“Timber, I’m Falling in Love”
Patty Loveless
Written by Kostas
Radio & Records
#1 (3 weeks)
July 14 – July 28, 1989
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
August 12, 1989
“I tell people I’m a combination of Linda Ronstadt, Loretta Lynn, and Ralph Stanley.”
That Patty Loveless quote opens the entry for this song in The Billboard Book of Number One Country Hits, which covers chart toppers from 1968 through 1989. I don’t know what the correlation is between an artist’s self-awareness and their greatness, but in the case of Patty Loveless, she captures the brilliance of her musical alchemy with that very self-aware take.
Loveless hails from Appalachian Kentucky, and her country and bluegrass roots run deep. She’s a coal miner’s daughter like her distant cousins Lynn and Crystal Gayle, and her early singing experiences came through the Wilburn Brothers, an act that discovered Loveless and her brother while they were still school age. After graduating high school, Loveless married the Wilburns’ drummer and moved to North Carolina, singing rock and pop in local venues before moving to Nashville to land a record deal.
Loveless’ timing was off at first. Her singles deal with MCA was converted to an albums deal on the strength of early reception to “I Did,” a stark country ballad that Loveless wrote herself. They pulled it from radio so they could record the album, but interest had waned by the time they reserviced the single a few months later. Her self-titled debut album didn’t produce any hits, but her second MCA record did. If My Heart Had Windows provided the breakthrough top ten title track for Loveless, as well as the top five Steve Earle-penned romp, “A Little Bit in Love.”
Loveless came into her own on her third album, Honky Tonk Angel, which produced five top five hits, including two No. 1 singles. “Timber, I’m Falling in Love” is her only eighties No. 1 hit, and it announces her arrival as a new traditionalist superstar. She fuses a pure country vocal with Ronstadt’s power, Lynn’s twang, and Stanley’s high-pitched wail, creating a progressive country sound that foreshadows her landmark work with Emory Gordy, Jr. in the nineties.
It’s deliriously catchy and euphorically goofy. It’s corny about love in the way that only country music at its most earnest can be. I’m not sure I could even take this song seriously from another artist on the scene at the time, but it’s perfection in Patty’s hands.
“Timber, I’m Falling in Love” gets an A.
Every No. 1 Single of the Eighties
Previous: Reba McEntire, “Cathy’s Clown” |
Next: Shenandoah, “Sunday in the South”
Leave a Reply