“Life Turned Her That Way”
Ricky Van Shelton
Written by Harlan Howard
Radio & Records
#1 (1 week)
March 4, 1988
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
March 19, 1988
“Life Turned Her That Way” was originally recorded by Little Jimmy Dickens in 1965 and was a hit for the first time by Mel Tillis in 1967.
And I don’t know what to say about this Ricky Van Shelton cover other than he wipes the floor with both of those recordings, delivering the definitive version of a haunting Harlan Howard ballad that deserved to be immortalized by a singer of Shelton’s caliber.
Ricky Van Shelton’s early albums were like those classic seventies sets from Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, where an old song would be revitalized and often performed better than it ever had been before. What’s so cool is that he found new material to record alongside those old standards and created a sound that worked just as well for country classics as it did for contemporary material.
Hard to mess things up too badly with that great a voice and such good taste in material.
“Life Turned Her That Way” gets an A.
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One thing noteworthy about Shelton’s covers of older recordings is that not only was he able to improve on most of them, but he did so in a manner that respectful of the earlier recordings. On this song he indeed did it better than did Tillis or Dickens; however, on “Statue of a Fool” I prefer the Jack Green recording. I do wish that he had not retired from the music business