“If You Ain’t Lovin’ (You Ain’t Livin’)”
George Strait
Written by Tommy Collins
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
December 10, 1988
The older I get, the more impressed I am by George Strait.
It took falling in love with the Faron Young version of this song for me to fully appreciate what Strait pulls off with his cover.
Young’s hit is a giddy honky tonk classic that only a fan of old school country could love. It’s got way too much honk in its honky tonk to have been palatable to the new wave of eighties country fans.
Strait’s cover is masterful because it smooths the rough edges while still honoring and referencing the Young performance. It’s almost heresy to suggest such a thing, but the truth is that George Strait is one of the best pop singers we’ve ever had in country music.
He applies that gift here to make an old song sound relevant and contemporary for its 1988 audience, and he does so without compromising the essential country nature of the track. He makes it go down smoother for his audience by dialing back the twang in the vocal, leaving just enough in the mix to call back to Young’s delivery.
It is a remarkable feat that is so easily masked by Strait’s unassuming talent.
“If You Ain’t Lovin’ (You Ain’t Livin’)” gets an A.
Every No. 1 Single of the Eighties
Previous: The Judds, “Change of Heart” |
I’m glad that you’ve come around on this song. I was reading an old review (from 2012) where you gave this song a B- (That review is linked from this song’s Wikipedia page). I think this song is worthy of an A, as are most of George Strait’s big hits.
Thanks for keeping up with these posts! I always enjoy reading them and listening to the music. It looks like you’re almost done with every year from the 80’s except 1989. It’s been a long journey (coming up on 2 years), but I’ve certainly enjoyed every step of the way.
It’s interesting that my reaction back when we were doing the Strait retro reviews was more in line with the other takes that have been posted on this thread. I’m noticing that my impressions are being impacted by hearing these songs within the context of what was going on at radio at the time, instead of within the context of an artist’s catalog. That’s happened even with artists like Strait who are among my longtime favorites.
There have also been so many covers topping the charts in the eighties that my process changed a bit and I’m listening to older versions of the songs to track the changes made. Streaming makes this possible in a way that it really wasn’t in the earlier days of CU. I never would’ve considered Strait’s performance here a pop one if I hadn’t heard the Young version.
I can’t explain it, but I do not like this song. I love George Strait, I love Faron Young. Both sing it well in different ways, but I just can’t get myself to like this song. Oh well, chalk it up to personal preference, I suppose.
This song is a typical Tommy Collins endeavor – funny, a little on the wry side but with a serious message. I love both versions [Faron Young and George Strait] both of which have considerable charm. Buck Owens had a really nice recording of the song on his 1963 Capitol album BUCK OWENS SINGS TOMMY COLLINS. although it was never a single for Buck, I think I like his version at least as much as I live the Faron Young and George Strait recordings. For whatever reason, it doesn’t appear that Tommy Collins recorded the song until 1971 for the Starday label. I don’t have the Starday record but I did have the pleasure of seeing Tommy perform the song live and while he is not as good a pure vocalist as Strait, Young or Owens, he has considerably more personality and his live rendition was a pure delight
Here’s another song that’s been lost in the ether for me for the last 35 years. I barely remember it from the 80s and haven’t heard it get any recurrent airplay since then. It definitely strikes me as a remake from two decades earlier. It’s a little too cornball for my taste but I’ll give it props for clever lyrics and Strait does a compelling job of delivering it. I’ve obviously never heard the Faron Young version but I have a pretty good approximation of its sound working backward from listening to Strait’s delivery. This won’t be going down as among my favorite Strait songs but for what it is, he did a decent job with it.
Grade: B-
I am having a hard time hearing this as a pop performance. It is not so much that young is true honky-tonk singer whereas Strait is a pop singer within country music. The wonder of this cover is that Strait gets at what made Young such an important star. In many ways, Strait is a young reiteration of Faron Young, a subtle and wildly versatile singer who is as comfortable singing hard country honky-tonk as he is singing standard, pop, love-ballads.
Listen to Young croon and flat-out sing on 1952’s “Tattle Tear Tears.” It’s insane.
Daniel Cooper, journalist from the Country Music Foundation, wrote the following in the liner notes to “Faron Young: Live Fast, Love Hard: Original Capitol Recordings, 1952-62:”
“History has not been especially kind to country artists like Faron Young — the men and women whose careers didn’t necessarily tie in with this or that epochal trend. The standard postwar story line, that country proceeded –hop, skip, and jump — from honky-tonk to rockabiliyy to the Nashville Sound, tends to marginalize important individual talents who didn’t embody one movement versus another.”
Hard to consider King George marginalized in any way, but I think the genius of what he quietly accomplished as both a vocalist and an interpreter of songs often gets missed, perhaps, because he was so excellent at whatever he put his voice to.
Bottom line, I have always loved this performance. It also pushed me to learn more about Faron Young and provided just another reason to dig deeper into this Tommy Collins character.
So many of these late ’80s hits are so vital because they pulled country’s past into the present just as the genre was racing forward.