Profound ‘goodbye songs’ highlight 1970s music scene

Moving into the 1970s, “goodbye songs” by rock’n’roll and country artists began to take new twists and turns to explore the depths of human emotions in dealing with life’s journey.

Welcome singer-songwriter Don McLean to the stage. In 1971, he wrote and recorded “American Pie,” an epic anthem spanning 8 minutes and 36 seconds that revealed a “complicated parable” about the state of society at that time.

 

Journalist Tim Nudd (shown below), writing for PEOPLE magazine in 2016, termed “American Pie” as “one of the great, cryptic masterpieces in the history of American music.”

 

McLean once said: “Basically, in ‘American Pie,’ things are heading in the wrong direction…less ideal, less idyllic. I don’t know whether you consider that wrong or right, but it is a morality song in a sense.”

McLean said that “he felt an inexorable decline in American culture at the time he wrote the song,” Nudd wrote.

 

“The song was inspired, first and foremost,” Nudd said, “by the deaths of musicians Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and J.P ‘The Big Bopper’ Richardson in a plane crash on Feb. 3, 1959 (near Clear Lake, Iowa), the “day the music died.”

McLean was a 13-year-old paperboy in his hometown of New Rochelle, N.Y., when the tragedy occurred, and he mourned the deaths of these early rock stars greatly, Nudd said.

 

“But the rest of the song is a maelstrom of social, cultural and political allusions,” Nudd wrote.

Now, at age 80, McLean continues to remain “quite cagey” when queried about the underlying meanings of his lyrics, causing the song to “remain a subject of continued intense fascination.”

 

What model year Chevy did Don McLean “drive to the levee?” The most popular choice would be a 1957 Bel Air. 

One of the most commercially successful “goodbye songs” in the 1970s belongs to Dolly Parton, who was born in the Locust Ridge area of Sevierville, Tenn.

She wrote and recorded “I Will Always Love You” as a farewell tribute to her business partner and mentor Porter Wagoner.

 

The Dolly Parton website shares the story: “Throughout Dolly’s seven-year stint on ‘The Porter Wagoner Show’ (from 1967-74), she and Porter reigned supreme as one of country music’s most popular duos. However, the little blonde with the powerhouse voice had set her sights on a solo career. As she set forth on her path to make her dreams come true, it would mean leaving the show – and her duet partner.”

“In 1974, Dolly wrote ‘I Will Always Love You’ as her own unique way of saying goodbye to Porter as their professional relationship came to an end. When Dolly first played the song for Porter, he began crying” and said it was “the prettiest song I ever heard.”

 

Wagoner produced the album for Dolly, and the song consequently went to No. 1 on the country charts.

Whitney Houston recorded a pop-ballad arrangement of the song for the 1992 film “The Bodyguard.” (It was her feature film acting debut, starring alongside Kevin Costner.)

 

Houston’s version of “I Will Always Love You” sold more than 25 million copies worldwide, making it the best-selling single of all time by a female solo artist, according to Guinness World Records.

 

This Whitney Houston poster is a collector’s item, because of the error in the printing of the song title.

Also deserving mention as top “goodbye songs” during the decade are: “If you Leave Me Now” (1976) by Chicago, written Peter Cetera, the group’s bass player (shown agove), and “I Will Survive” (1978) by Gloria Gaynor, written by Freddie Perren and Dino Fekaris (shown below).

 

Most folks can sing along with the tune written in 1977 by David Allan Crowe and performed by Johnny Paycheck:

 

Take this job and shove it,

I ain’t workin’ here no more.

A woman done left and took all the reasons

I was working for.