Keep writing songs and keep playing, we'll get to see you in Gonzales hopefully in December.
Dickey Lee:
I'll be out there until I fall over dead. Say hi to your listeners for me.
