James Taylor wrote “Bartender’s Blues” and recorded it for his 1977 Columbia album JT, produced by Peter Asher. Linda Ronstadt sang harmony, Dan Dugmore played pedal steel and Danny Kortchmar guitar, and the song went out as the B-side of Taylor’s single “Handy Man”; on its own it reached only No. 88 on Billboard’s country chart. Taylor later called it “an okay but lightweight song.”
The usual barroom song has a customer pouring out his troubles to the man behind the bar. Here the bartender does the talking. He doesn’t like his work but doesn’t mind the money; he sees “folks with their backs to the wall,” lights their smokes and laughs at their jokes, and thinks about closing down, gassing up the car and mailing in his keys. The chorus says what keeps him there: four walls around him to hold his life, and a honky-tonk angel to hold him tight. By the last verse he has burned his bridges and sunk his ships and is “stranded at the edge of the sea.”
According to George Jones’s memoir I Lived to Tell It All, the CBS executive Rick Blackburn played him Taylor’s demo and he liked it at once. Jones recorded it on 10 October 1977 at Columbia Recording Studio in Nashville with Billy Sherrill producing and Taylor singing harmony; Phil Baugh, Billy Sanford and Reggie Young played guitars, Pete Drake steel, Henry Strzelecki bass, Jim Isbell drums and Hargus “Pig” Robbins piano. Jones remembered cutting his part first and the track being sent to Taylor for his harmony. Epic released it with “Rest in Peace” on the other side at the turn of 1978, and it spent fourteen weeks on the Billboard country chart, peaking at No. 6, his first Top 10 single in two years. It became the title track of his 1978 album Bartender’s Blues and was included again on his 1979 duet collection My Very Special Guests. Jones sang it once more in the autumn of 1994 at Bradley’s Barn in Mount Juliet, Tennessee, this time as a duet with Trisha Yearwood, for The Bradley Barn Sessions.
Bluegrass bands recorded it too. Charlie Moore and his Dixie Partners recorded it in Brighton, Michigan, on 5 July 1978 for the Old Homestead album Cotton Farmer (1980), Moore singing lead with J. C. Hale on tenor and Bill Napier on baritone. Wildfire put it on Uncontained (Pinecastle, 2001), with Robert Hale singing lead, and Jimmy Gaudreau and Moondi Klein recorded it for their 2014 Rebel album If I Had a Boat.
