Keith Whitley

Keith Whitley died twenty years ago this May. He has no thread on ILM so I thought I'd start one.

I bought I Wonder Do You Think Of Me because of an intriguing review in the third edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide (1992), so I didn't hear his music while it was current. He's still largely context-less for me, but maybe not for some of you. I'd like to hear from others what they think of him. On a lot of days he's my favorite singer in any genre. I know they he copped his vocal tricks from Lefty but the tenderness in Whitley's vocals is something new. This is astonishingly intimate music, and as fine as the lyrics scan on page, the intimacy is more a function of Whitley's tone. When I hear "Don't Close Your Eyes", it's hard to believe, because how could a man who sounds like that ever have problems with any lover? Or "I Wonder Do You Think Of Me", probably the single song of his I return to most often: yes, we are thinking of you still, how foolish could you be? And to think this was pop music at some time; well, maybe some of you have thoughts about this, or him.

Listening to the records from 1984 and 1985 again, it's clear he was in better production hands by the end of the decade. The production on "I've Got The Heart For You", for instance, is really unsympathetic to his voice, as the sax steamrolls over the vocal melody. Plus, the vocal wavering that sound so emotionally deep on the 1988 and 1989 records here sound like tics instead. There's a sadness on those later records that's not there on the mid 80s.

One of the things I find most striking about Whitley is how he can turn his own vulnerability into something like swagger, without coming across as either wimpy or a braggart. On "Don't Close Your Eyes", he's begging his lover not to think of another man while they (presumably) make love. And it's natural to be ashamed about this, about being inadequate as a lover. But the performance is unashamed. Watch the way he sings it in the clip above. I imagine the crowd at the Opry felt a little strange afterward, about the shared intimacy; husbands bowing their eyes when their wives look at them afterward.

The inadequacy here isn't the same as in, say, "Jolene", because firstly it's written from a male perspective, which makes the inadequacy more shameful in our culture, at least. Secondly, the inadequacy is specifically sexual. Thirdly, the plea isn't to the competitor for the lover's attention, but to the lover his/herself.

"I Wonder Do You Think Of Me" is also about inadequacy. This time it's not sexual inadequacy, but rather inadequacy at making a difference in a person's life, a person that mattered. "On graduation day, you just drifted away." The song suggests a narrator who hasn't quite come to grips with this. It's not just the lyric, but the way he lets the "away" in "you just drifted away" just...drift out of his mouth. After listening I again want to be somewhere private.

the ultimate (as in final) honky tonk hero. the true heir of lefty and hank. you are so right about how he came into his own on those last two albums. I've always thought if he had lived longer the whole trajectory of mainstream country might've gone in a different direction that garth brooks/eagles/las vegas. but that's idle (and sentimental) speculation.

And to think this was pop music at some time

keith was the last-country-music-as-rural-culture superstar (along with randy travis). after garth's crossover success in the early 90s so-called country music became the soft-rock sound of the suburbs we know today. "exurban music."

check out mark chesnut's 1992 album Long Necks & Short Stories for another last gasp of country music.

i like garth brooks actually but he does something different than these guys.

Yeah, I like Garth too, and lots of what you call exurban (country) music. I'm not sure that Whitley's late 80s music is superficially that different from Garth's, or Tricia Yearwood's, from that era. The arrangements on all of these are pretty soft rock. Despite Whitley's bluegrass past, those last couple of albums don't have much in the way of strings or banjos. They do have terrific dobro and pedal steel though (e.g. Sonny Garrish on "Don't Close Your Eyes")---check out the youtube embedded at the end. Whitley as Lefty: I know that's the legacy people say he was reaching for, but I think Whitley's inadequacy songs are more specific than "I Never Go Around Mirrors", and more, I don't know, shocking in their frank sexuality.

that's a great point about the intimacy of keith's vocals. check conway twitty's hits from the early-to-mid 70s for shockingly frank sexuality. his duet with loretta lynn "lead me on" is the most erotic record I've ever heard. what if keith and wife lorrie morgan had done duets? whoa. whitley was a pretty tortured guy, as you say, this really comes across in his drinking songs too. obviously the bluegrass influence was vanquished from his music in nashville but i don't hear any rock in his sound. to me one of the most significant things about keith was his upbringing in appalachia. really defining and a distant experience -- a vanished world -- from growing up in the houston suburbs.

i didn't mean "exurban music" as a pejorative, i think garth brooks was logical development and a reflection of broader changes in american life.

it's been a while since i listened to him, but i always found "don't close your eyes" just heartbreaking. i love/admire that kind of mix of craft and emotion—like, he's not really pouring himself out every time he sings that song, but he sure knows how to make it seem like he is.

