“(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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I love the Floyd Cramer original, although I think of it more as a country classic. I do see the original actually peaked higher on the Hot 100 than country but as a child growing up in the 70’s the instrumental was a regular play on country TV shows. I find it interesting that there are so many different lyrics by different artist for this song. Regarding this one from Conway. I personally would give it a “B”. Its good but for some reason it just doesn’t sound like Conway to me.
Definitely doesn’t sound at all like Conway!
Willie, I could see in the R&R H-o-F, given his appearances with Dylan, the Dead, Dave Matthews, Mellencamp, et al. But Dolly in the rock H-o-F struck me as as not making much sense. She has never been rock. Heck, Mariah Carey is not in the rock H-o-F. Heck, Anne Murray, Olivia Newton John, Juice Newton and Crystal Gayle are not in the country music OR rock halls of fame, presumably because they’re deemed too pop for the former and too country for the latter.
Mariah Carey will be in the Rock Hall of Fame and Crystal Gayle will be in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
I’d put Olivia Newton-John in both of them, but I think it’s well established that I have a bit of a bias there!
Anne Murray also belongs in the Country hall, as most of her hit songs were in country. Dolly in the R&R hall makes no sense to me. The artist I’d like to see get into the R&R Hall is Jim Croce, but it does not appear that that’s ever going to happen. Funny that country artists cover his songs and even did a tribute album to him in the ’90s.
One can make the case for Conway Twitty becoming a part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame just on the basis of his being a stylist all his own, whether it be in the days of “It’s Only Make Believe”, or what he did in terms of getting back to country in the late 1960’s. It may be something of a steep curve for some (his last pop crossover hit was in 1973), but you could make the case. After all, his first success was for Sam Phillips and Sun Records, where Elvis got his start.
And at the same time, if he’s not already there, Floyd Cramer himself could be inducted into the RRHoF as well, as his slip-note piano style on the original “Last Date” in 1960 has been emulated by pianists and keyboard players not only in country, but in rock and R&B as well, for the better part of six and a half decades now.
My Mother used to play Floyd Cramer’s version all the time when I was growing up. I loved that version and still do.
I never minded all the covers over the years but none could touch Cramer’s version IMHO.I also liked Emmylou’s 80s version.
This one is nice, but nothing special. Love Conway, but there is so much more I’d rather hear from him.
Several attempts have been made over the years to append lyrics to “Last Date”. The first I can recall was a 1960 recording by Skeeter Davis: “My Last Date (With You)” – lyrics were by Boudleaux Bryant and Skeeter Davis. This version went #5 Country and #26 Pop. Personally, I feel that the song works better from the female perspective.
MY LAST DATE (WITH YOU)
One hour and I’ll be meeting you
I know you’re gonna make me blue
My heart is trembling
Through and through
Cause I know very well
I can tell
I can tell
This will be my last date with you
Just can’t believe that this could end
I know I’ll never love again
You’ll ask me to be just a friend
This is plain as can be
I can see
I can see
This will be my last date with you
I know we had a quarrel
But all sweethearts do
I gave my love to prove to you
That I will always love you and be true
I know you’ve met someone new
You’ll tell me you and I are through
My plans and dreams cannot come true
And when you say goodbye
I know I will cry cause
I’ll know it’s my last date with you
I used to hear Floyd Cramer’s “Last Date” all the time. For WKJC, it was their go-to “we only have two minutes” song in the vein of “Two of a Kind, Workin’ on a Full House” or “Drinkin’ Bone”. I know I’ve heard it elsewhere too, which is surprising for an instrumental.
Both Conway’s lyrical version and Emmylou Harris’s pronoun-flip of it both got to #1.
Not ONCE in my life have I ever heard “Lost His Love…” OR “Lost Her Love…” in the wild. Not on classic-country playlists, not even when explicitly curating playlists of Conway or Emmylou.
Which is a shame, because that melody kicks ass, and Conway did a great job fitting lyrics to it.
I loved the write-up, and the historical contextualization of the significance of this song in particular.
Because of my obsession with Conway at a young age, I knew this version before ever hearing the original Floyd Cramer instrumental.
That has to be John Hughey on steel in the intro, no? Between his vocal dynamics and growling, Twitty can still convey emotional urgency and tension better than anyone in country music.
Just another case for Twitty’s greatness.