“I Ain’t Never”
Mel Tillis
Written by Webb Pierce and Mel Tillis
Billboard
#1 (2 weeks)
September 30 – October 7, 1972
Mel Tillis is part of a tradition in country music history that is now just about extinct: the singer-songwriter-comedian.
Call it a relic of the package road show and syndicated television variety show days, but there used to be a big place in the country market for someone who could not only sing and write, but could give an entertaining comedic performance in the barn house tradition.
Mel Tillis was an outstanding songwriter of deep sophistication, penning classics like “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” and “Detroit City.” He was also a merely competent singer who elevated his live shows with brilliant comedic timing and a real sense of showmanship.
“I Ain’t Never” is the best example of all of Mel’s talents coming together for a classic country record. Because he wrote this with Webb Pierce, this is more than just a cover of an older hit. Tillis has perfect comedic timing here, and it gives the record the electricity of his legendary live shows, which are worth the time of a YouTube deep dive.
Longtime readers won’t be surprised by my assertion that for all of Mel’s incredible talents and historic impact, I feel his greatest contribution to country music was Pam Tillis.
But I share that to make my point all the more clear. “I Ain’t Never” by Mel Tillis is better than the Pam Tillis recording from It’s all Relative: Tillis Sings Tillis, and that’s the only song that they’ve both recorded where I would make that assertion.
“I Ain’t Never” gets an A.
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I agree with the “A”. Mel has been so underrated when it comes to talking about country music history. He deserves a bit more attention. Song is not deep but so enjoyable.
There’s been a lot of conversation of country legends whose legacy has been erased or limited to a couple of recurrent radio standards. Mel Tillis has gotta be at or near the top of that list of artists active in the last 50 years. The only title I can directly attribute to him off the top of my head is “Coca-Cola Cowboy”. If I’ve heard any of his other songs played on classic country radio in the last 20 years, I wasn’t aware of it.
But, at least for me, there’s a reason for it. I did a “shallow dive” into his music a few years ago to see what I was missing. Considering how much I love his daughter’s music, I was disappointed by how little his stuff did for me, including this one.
I had a similar experience, and it took the tribute album to kickstart my appreciation for Mel Tillis.
What Pam Tillis was doing in the nineties was matching the standard of recording artists like Trisha Yearwood and Patty Loveless. She was at the top of her game as an artist during the best time in history for women in country music.
What Mel Tillis was doing in the sixties as a songwriter was matching the standard of songwriters like Hank Cochran, Willie Nelson, and Harlan Howard. He was at the top of his game as a songwriter during the best time in history for songwriters in country music.
The tribute album is a perfect vehicle for showcasing both of them at their creative peaks.
That tribute album and Rhinestoned are actually my favorite Pam Tillis albums.
This is one of those classic songs that saw multiple artists find chart success, and multiple versions are essential listening. Consider me Team Tillis here, but Webb Pierce also gives a great version. And I agree that Mel was a very charming performer whose humor was a big part of his persona, but also wrote numerous songs of serious and somber nature. He and Roger Miller are kindred spirits in my mind because of their similarities.
“I Ain’t Never” is the best example of all of Mel’s talents coming together for a classic country record. Because he wrote this with Webb Pierce…
Depends on the meaning of the word “with.”
Kevin – I generally agree with your assessment of “I Ain’t Never” and I feel that Mel’s best recordings were made for Kapp and MGM
1) You stated: “Longtime readers won’t be surprised by my assertion that for all of Mel’s incredible talents and historic impact, I feel his greatest contribution to country music was Pam Tillis”
I heartily disagree. As much as I like Pam Tillis, Mel’s biggest contribution to country music is the incredible catalogue of great songs that he wrote. If Mel’s songs had not been written the canon of country music would be much poorer. If Pam hadn’t emerged as a vocalist, the field would have been poorer but not nearly to the same extent as the loss of Mel’s catalogue.
2) You stated: “… “I Ain’t Never” by Mel Tillis is better than the Pam Tillis recording from It’s all Relative: Tillis Sings Tillis, and that’s the only song that they’ve both recorded where I would make that assertion…”
Again, I heartily disagree – I thinks Mel’s recording of “Heart Over Mind” blows most other recordings of the song out of the water and that includes both Pam’s recording and that of Ray Price, a superior vocalist to either Tillis.
It should be noted that the Webb Pierce recording of “I Ain’t Never” spent nine weeks at #2 on Billboard (and reached #25 on Billboard’s Hot 100), three weeks at #1 on Music Vendor (later Record World), and one week at #1 and eleven weeks at #2 on Cash Box back in 1959. On Billboard, Webb’s song got stopped by the Browns “The Three Bells” which spent ten weeks at #1 (country) and four weeks at #1 (Hot 100) – truly a monster hit for The Browns
I will say I really wanted to explore Mel’s 70’s hits as I got his 1991 greatest hits package and really love the hard country sound on a majority of the songs. I loved “New Patches”, “Good Woman Blues”, “Southern Rains”, “Coca Cola Cowboy”, “Your Body Is an Outlaw” and though hard to find “Send Me Down to Tucson” are fantastic songs. I also love “Who’s Julie”.
Pam did the backing vocals on “Your Body Is an Outlaw”. That may be the earliest recording of her that exists.
One of the earliest, but not the very first!
Barbara Fairchild was the first artist to record one of Pam’s songs (“The Other Side of the Morning,” 1977) and use her as background vocalist (on her 1978 album, This is Me.)
