His Eye Is on the Sparrow (Mickey Newbury LP)

His Eye Is on the Sparrow
Studio album by Mickey Newbury
Released 1978
Recorded Acuff-Rose Sound Studios, Nashville, Tennessee
Genre Country
Length 32:10
Label Hickory
Producer Ronnie Gant
Mickey Newbury chronology
Rusty Tracks
(1977)		 His Eye Is on the Sparrow
(1978)		 The Sailor
(1979)
Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
Allmusic [1]

His Eye Is on the Sparrow is an 1978 album by Mickey Newbury. It was his second release on Hickory Records.

Recording and composition

His Eye Is on the Sparrow uses many of the same personnel as Newbury's previous album Rusty Tracks, with Ronnie Gant returning as producer and film scorer Alan Moore once again conducting the strings. Musically, the two albums are very similar and would have worked well as a double LP release. Lyrically, several songs, such as the title track, contain biblical references. In a 1977 interview with Peter O'Brien of the Omaha Rainbow Newbury stated:

My next album will be built around an evangelist called Jubilee. It's been buzzing around in my mind for about two years. First thing I got was 'Jubilee', this revival shout, and I couldn't figure out what the hell it was about. I figured it might have been the Alabama Jubilee. I kept lazing around with it, I kept trying to write songs, but nothing ever would come. Finally, I started writing this song. I didn't use the name in the song at all, but I knew immediately that her name was Jubilee. I know things about her. Her family had always told her she was a direct descendant of General Robert E. Lee. She later finds out it is phony, but she has used that in her act as an evangelist. I see her whole character and know exactly what she's like, who she is, all about her. Just like Frisco Mabel Joy, same thing with her. I knew who she was as soon as I started, I knew everything about her. Weird.

"Saint Cecilia" draws from passages of Christian sanctity, its subject the patroness of church music and is glorified in fine arts and poetry, while "Westphalia Texas Waltz", a song originally composed by fiddler Cotton Collins of the Lone Star Playboys and popularized by singers like Pee Wee King and Merle Travis,[2] contains the line, "He stood as the sun in the morning rose up on Wichita Falls" which may be a biblical reference, as in John 8:12, Jesus said, "I am the light of the world. he who follows Me shall not walk in darkness, but have the light of life." Newbury had also been engaged to a woman from Westphalia years earlier named Detta Beach and later admitted that she had inspired several of his compositions.[3] On "Wish I Was", Newbury expresses his own humility towards God and nature by declaring, "A grain of sand is all I wanted to be."

Both "It Don't Matter Anymore" and "I Don't Know What They Wanted Me to Say" address the theme of disillusionment with friends ("All the friends I thought I knew, they've dwindled down to a precious few"), while the gentle "The Dragon and the Mouse" is a children's song. "Gone to Alabama," which was released as a single and peaked at #94, is the album's only uptempo number, its foot-stomping chorus and jangling tambourines actually sounding like a deep south revival celebration before coming its gospel conclusion. Of the album's closing track "Juble Lee's Farewell Shout," AllMusic states, "...'Juble Lee's Revival Shout' is no gospel song; it's a small, bleak testament to the most intimate kind of loneliness - the kind found in the mirror at the end of the day. It's a chilling way to end a record that began so tenderly, so simply, if not optimistically...a truly awesome and off-putting finish." As he had on his previous album, the title track sees Newbury once again reinterpreting an American folk song in his own inimitable style.

Reception

His Eye Is on the Sparrow did not chart. AllMusic calls it one of Newbury's "prettiest records. It's intimate in a way that none of his others are; it's a lonely but not world-weary set. The songs are fraught with a more fragile and tender beauty, and are underscored by his production team's subtle nuances and textures." Newbury biographer Joe Ziemer opines, "These autobiographical compositions are seminars in literate poetry, fused to pretty melody." Goldmine writer Allen Harbinson deems the album "uneven" with a "dirge-like quality."

Track listing

All tracks composed by Mickey Newbury; except where indicated

  1. "Juble Lee's Revival" - 3:54
  2. "Westphalia Texas Waltz" - 5:17
  3. "Wish I Was" - 4:32
  4. "His Eye Is On The Sparrow" (P.D.Scots Pipe Band) - 2:34
  5. "The Dragon and the Mouse" - 2:35
  6. "Gone to Alabama" - 3:16
  7. "It Don't Matter Anymore" - 2:32
  8. "I Don't Know What They Wanted Me to Say"- 2:30
  9. "Saint Cecilia" - 2:40
  10. "Juble Lee's Revival Shout" - 2:07

Personnel

Technical

References

  1. ↑ His Eye Is on the Sparrow (Mickey Newbury LP) at AllMusic
  2. ↑ Zeimer 2015, pp. 190–192.
  3. ↑ Zeimer 2015, p. 191.
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