“Super Kind of Woman“
Freddie Hart and the Heartbeats
Written by Jack Lebsock
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
April 7, 1973
One thing I pride myself on is keeping an open mind.
That makes it easy for me to flip like a pancake once an artist suddenly clicks with me.
I’ve been a harsh critic of Freddie Hart during this feature, but y’all? I love this.
Suddenly the exaggerated vocals heighten the charm of the record for me. He is a steel guitar personified on the chorus.
Speaking of steel guitar, tell me how they finally got the alchemy right and blended seventies cosmopolitan country with fifties rock and roll? It works in a way that feels organic and not antiseptic like “Lost in the Fifties Tonight.”
Which is to say it borrows from the past while still sounding contemporary, rather than appealing to warm and fuzzy nostalgia for the past.
Song’s great, too. A true appreciation for a great woman. You can feel he means it with every note he sings.
What a great discovery. Let’s get this guy on digital platforms already.
“Super Kind of Woman” gets an A.
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A very good love song. I would give it a “B”. A nice listen but it would not go down as one of the 70’s classics.
Freddie Hart proved to be an acquired taste for many. I started hearing on a regular basis during his years on Kapp and while I realize that Kapp did not have the muscular oomph to get Freddie high on the charts, they had the professional know-how to make really good country records. With Kapp, Freddie had six chart records (he had two of these records reach the top 15 on the Canadian country charts – “Togetherness” and “Born a Fool”). Moving to Capitol Records, the folks at Capitol struggled with Freddie’s first few singles and at one point gave up and released Hart from the label. Whether the problem was song selection (I liked his first four singles although none of them did very well) or lack of promotional effort on the part of Capitol (I suspect this to be the case since the label had Haggard, Owens, Sonny James, Glen Campbell, Anne Murray and many more artists burning up the charts), Freddie found himself cast aside until an Atlanta DJ starting playing an album track titled “Easy Loving”. The rest is history with Freddie having six #1, two #2 and three #3 Billboard Country Hits over the next few years (Record World had two of the other top three records reach #1 on their country chart). Since Freddie was already 44 years old when his #1 record occurred, he figured to have a short shelf life in the increasingly youth-oriented Country radio market, but what an impressive run he had, running up 18 top twenty records during his run on Capitol.
As for “Super Kind of Woman”, I loved it from the first time I heard the song. I do not regard it as one of his very best songs (some of which came before his Capitol years) but it is an easy B+ in my book. I just wish it were possible to get his Kapp recordings onto a CD (fortunately there is a good collection of his Columbia recordings on Bear Family)
All aboard the Freddie Hart train!