Heaven Help the Child

Heaven Help the Child is the 1973 album by country singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury. The album was Newbury's third consecutive release recorded at Cinderella Studios. Noted for its dramatic remakes of four previous Newbury songs: "Sweet Memories", "Good Morning Dear" from Harlequin Melodies, "Sunshine" from Sings His Own and "San Francisco Mabel Joy" from Looks Like Rain, the album is considered equal among Newbury's acclaimed Looks Like Rain and Frisco Mabel Joy. Apart from its definitive versions of three of Newbury's early songwriting hits, the album is also acclaimed for its title track, with its multi-generational narrative, the haunting "Cortelia Clark," and the bluegrass classic "Why You Been Gone So Long." In his AllMusic review of the LP, Thom Jurek declares, "Newbury, for the third time in as many recording sessions, came up with a record that defies categorization. And for the third time in a row, he had done the impossible, created a masterpiece, a work of perfection."

Heaven Help The Child was collected for CD issue on the eight-disc Mickey Newbury Collection from Mountain Retreat, Newbury's own label in the mid-1990s, along with nine other Newbury albums from 1969-1981. In 2011, it was reissued again as part of the four-disc Mickey Newbury box set An American Trilogy on Saint Cecilia Knows, alongside two other albums recorded at Cinderella Sound, Looks Like Rain and Frisco Mabel Joy. This release marks the first time that Heaven Help The Child has been released on CD in remastered form, after the original master tapes (long thought to have been destroyed in a fire) were rediscovered in 2010.

Background

Heaven Help the Child is the third and final installment of Newbury's "Cinderella Trilogy", a series of albums that he recorded at Cinderella Sound, a tiny studio located Madison, Tennessee. The first two albums he cut there, Looks Like Rain (1969) and 'Frisco Mabel Joy (1971), were critically acclaimed for their unique, mysterious atmosphere and poetic songs. Newbury, who had initially gained fame as a songwriter, scored his only pop hit in 1971 when his arrangement of three Civil War ballads, titled "An American Trilogy", hit #29 on the country charts. Elektra boss and Newbury champion Jac Holzman later recalled to Mojo in 2012, "By Heaven help the Child, I think he began to become more comfortable with other instruments expressing his vision."

Composition

Next to "An American Trilogy", "Why Have You Been Gone So Long" is Newbury's most covered song. Guitarist Tom Ghent, who appeared with Newbury at The Bitter End in New York in 1970, later claimed that songwriter Dennis Linde, who was playing bass, suggested that they speed up "Why Have You Been Gone So Long" since most of Newbury's songs were so slow. "We rehearsed it", Ghent recalled later, "and that evening, we kicked it off at about twice the normal speed! Well, Mickey...turned and looked at me, then at Dennis, then at me, then at Dennis...Finally he decided to go along with the joke and just sing it at that tempo."^[2] Newbury stuck with the arrangement, and the song injected a toe-tapping shot of bluegrass into what was otherwise a collection of contemplative, haunting songs on Heaven Help the Child. The title track, which Newbury biographer Joe Ziemer calls Newbury "at his most poetic, a multilevel odyssey woven from threads of life as seen through his eyes,"^[3] won first prize at the Second Annual Tokyo Music Festival, an event that consisted of 609 artists from 36 countries. In 1977, Newbury recalled to Peter O'Brien of the Omaha Rainbow:

I didn't write it specifically for the Festival. It was one of three or four songs they submitted and that was accepted, so I went out to Japan. It was a nice trip. Surprised me, too...There were artists from all over the world. Russia, Belgium, Philippines and everywhere. There was about forty in the finals. It was really quite something to win that... Some of the things were in my head for a long time, like 'We're all building walls instead of bridges' was.

Newbury confessed that "Sweet Memories" was written about a broken engagement: "I was engaged to a girl from Westphalia, Texas and it didn't work out, and the idea for "Sweet Memories" came from that."^[4] "Cortelia Clark" was composed as a tribute to a sixty-two-year-old blind street by that name who perished in a gas fire.^[5] Contrary to popular belief, the version of "San Francisco Mabel Joy" that concludes the album is a straight lift from Newbury's 1969 Mercury album Looks Like Rain rather than a rerecorded or overdubbed version.^[6]

"Sunshine" was released as a single and peaked at #53 on the Billboard country chart and #82 on the pop chart. It just missed the Top 40 on the Canadian adult contemporary chart, reaching #41.

Reception

Heaven Help the Child was not a commercial success, peaking at #172 on the U.S. pop albums chart. Today it is considered another one of Newbury's major works, with biographer Joe Ziemer writing of the album, "He knocks the walls down, of place and time, to break free unchained, and move out into the world and beyond." AllMusic calls "Cortelia Clark" "one of Newbury's great achievements as a songwriter." In 2011 Steve Horowitz of PopMatters wrote, "If Newbury seemed conflicted on 1971’s ’Frisco Mabel Joy, he’d gotten over it by the somewhat celebratory Heaven Help the Child. His musical palette was much more colorful and airy as he sings hopefully, 'we’re all building walls/they should be bridges' and such."

Track listing

All tracks composed by Mickey Newbury

"Heaven Help The Child" - 5:16
"Good Morning Dear" - 5:18
"Sunshine" - 4:34
"Sweet Memories" - 3:28
"Why You Been Gone So Long" - 3:27
"Cortelia Clark" - 5:12
"Song For Susan" - 4:30
"San Francisco Mabel Joy" - 5:43

Personnel

Wayne Moss
David Briggs
Mickey Newbury
Charlie McCoy
Weldon Myrick
Bobby Thompson
Norbert Putnam

Selected cover recordings

"San Francisco Mabel Joy" was heavily covered as both a folk and country song in the early 1970s. Joan Baez recorded the song for her 1971 hit double album Blessed Are... . Waylon Jennings included his version on his 1973 breakthrough Lonesome, On'ry and Mean. The song was also featured on Kenny Rogers' 1978 country smash The Gambler, and John Denver's recording is on his 1981 album Some Days Are Diamonds. The Box Tops recorded a presumably early version under the title "Georgia Farm Boy," which was included as a bonus track on the 2000 reissue of The Letter/Neon Rainbow.
"Sweet Memories" is one of Newbury's most prominent early songwriting successes, and became an early signature song. The first hit version was released by Andy Williams but the song has also been recorded by over 70 artists such as Brenda Lee, Ray Charles, The Everly Brothers, Brook Benton, with recent versions by Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard, and Ray Price on the 2007 album Last of the Breed and by The Time Jumpers for which they received a Grammy nomination in 2008.
"Good Morning Dear" has been recorded by Roy Orbison, Don Gibson, The Box Tops, Ray Charles, as well as Pat Boone, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Frank Ifield.
"Sunshine" was originally released as a single by RCA in the late 1960s. Newbury's song has been recorded by Gene Vincent, Ray Stevens, and Kenny Rogers and the First Edition
"Cortelia Clark" has been recorded by Josh White Jr.
"Why You Been Gone So Long" is Newbury's second most recorded composition. It has been recorded by Carl Perkins, Gene Clark, Clarence White, Tony Rice, Johnny Darrell, and David Allan Coe among others. The song has also been recorded by Jessie Colter (appearing on the 1976 RCA compilation Wanted! The Outlaws and performed as a duet by Jerry Lee Lewis and Dolly Parton on Parton's television show.
"Heaven Help the Child," was covered by Bill Callahan for a 2012 split single release from Saint Cecilia Knows and Drag City.

References

↑
↑ Zeimer 2015, pp. 120–121.
↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 147.
↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 148.
↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 149.
↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 150.

External links

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