“It’s Gonna Take a Little Bit Longer”
Charley Pride
Written by Benedict Peters
Billboard
#1 (3 weeks)
July 22 – August 5, 1972
I try to capture the historical significance of these records when appropriate, but they don’t have any influence on my ratings.
Truth is, most of the massive hits during a golden era of country music are pretty spectacular. That’s been true of the early seventies just as it was true of the New Country era of the late eighties and during the early nineties boom years.
Charley Pride became a gold-selling superstar during an era when they threw a party for selling 100,000 LPs because he was an extraordinary talent with great taste in material.
He executes on an incredibly high level, and I’m not sure that “It’s Gonna Take a Little Bit Longer” is of the same caliber as the biggest hits we’ve seen so far, but I like it more than any of the “new to me” Pride hits I’ve covered in this feature to date.
It hits a very specific sweet spot for me. I love a country song that talks about being resilient in the face of a heartbreak that just won’t quit. I love it when an upbeat, bouncy melody is paired with a melancholy lyric. “Deep Down” is my most played country song for a reason, y’all. God I love the instrumentation on this, with the steel guitar giving this guy’s heart away with every note.
Pride calls BS on “time heals all wounds” here, but he’s a busy man and has to keep going. So to get through the day, he’ll roll his eyes at the notion that time has healed his heart, and shut up the people saying it to him by pointing out that, no, this one was a doozy of a heartbreak and it’s going to leave some scars.
“It’s gonna take a little bit longer,” he sings, and you can’t help but wonder if he means forever when he says that.
“It’s Gonna Take a Little Bit Longer” gets an A.
Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies
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Another great Charley Pride discovery. I may have heard this once before but it’s definitely not familiar. Charley could sing the phone book and would sound fantastic with the accompaniment of his usual quality production but it was a bonus to have the breadth of quality songs that he got his hands on. Still working on getting my hands of some sort of Charley Pride anthology album and maybe get ahead of some of the reviews still to come in the 70s.