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Heaven Help the Child

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Heaven Help the Child is the 1973 album by country singer-songwriter Mickey Newbury. The album was Newbury's third consecutive release recorded at Cinderella Studios. Noted for its dramatic remakes of four previous Newbury songs: "Sweet Memories", "Good Morning Dear" from Harlequin Melodies, "Sunshine" from Sings His Own and "San Francisco Mabel Joy" from Looks Like Rain, the album is considered equal among Newbury's acclaimed Looks Like Rain and Frisco Mabel Joy. Apart from its definitive versions of three of Newbury's early songwriting hits, the album is also acclaimed for its title track, with its multi-generational narrative, the haunting "Cortelia Clark," and the bluegrass classic "Why You Been Gone So Long." In his AllMusic review of the LP, Thom Jurek declares, "Newbury, for the third time in as many recording sessions, came up with a record that defies categorization. And for the third time in a row, he had done the impossible, created a masterpiece, a work of perfection."[citation needed]

Heaven Help The Child was collected for CD issue on the eight-disc Mickey Newbury Collection from Mountain Retreat, Newbury's own label in the mid-1990s, along with nine other Newbury albums from 1969-1981. In 2011, it was reissued again as part of the four-disc Mickey Newbury box set An American Trilogy on Saint Cecilia Knows, alongside two other albums recorded at Cinderella Sound, Looks Like Rain and Frisco Mabel Joy. This release marks the first time that Heaven Help The Child has been released on CD in remastered form, after the original master tapes (long thought to have been destroyed in a fire) were rediscovered in 2010.

Background

Heaven Help the Child is the third and final installment of Newbury's "Cinderella Trilogy", a series of albums that he recorded at Cinderella Sound, a tiny studio located Madison, Tennessee. The first two albums he cut there, Looks Like Rain (1969) and 'Frisco Mabel Joy (1971), were critically acclaimed for their unique, mysterious atmosphere and poetic songs. Newbury, who had initially gained fame as a songwriter, scored his only pop hit in 1971 when his arrangement of three Civil War ballads, titled "An American Trilogy", hit #29 on the country charts.[citation needed] Elektra boss and Newbury champion Jac Holzman later recalled to Mojo in 2012, "By Heaven help the Child, I think he began to become more comfortable with other instruments expressing his vision."

Composition

Next to "An American Trilogy", "Why Have You Been Gone So Long" is Newbury's most covered song. Guitarist Tom Ghent, who appeared with Newbury at The Bitter End in New York in 1970, later claimed that songwriter Dennis Linde, who was playing bass, suggested that they speed up "Why Have You Been Gone So Long" since most of Newbury's songs were so slow. "We rehearsed it", Ghent recalled later, "and that evening, we kicked it off at about twice the normal speed! Well, Mickey...turned and looked at me, then at Dennis, then at me, then at Dennis...Finally he decided to go along with the joke and just sing it at that tempo."[2][full citation needed] Newbury stuck with the arrangement, and the song injected a toe-tapping shot of bluegrass into what was otherwise a collection of contemplative, haunting songs on Heaven Help the Child. The title track, which Newbury biographer Joe Ziemer calls Newbury "at his most poetic, a multilevel odyssey woven from threads of life as seen through his eyes,"[3][full citation needed] won first prize at the Second Annual Tokyo Music Festival, an event that consisted of 609 artists from 36 countries. In 1977, Newbury recalled to Peter O'Brien of the Omaha Rainbow:

I didn't write it specifically for the Festival. It was one of three or four songs they submitted and that was accepted, so I went out to Japan. It was a nice trip. Surprised me, too...There were artists from all over the world. Russia, Belgium, Philippines and everywhere. There was about forty in the finals. It was really quite something to win that... Some of the things were in my head for a long time, like 'We're all building walls instead of bridges' was.[citation needed]

Newbury confessed that "Sweet Memories" was written about a broken engagement: "I was engaged to a girl from Westphalia, Texas and it didn't work out, and the idea for "Sweet Memories" came from that."[4][full citation needed] "Cortelia Clark" was composed as a tribute to a sixty-two-year-old blind street by that name who perished in a gas fire.[5][full citation needed] Contrary to popular belief, the version of "San Francisco Mabel Joy" that concludes the album is a straight lift from Newbury's 1969 Mercury album Looks Like Rain rather than a rerecorded or overdubbed version.[6][full citation needed]

"Sunshine" was released as a single and peaked at #53 on the Billboard country chart and #82 on the pop chart.[citation needed] It just missed the Top 40 on the Canadian adult contemporary chart, reaching #41.[citation needed]

Reception

Heaven Help the Child was not a commercial success, peaking at #172 on the U.S. pop albums chart. Today it is considered another one of Newbury's major works, with biographer Joe Ziemer writing of the album, "He knocks the walls down, of place and time, to break free unchained, and move out into the world and beyond." AllMusic calls "Cortelia Clark" "one of Newbury's great achievements as a songwriter."[citation needed] In 2011 Steve Horowitz of PopMatters wrote, "If Newbury seemed conflicted on 1971’s ’Frisco Mabel Joy, he’d gotten over it by the somewhat celebratory Heaven Help the Child. His musical palette was much more colorful and airy as he sings hopefully, 'we’re all building walls/they should be bridges' and such."

Track listing

All tracks composed by Mickey Newbury

  1. "Heaven Help The Child" - 5:16
  2. "Good Morning Dear" - 5:18
  3. "Sunshine" - 4:34
  4. "Sweet Memories" - 3:28
  5. "Why You Been Gone So Long" - 3:27
  6. "Cortelia Clark" - 5:12
  7. "Song For Susan" - 4:30
  8. "San Francisco Mabel Joy" - 5:43

Personnel

Selected cover recordings

References

  1. ^ [1]
  2. ^ Zeimer 2015, pp. 120–121.
  3. ^ Zeimer 2015, p. 147.
  4. ^ Zeimer 2015, p. 148.
  5. ^ Zeimer 2015, p. 149.
  6. ^ Zeimer 2015, p. 150.
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