Don't know where I was at mentally when I was jotting down songs to feature in the early months of this year at Friday Night Jukebox, but this is the fourth one since New Year's (and next week's will be the fifth) that was one of my Father's favorites. My Dad liked listening to music as we ate dinner, and we heard this tune (and its respective album) numerous times through the years....
Ray Stevens has had a long and varied (and pretty successful) career making music. He got his start in 1957, and until the 1980's, alternated between pop/country songs and comedic songs, having hit singles in each genre. Stevens also produced and wrote music, as well as having his own TV variety show, the creatively entitled The Ray Stevens Show. Since the eighties Stevens has concentrated on comedy records and continues to perform to this day. Stevens won a Grammy Award (for this week's tune) and has been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. For his career, Stevens has released fifty studio albums, 67 compilation albums, and 125 singles (with two of those singles reaching #1 on the Billboard Hot 100). I don't usually mention the personal lives of the featured artists, but Stevens was married to his wife Penny for over sixty years until sadly she passed away last December...and I'm pretty sure he's the only FNJ star to have a marriage that lasted that long.
Fun Fact: The children heard singing in the background on this week's tune were not a professional group, but rather the students at Oak Hill Elementary School in Nashville, Tennessee, which just happened to feature his two daughters.
"Everything Is Beautiful" was released in 1970 and later added to the obligatory album release of a hit single, the ever so surprisingly named LP Everything Is Beautiful. The single hit #1 (with a bullet) on the singles chart, while the album peaked at #35 on the Billboard 200.
No denying it: "Everything Is Beautiful" is a sappy ballad calling for love and togetherness, and for opening our minds to see the good in everyone...which is probably just as relevant today as it was back then. Stevens wrote a catchy as all hell single, sang the hell out of it, and added in the kid chorus to take the good vibes straight on up to the stars. This is one of those songs that may cause some to shake their heads and drift on back to Coolsville, but as for myself, I've been singing it all week and wondering if fifty years from now we'll still be as divided as we are today...and were fifty years ago, as well.
Lyric Sheet: "There is none so blind/As he who will not see/We must not close our minds/We must let our thoughts be free..."
Enjoy:
Republican = Traitor
Peace,
emaycee
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