That's a great point on Conway Twitty! Whenever "You've Never Been This Far Before" comes on the radio, I blush (trembling fingers touching forbidden places!). It's so frank. But let's think about "Lead Me On" a sec. Conway owns up to his neediness. But Loretta asks him to take control. Conway is the boss. He's a needy, vulnerable boss, but he's still the boss. Whereas in, say, "Don't Close Your Eyes", Keith is the passive one. This is the striking thing (to me) about Keith that I'm trying to get at.

xpost yeah I imagine it must have been hard to inhabit that song live, not to mention hard to work up the nerve!

oh and I feel you re. exurban music, I love a lot of that stuff and didn't read it as a pejorative. The Appalachian strain in mid 80s country fascinates me; pass over Dolly because by then she was in her own category, but think of the Judds: there is something wild in their music, despite the soft-core production: e.g. in "Why Not Me?", listen to how Wynonna's vocal quivers, and how that builds up the song's central plea (and I know it's a Harlan Howard song, but it's Wynonna's vocal that brings the heat).

i think a significant turning point was august/september 1990, when chesnutt and garth both released versions of "friends in low places." chesnutt's is unimpeachable—classic barstool honky tonk, a little bit of self-pity mixed in with the swagger. but then garth's is, to me, the far superior version, even though it's emotionally less complex and he's not nearly as good, technically, as a singer. he just made what could have been a nice but fairly ordinary song into this huge, rousing, pop phenomenon anthem.

OTM. but I think "friends in low places" is a better than ordinary song in chesnutt's hands while garth strips it of melancholy and reverses its meaning in a way that's almost perverse -- classic honky-tonk doubt and self-pity turned into a pop-bombastic drinking anthem.

yeah, definitely better than ordinary. but very much in the classic honky tonk template, i guess is what i meant. in a way garth's isn't.

Those are great thoughts on "Friends In Low Places"; I'm a little ashamed to admit that I don't know Chesnutt's version (I loved his singles in the early 90s, but never bought the albums, something I think I'll soon remedy). I wouldn't say that Garth strips it of melancholy, but more that he, as you say, inverts the melancholy into something to be proud of. Getting burned was something to brag about---and why not, given the performance's hugeness?

One of the things I find most striking about Whitley is how he can turn his own vulnerability into something like swagger, without coming across as either wimpy or a braggart. On "Don't Close Your Eyes"...

yeah no, he ignores vulnerability altogether. it's an important choice he made, but he went with what's written in 'don't close your eyes,' as opposed to playing up an emotion we do immediately see in the situation. (and the arrangement of the track, the swelling of the chorus, helps it along.)

the closest the narrator comes to any admission of even the possibility of a problem on his end is 'maybe i've been a fool' for staying(*), and that 'maybe' dismisses its potential as a seriously considered notion before he even gets to 'but i keep hoping someday / that you'll see the light.' the narrator really has an immense faith that he can make her happy: not only the 'see the light' line, but also, of course, 'you'll find more love than you've ever known.'

if whitley had inserted an awareness of vulnerability where none was written, the brutality of the song would've been diminished (and this ties directly into what mte says about him seeming like he's pouring himself out, without really doing it). expressing a vulnerability implies a knowledge that pain is on the way. but the narrator isn't tensed for the blow. he doesn't know he's inadequate. but we do. we know he's a fool to hope, and that's what wrenches our hearts for him.

