Guy Mitchell: "Heartaches by the Number"

November 23, 1959 (3 weeks)

It's easy to forget - or not even be aware of - but there's a great deal of humour in country music. Hank Williams lived nearly his entire life in pain, battled drug and alcohol addictions and died at the age of twenty-nine in spite of the fact that he appeared to be around forty-five in virtually every photo taken of him yet many of his songs are funny. Johnny Cash was not without wit himself, even if the crowd at the trendy Viper Room in LA back in 1993 seemed to chortle and holler a little too much. Buck Owens may have had more than a little Ned Flanders in him but his cornball jokes could sometimes land.

The cliche of country being about woeful human tragedy came about for a reason but the "dog died, woman left, car broke down" laments aren't as commonplace as one might think. Nevertheless, though irony dominated nineties' pop and rock, no one told the likes of Garth Brooks, Vince Gill and Shania Twain as mainstream country-pop went through its very earnest peak, which coincided with a fall off in popularity of the more tongue-in-cheek types like Dwight Yoakam. Is it any wonder the overlooked and largely forgotten band BR549 seemed so out of place in 1996?

Country music was less polarized between seriousness and irony back in the fifties. One could be a melodramatic crooner of heartbreak one minute and then be gently taking the piss the next. I hear "Heartaches by the Number" as a comedy song with more than a grain of grim reality to it. (Either that or its an anthem of despair with sly wink) It isn't that Guy Mitchell is uncaring in his sorrow, he's just so utterly resigned to it. If you experienced this many heartaches, you might be similarly callous in your attitude.

The comedy only really comes out by the way Mitchell nonchalantly sings this Harlan Howard composition. Roseanne Cash's cover version from her celebrated 2009 album The List is much more conventional, at least in part due to her beginning with the song's first verse rather than starting with the chorus. Mitchell cuts right to the chase by letting it slip that this is all a bit of a game ("But the day that I stop counting, that's the day my world will end") and the fact that he sounds so happy-go-lucky doesn't help. Or it helps a great deal, if you're anything like me and think that Mitchell is the best thing about this otherwise so-so piece of work.

That's the thing with what until now has been a largely positive review: I like the idea of "Heartaches by the Number" a good deal more than in practice. I prefer my half-baked interpretation of it to the way others might just hear it as yet another pitiful country music tale. (I mentioned him above as someone who could add humour to his recordings but Dwight Yoakam's version from his debut album is just as straight as Cash's) I'd rather be bull-headed than accept the reality that maybe it's just another competent country song and not what the Pet Shop Boys would've been like had they cut their teeth in Nashville.

I could simply being giving him far too much credit and that he was simply a cheerful fella who was building himself up for a career in Hollywood. That's very possibly true. But whatever, at worst he took a by-numbers (see what I did there?) country song and made it fun to listen to. He didn't bring a tear to my eye, didn't allow me to see a part of myself in his music and nothing about spoke to me. But neither did he make me want to roll my eyes, scoff or, heaven forbid, turn the sonofabitch off. I'm not a huge country fan beyond four or five big names so just the fact that I listened can be considered a victory.

Score: 6