I have much more of an appreciation now for the Mel Tillis catalog than I did back in the 90s. It was so jarring to me to hear his music for the first time because Pam Tillis was my gateway into the genre, and I couldn’t connect anything I was hearing to what I heard in her work.
I first heard of Mel Tillis in the context of being Pam’s dad, and it was years before I heard any of his recordings. This was the pre-internet nineties, and Mel Tillis was not among the legends who were enjoying revivals on CMT or being name checked by the new superstars like Garth and Alan were praising Jones and Haggard.
Mel is so representative of the strand of country music that ended up in Branson, which was the most disconnected of country music legacies from the nineties boom. I couldn’t hear his influence on anything that I cared about musically, so I didn’t pursue listening to him more back then.
It was Pam’s tribute album that really drove home for me what a fantastic songwriter he was. And it’s a joy discovering his live performances on YouTube now. Something he has in common with Pam’s pre-Arista work is that his live performances were so much better than what was on record. If he had worked with some of the great producers of the time that were pushing the genre forward at the time, I think that his music would’ve lasted longer in the collective memory.
Interesting that Mel wrote the #1 standards “I Ain’t Never” for Pierce, “Detroit City” for Bare and “Ruby…,” first a minor hit for Johnny Darrell and then a smash #1 for Kenny Rogers. But Mel didn’t write any of his own #1’s, save for “I Ain’t Never,” which he later “covered.” Mel said he didn’t “get” “Coca Cola Cowboy” and recorded it only because he had to do it to be in the “Every Which Way but Loose” movie, but he changed his mind about it when it went to #1.
Mel was a no bout-adoubt-it H-o-F’er. I think it would be neat if Pam gets in, too, but she’s in that borderline area where it may happen if she gets a push and the stars line up.
Ten years ago, it was a hope of mine that Pam would get inducted.
Now, I know that it’s a certainty. I just hope it happens while she’s still young enough to really enjoy it!
Her influence is all over the new artists coming up and her streaming numbers keep growing. She was outsold by Patty, Lorrie, Chapin, and Wynonna back in the day, but she leads all of them in streaming numbers now.
And it’s not just being driven by “Memphis.” Younger listeners have discovered “Spilled Perfume.” That may be her most streamed song at some point down the road. It’s pretty unique in its perspective.
I think it’s your influence, Kevin!:) Even if not, you’re the one who inspired me to give her a fresh chance many years ago and I’m so glad I did! She wasn’t one of my favorites during the nineties, but she has become among my favorites.
That makes me so happy to read. I didn’t want this music to disappear down the memory hole, so I’m glad I helped keep a focus on it before it was rediscovered more recently.
I am not entirely sure what point I want to make with this comment other than I have been a huge fan of Mel Tillis since a young age. My sister gifted me two cassettes at Christmas in the early eighties. The first was an MCA Conway Twitty greatest hits collection titled “Number Ones.” The second tape was a Mel Tillis greatest hits collection titled “Mel Tillis: The Very Best Of.”
I was captivated by his singing. I ran through “Coca Cola Cowboy,” “I Believe in You,” “Send Me Down to Tucson,” “What Did I Promise Her Last Night,” and “Burning Memories.”
Even as kid not ten years-old, I was so pumped to have received this gifts and have these song available to me whenever I wanted to listen to them, and I listened to them all the time.
I first knew Tillis as a smooth singing 70’s country singer, but slowly came to appreciate what an essential and foundational songwriting talent he was as my knowledge and appreciation of country music history began to grow. It blew my mind that this crooner went back to the fifties and the original honky Tonk era.
His consistency throughout the ’50s, ’69s, 70′ and early ’80s was noteworthy. Recall we saw him in the ’80s feature with “Southern Rains.”
I think just citing the back flap of Pam Tillis’tribute album to her father as to why she had to do that project gets to the heart of the matter.
Pam wrote:
I wanted to make this album because I feel related to these songs by blood. because I can barely get through “Detroit City” without crying. Because I wanted to do some real country music;sometimes by the book and sometimes in my own peculiar way. Because I remember a fall, skinny man walking around our house or driving our car, humming these songs under his breath or blasting these on an old reel-to-reel in the middle of the night , hot off the presses, waking up the whole house. Because these songs represent a magic, an innocence, and a wildness that sometimes seems to be missing from Nashville today.Becaue he felt, like most parents, that I didn’t really listen or appreciate the immensity of his labours. Because I want to help people either remember or possibly discover for the first time, this south Florida poet.”
The genius of the Pam Tillis tribute album was that it focused solely on Mel Tillis as a songwriter. She was at the peak of her talents as a singer and producer, and she presented his catalog so strongly that I think if your only interaction with Mel Tillis’ talent was that album, you’d walk away thinking he belongs in the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Mel’s own strengths as a singer and a live entertainer blossomed later than his songwriting talent, so the definitive recordings of most of his classic songs were recorded by artists like Ray Price and Bobby Bare.
This is the only number one of his that he wrote, amazingly enough. He has some great records still to come in this feature, but they are from outside writers.
A bit off topic but I was curious to the extent of his “stutter” for anyone who knows. To me he seemed to stutter much less in his older years. How real or how much of it was part of his comic act? I am not criticizing at all, as he was a great entertainer and seemed like a very good guy. Just curious.
I saw Mel Tillis on TV and I’ve seen videos of him over the years and I believe he talked as best as he could. His stutter was bad when he was young and it lessened with age. That’s hardly uncommon. In the “expensive boots” video above, he goes through several consecutive sentences without stuttering, but then the stuttering hits him as he’s trying to deliver the punch line of the story, and certainly does not need to create a distraction.