(* which might be the only line that can rival the, indeed, shockingly frank 'don't pretend it's him' for highest pain quotient--i mean, 'maybe'? look, pal, you understand that you're begging her to, you know, acknowledge you during sex, right?)

garth strips it of melancholy and reverses its meaning in a way that's almost perverse -- classic honky-tonk doubt and self-pity turned into a pop-bombastic drinking anthem

zackly--because it's not just a pop bombastic drinking anthem, it's also a pop bombastic redneck pride anthem. (don't forget that the fiddle in garth's version deserves no small amount of credit for the bombast. it may not keep up with garth, exactly, but darned if it don't hang awfully tough.)

wow, those are great posts! One thing we haven't noted about "Don't Close Your Eyes" is how he lets his voice trail off at the end of each line on the verses (e.g. "and even now in my armmmmmmmmmmmmmmms..."). He holds the note a long time, so that his voice fades under the guitars but is still there. To cut to the case: it sounds like sobbing. I think it's extremely effective. I don't know antecedents for this off-hand but I suspect there are some: I'm listening to Lefty and George Jones looking, and will turn to 70s Elvis and Roy Orbison next: I have to listen closely to hear this.

22 years ago today.

Listening to the last record today, what stands out right now is how he well he wears the mask of a miserable heartbroken man, and yet we know how it ended. His singing, as we've talked about before, has technique; it would be wrong to call him a raw singer. But when he sings of Tennessee courage, part of the beauty, if we can call it that, is that we know he knew of what he sang. To be able to sing so vulnerably, and really be that vulnerable: his voice takes my breath away too.

23 years ago today.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-Nub5gWCKY

I missed the anniversary this year, but close enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jylb5NznEs

since starting a Lorrie Morgan thread would probably get less interest than even this one (RIP as always, Keith, you were one of the greats), I'll revive this one to say how much I love "Five Minutes". It'll take a miracle, but Lorrie tells you how to pull it off; but make it quick, the cab'll be here shortly. But the music doesn't carry the urgency, belying the rush. The song's written by Beth Nielsen Chapman, who also wrote Faith Hill's "This Kiss", another song that plays with time, that tries to conjure an epiphany.

I love Don't Close Your Eyes.

Yet another valuable thread I hadn't seen before. Good wiki entry, though discogs takes the discog further, as is only right---intrigued by their v. detailed credits for his Rounder album, Sad Songs and Waltzes, with input from Hargus "Pig" Robbins, JD Crowe, Dale Ann Bradley, Alison Krauss, the Jordanaires, though not an all-stars album---good titles too; anybody heard it??
(Was thinking he was in band with Skaggs, Salt Creek, or something similar---along with some other guys who became better known elsewhere--maybe also on Rounder, but not seeing a per se band release, though there's one credited to the two of them, from 1971.)

Public TV around here made a nice career documentary on JD Crowe that had some cool video and pictures of when Keith Whitley played in his band. There has some some stories about Whitley on one of the shows as he and both Rickey Skaggs played quite a bit together including a time in both Ralph Stanley and JD Crowe's band.

KET had this in the archive too...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NAxxH0XOyY

Back in the day, Whitley used to play all the bars around here. I've met quite a few that saw him in small joints around Richmond or Lexington Ky.

http://kentuckycountrymusic.com/2019/05/keith-whitleys-legacy-lives-on-30-years-later.html

https://i2.wp.com/kentuckycountrymusic.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/RIcky-Skaggs-Ralph-Stanley-Keith-Whitley-from-Ricky-Skaggs-website.jpg?resize=768%2C521

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AByGThFjmUs

This guy was incredible. I've been obsessing over his first two major label albums, LA to Miami and Don't Close Your Eyes. The former, with it's perfect little 80s soft-country vibe, seems like a minor miracle considering his bluegrass background. I was trying to think of the context of this album in relation to all the other neo-trads kicking off around the time and I almost think Born in the USA and Tunnel of Love are better comparisons. Really solid material bathed in 80s production--chiming keyboards, sax solos, lots of reverb. And good lord, that voice. Everyone OTM upthread discussing the vulnerability he conveys.

It's crazy to imagine how this guy's career would've gone if he didn't die. I'm just starting to get into the posthumous material, but it sounds like he was moving away from the pop stuff into the more trad stuff George Strait and Randy Travis were making at the time. He was just inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame but it's really crazy how little he's talked about nowadays. I can't get over how good he was.

Also, I bought a pdf version of this if anyone wants me to share: https://www.bluegrassunlimited.com/article/keith-whitley/

How perfect is this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ka_lJGRGPs8

one of his songs went viral on tiktok last year

https://theboot.com/keith-whitley-miami-my-amy-tiktok/

big fan of the first few records.