“(Lost Her Love) On Our Last Date”
Conway Twitty
Written by Floyd Cramer and Conway Twitty
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
May 27, 1972
It’s taken over half a century, but we’re finally in a time again where the walls between genres are as porous as they should be.
Music should be a conversation, and the splintering of classic AM radio stations that played all styles of music into FM silos targeting narrow slivers of listeners limited that conversation for far too long.
We still see the remnants of it with the silly gatekeeping of country music that the withered husks of Music Row and terrestrial radio are still doing, but they don’t seem to realize that the people they want to keep out aren’t trying to get in. They realize that the gate never existed in the first place. There was just more money in doing it one way, and now there’s more money in doing it the other way.
We’re seeing country, pop, rock, R&B, and hip-hop intermingling again because that’s what listeners are embracing through the two metrics that matter most now: ticket sales and streaming.
It makes for a beautiful coda to the era we’re covering here, where rock and rollers like Jerry Lee Lewis and Brenda Lee were having revived fortunes on country radio. Both of those artists are among the elite few who are in both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Rock purists and country purists are bonded in their revulsion to such cross-pollinizing, but the Rock Hall has been correct in reasserting the critical role that country music has played not just in the formation of Rock and Roll but in the preservation of its sound since the Rock and Roll era ended so many decades ago.
Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson were obvious Rock Hall inductees now that its giving country music’s post-Rock and Roll era artists their propers. I’ve heard credible cases for everyone from Emmylou Harris and Waylon Jennings to Garth Brooks and Shania Twain being the next twangy inductees.
“(Lost Her Love) On Our Last Date” isn’t Conway Twitty’s best No. 1 single. Not by a long shot. But for me, it makes the case for why the next country act to be inducted into the Rock Hall should be Twitty. He wasn’t quite a rock and roll pioneer, like this year’s inductee Chubby Checker, but enough time has passed that he might as well have been.
But here’s the thing. His rock and roll records weren’t anywhere near as good as the country ones he’d make. He’s trying too hard on the early stuff to sound like Elvis, and as he honed his own style, he couldn’t make his rock records sound vital and interesting. That’s because he wasn’t leaning on the country elements of rock and roll enough. He does that here, and ironically, this country version of a rock classic might be his best rock single.
Adding his own lyrics to the gorgeous instrumental classic “Last Date,” Twitty ditches his earlier Elvis affects and taps into what he might have sounded like as a young singer if he’d leaned into the sweetness and sincerity of his voice that made his country music work so timeless. He’s a little too old to be singing this, so he wisely avoids his lower register, evoking the raw emotions of a teenager who messed up and got his heart broken because of it.
Twitty’s approach here telegraphs the role country music would play in making rock and roll’s legacy relevant to its original teenage fans as they got older, incorporating R&R conventions while moving the subject matter and delivery into more mature and sophisticated territory. Rock purists scoff at this the same way they scoff at hip-hop and pop artists, who do the heavy lifting on the other end: keeping rock and roll’s legacy relevant to the youth who will ultimately keep that legacy alive.
“(Lost Her Love) On Our Last Date” gets a B+.
Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies
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