IN fact, I even put my money where my mouth is, as I chose it as the wedding song for management and myself, as I decided I wouldn’t settle for anything less (heh).
Actually I did settle for less – not with management, I hasten to add – but with my choice of the song version.
I wanted Willie Nelson whereas management wanted, nay, demanded! Elvis Presley.
Now as anyone who knows management is soon aware, Elvis is a semi-deity … so this was an argument I would not win, even though I did stress that Willie should get the nod because he actually wrote it.
But I was wrong. Willie may have made the song iconic, but he never wrote it.
I found this out last week when the guy who actually did write it died. His name was Wayne Carson, and he came from country music royalty.
Okay, it wasn’t serious royalty as his parents, Odie and Olivia Head, were known on the circuit as Shorty and Sue Thompson, which doesn’t have much of a regal ring to it even among the hillbillies.
Anyway, inspiration came to Carson when his wife phoned demanding to know why he was still holed up in Memphis when he should’ve been home 10 days ago.
‘She was pretty damned irate about it,’ he recalled. ‘So I tried to calm her down. I said, ‘Well, I know I’ve been gone a lot, but I’ve been thinking about you all the time’ – and it just struck me like someone had hit me with a hammer. I told her real fast I had to hang up because I had to put that into a song.’
Which he did – scripting the lyrics in just 10 minutes.
Quick fix
However, by a weird quirk of fate, also in the room was a struggling actor called Red West, who sometimes moonlighted as a bodyguard for Elvis.
So when Priscilla split and Elvis was moping around, Red told him about this song called Always on my Mind. Elvis was intrigued as he thought it may make him look like a good guy after being serially unfaithful.
So he said yes and recorded it. Simple as that.
However, by Elvis’s standards, it was only a moderate success when it came out in 1972, mainly because the Yankee disc jockeys thought the song on the flip side of the vinyl, Separate Ways was more in tune, so to speak, with the Elvis-Priscilla bust-up.
A decade later Willie got hold of it. He was supposed to do it as a duet with Merle Haggard. But, when Haggard heard the song, he said it was ‘a piece of s$%*’.
‘Okay,’ said Willie, ‘wait outside and I’ll sing it without you.’
The rest is history. It went straight to No 1 in the Billboard chart, was named the Country Music Association’s song of the year and won the singer (Willie) and the songwriter (Wayne) three Grammys the following year.
In fact, Willie’s version earned Wayne Carson more than $1-million in royalties, so he didn’t give a hoot that everyone else, including me, thought Willie had written it.
But why did I choose it as my wedding song?
Well, that too was simple. I had known management for at least 15 years before I popped the question. In between that time we both went out with other people.
However. management was always a constant in my life. We had been great friends before anything else, and that, in my (humble but flawed) opinion on relationships, is a key factor.
So I suggested Always on my Mind as something symbolic after all those years that we had been apart. It was true; I did some crazy things, but I never forgot her.
For her the reason was even more simple: none of the sentimental rubbish, she agreed because … well, because she liked Elvis.
So all I can say to Carson is RIP – and thank you for your notes of genius scribbled on a kitchen table all those years ago.
