“You Were Always There“
Donna Fargo
Written by Donna Fargo
Billboard
#1 (1 week)
July 28, 1973
This is a country song that should come with a trigger warning for anybody who’s lost a parent or is estranged from one.
I was not prepared for how this song ripped my heart out. Fargo’s emotional intelligence had been through the roof from the jump. She was way ahead of her time on that front. But even by her own standards, this record is stunning in its complexity and empathy.
Fargo is processing the death of her mother through the lens of her own fully realized dreams, and her grief is on a collision course with her gratitude, as she honors the sacrifices, her mother made on her behalf, but realizes she never really knew her and never will.
All the questions that she never asked hang over her, from whether or not her mother followed her dreams to whether or not she even wanted to be a mother in the first place. Her mother is described as the platonic ideal of motherhood at the time, and Fargo finds herself wrestling with the tragedy behind living for your children so fully that who you are as an individual disappears.
She doesn’t know if her mother had dreams because she never asked her. She wants to now, but it’s too late. She can sing the perfect tribute to her late mother, and God, does she, but her mother will never hear it. Even with her extraordinary gifts as a songwriter, she can’t make sure that her mother is fully seen, because she never fully saw her when she was still alive.
Just a devastating record all around, with a hurt that still lingers long after the last note is played.
“You Were Always There” gets an A.
Every No. 1 Single of the Seventies
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