{"id":1334,"date":"2021-09-19T12:32:19","date_gmt":"2021-09-19T16:32:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/?p=1334"},"modified":"2021-09-19T12:32:22","modified_gmt":"2021-09-19T16:32:22","slug":"the-song-that-crossed-genres-and-connected-generations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/the-song-that-crossed-genres-and-connected-generations\/","title":{"rendered":"The song that crossed genres and connected generations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Nearly every school day in 1975, my sophomore year at Pekin Community High School in Central Illinois, I would rush through lunch in the cafeteria with my pals Gary and Jim to get to the \u201cLeeway\u201d where I would plop a quarter into the jukebox for my two favorite songs \u2014 \u201cChina Grove\u201d by the Doobie Brothers and \u201cMy Maria\u201d by B.W. Stevenson.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The Leeway at Pekin Community High School.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

The Leeway was a long corridor that connected the \u201cold building\u201d of what was called West Campus and the new addition, which was called the English building or \u201cRed Building\u201d because of its exterior red panels. The West Campus hosted freshmen and sophomores while the East Campus, on the other side of town, was where the juniors and seniors attended classes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

More importantly, though, the Leeway was the social epicenter of the West Campus, a place where students could gather and hang out before the lunch period ended and classes resumed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And it had a jukebox. That was a big deal then. The key with the jukebox was to get your quarter in early in the lunch period. The songs were played in the order in which they were punched into the jukebox, so if you didn\u2019t get your selections in early enough, classes would resume before your songs were played.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wanted to hear \u201cChina Grove\u201d and \u201cMy Maria\u201d every day in 1975 before going back to class. Those songs were just that good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
The B.W. Stevenson album cover that featured the song “My Maria.”<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy Maria\u201d was co-written by Stevenson and Daniel Moore  and released as a single in August 1973. The song became a hit and peaked at No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart. (Moore also wrote \u201cShambala,\u201d which Stevenson recorded, but which became a hit for Three Dog Night in 1973 reaching No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles list.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMy Maria\u201d would find success again nearly 25 years later when country music duo Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn covered it in 1996. That version reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs and won Brooks & Dunn their second Grammy Award for Best Country Performance by a Vocal Group of Duo. It\u2019s been a staple of Brooks & Dunn\u2019s live shows ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the time, Dunn had to be persuaded to even record the song.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI was afraid to even sing it a lot for a while,\u201d Dunn said in an interview for I Miss 90s Country Radio with Nick Hoffman on Apple Music Country. \u201cI was hesitant to do it because I thought, \u2019Oh man, it\u2019s just that falsetto thing.\u2019 It\u2019s a rock song, in my opinion.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Ronnie Dunn
(Photo by Mike Morsch)<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

I, too, thought it was a rock song in 1975. But when I first heard the Brooks & Dunn version, I was hooked. They absolutely owned it, one of those rare instances when the remake was as good, if not better, than the original. And because of \u201cthat falsetto thing\u201d in the song, it\u2019s got to be a difficult song for even the best of vocalists. But Dunn, who has one of the best voices in country music, has successfully and consistently pulled it off in the ensuing years. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Those high school memories were definitely rolling around in my head when I arrived at the BB&T Center in Camden, New Jersey, on Sept. 16, 2021, to see Brooks & Dunn live for the first time. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ve listened to \u201cMy Maria\u201d for 48 years now, but never heard it performed live. B.W. Stevenson died in 1988 at age 38 and I never got the chance to see him perform. Brooks & Dunn stopped touring for a decade or so after 2010, but recently got back together for a tour and I wasn\u2019t going to miss the chance to hear the song performed live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brooks & Dunn didn\u2019t disappoint. \u201cMy Maria\u201d has been a crowd favorite for a long time, and Brooks & Dunn save it for the end of their shows, the last song before the finale, which was \u201cOnly in America\u201d for this show.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the untrained ear, it sure sounds like Dunn can still do \u201cthat falsetto thing,\u201d and the audience reacted accordingly \u2014 dancing cowboys and yay-hoos throughout the venue, including me. That\u2019s what a good song is supposed to do, invoke a reaction from the audience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So for three or four minutes that evening, I was transported back to West Campus at Pekin Community High School, rushing from the cafeteria to the Leeway jukebox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It occurred to me that waiting all those years to hear \u201cMy Maria\u201d live was worth so much more than a quarter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn performed Sept. 16, 2021, at the BB&T Center in Camden, New Jersey.
(Photo by Mike Morsch)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nearly every school day in 1975, my sophomore year at Pekin Community High School in Central Illinois, I would rush through lunch in the cafeteria with my pals Gary and Jim to get to the \u201cLeeway\u201d where I would plop a quarter into the jukebox for my two favorite songs \u2014 \u201cChina Grove\u201d by the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":104,"featured_media":1342,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-tvdbook"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/104"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1334"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1343,"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions\/1343"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1342"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vinyldialogues.com\/VinylDialoguesBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}