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Bartender’s Blues
“Bartender’s Blues” was written by James Taylor and recorded on his 1977 album JT (Columbia), with Linda Ronstadt singing harmony and Peter Asher producing. Taylor built the song around a deliberate structural reversal: rather than a customer confessing to a sympathetic bartender, the bartender himself narrates his own loneliness — a flip that makes the sentiment land differently than the convention it appears to follow.
CBS executive Rick Blackburn played Jones a demo of the Taylor recording, and Jones liked it immediately. Jones recorded his vocal, then sent the track to Taylor for a harmony overdub — a cross-country back-and-forth that produced two distinct versions of the same song. Jones’s single was released in early January 1978 and reached #6 on the Billboard country chart, his first Top 10 in two years. It became the title track of Bartender’s Blues (Epic, 1978), produced by Billy Sherrill. The two artists also recorded a full duet version, released on Jones’s 1979 album My Very Special Guests.
A notable version is George Jones’s — the recording that gave the song its country-chart life. Jones’s reading of Taylor’s writing produced one of the stranger collaborations in the Nashville–pop crossover tradition: a Massachusetts singer-songwriter’s bar-life meditation re-formed through the voice of the man many consider the greatest country singer who ever lived.
Born this day · September 2, 1912
Johnnie Lee Wills was a Texas-born Western-swing fiddler and bandleader who, as his older brother Bob Wills’s right hand, played banjo and later fiddle in the Texas Playboys before taking over the Tulsa half of the operation in 1940 and fronting Johnnie Lee Wills and All the Boys for the next forty years. His 1949 co-write “Rag Mop” gave the Ames Brothers a 1950 No. 1 pop hit.
- Born September 2, 1912, in Hall County, Texas, the second of four sons of tenant farmers John and Emma Wills.
- Joined his older brother Bob’s Texas Playboys on banjo in 1934, the year the band started broadcasting from KVOO Tulsa.
- Founded his own group, the Rhythmairs, in 1939; returned to the Playboys in 1940 when Bob split the band in two and named Johnnie Lee leader of the Tulsa half.
- Renamed his group Johnnie Lee Wills and All the Boys after Bob moved to California in 1940 and switched from banjo to fiddle.
- Co-wrote “Rag Mop” with steel guitarist Deacon Anderson in 1949 and cut the original version on Bullet Records in early 1950.
- The Ames Brothers’ cover of “Rag Mop” on Coral became a 1950 No. 1 pop hit.
- Represented Oklahoma at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. in 1982.
- Died in Tulsa on October 25, 1984, at age 72.
Also born today: Bill Evans
An editorial introduction to bluegrass — its history, its sound, the theory that explains why it works, and the culture that has carried it for eighty years.
Every song, tune, musician, band, and album in bluegrass — in one deeply searchable database. Filter by key, tempo, chord moves, jam popularity, theme, instrument, and dozens more.
Curated lists for jamming, woodshedding, and discovery — save any as a playlist with one click.
