Burt Reynolds’ Long Forgotten Country Music Album
L
ast week came the sad news that Burt Reynolds had died aged 82 years old. It’s easy to forget, but for a long time Reynolds was one of the biggest movie stars in the world. And unfortunately, sometimes huge movie stars think they can also be musicians whether they can sing or not.
Reynolds’ dream growing up wasn’t to be in show business at all, young Burt wanted to be a professional football player but after injury put paid to his sports dreams, discovered acting and with his macho good looks, that bore more than a resemblance to Brando, quickly broke into TV and film.
While he essentially played himself – a likeable good old Southern boy – he was undoubtedly good at it, always seeming to be having a ball on screen, something that translated to his audience. “I wasn’t interested in challenging myself as an actor,” Reynolds admitted in his 2015 memoir But Enough About Me. “I was interested in having a good time.”
By the early ‘70s Reynolds star was so bright, in fact, that people felt his charisma and star power would translate into a music career. The logic seemed sound: Burt was at the height of his beauty and so full of charisma that surely his fans would be swooning to his music as well as his films. So Reynolds recorded a country album and called it Ask Me What I Am. If you are a Burt Reynolds fan and are about to rush out to try and find this lost treasure, be warned, there is a reason why this album was quickly forgotten and even Reynolds himself conveniently didn’t mention it once in his recent memoir.
At the time of the album’s recording, Reynolds had been a star for over 10 years, first in TV in shows such as Gunsmoke, Hawk and Dan August, but also in a number of (mostly forgettable) feature films. That is until he was offered the role of Lewis Medlock in John Boorman’s Deliverance in 1972. The film was a huge box office hit, earning lots of acclaim for its star. Reynolds, it turns out, was not only handsome but could really act. The movie turned him overnight into the hottest name in Hollywood.
Shortly before the film’s release Reynolds had also become Cosmopolitan’s first ever male centerfold, famously posing naked on a bearskin rug, his hand and arm covering his modesty, a huge grin on his mustachioed face. The magazine quickly sold 1.5 million copies, turning him into a huge sex symbol. Reynolds later said that he regretted the photo, as he felt it damaged his chance for an Oscar nomination for Deliverance and deterred others from offering him other serious roles but the fact was, with the hype from both the centerfold and the success of Deliverance, Burt Reynolds was the name on everybody’s lips in 1972.
It was at this time that Reynolds met singer-songwriter Bobby Goldsboro during a Tonight Show appearance and the pair became firm friends. Goldsboro, of course, was a hugely successful musician who, after playing guitar for Roy Orbison, had branched out on his own to have a string of hits throughout the ’60s (and into the ’70s) including the 1968 #1, “Honey.” Reynolds was a big country music fan and so Goldsboro introduced him to his old friend, country music bigwig Buddy Killen, who was president of the hugely successful Tree International Publishing. Reynolds was now a huge movie star but could he be a country music star too?
In an interview recorded for radio that year Reynolds explained: “A friend of mine named Bobby Goldsboro talked me into doing an album down in Nashville. I had a lot of fun doing the album and I think I surprised not only Bobby but I surprised myself a couple of times.”
The album’s engineer Ernie Winfrey offered a little insight to Reynolds’ forgotten album on YouTube last year: “My boss, and his friend Buddy Killen, got together with Goldsboro and decided that, considering Burt’s huge popularity at that time, they would sell tons of records based solely on his fame,” he wrote. “I have to give Burt credit for having the balls to even try it.”
Reynolds was signed to Mercury Records and went to record his debut at Soundshop Studios in Nashville with both Killen and Goldsboro at the helm as producers. The whole thing was recorded in just two days. Despite the producers confidence that they could make Reynolds a new Nashville star, Winfrey says that Burt himself wasn’t so sure. “I know that Burt knew in his heart that he didn’t really have the chops to bring it off but he may have expected me to perform miracles on his voice,” he wrote. “ I know this because when I was out adjusting his mic he whispered…”Ern, please help me sound as good as you can.” As you can see I have only so much control over that. All the effects in the world will not make a bad singer sound good.”
The November 3, 1973 issue of Billboard reported that “eight of the 11 songs were written specifically to reflect Reynolds’ life and general philosophies by Bobby Goldsboro, Red Lane and Dick Feller.” Despite this, the album itself is a sentimental and nostalgic affair a world away from Reynolds’ manly tough-guy-with-a-sense-of-humor image. Engineer Winfrey later remembered: “Killen and Goldsboro rounded up some excellent songs for Burt and we recorded some really good tracks for him to sing over. Alas, his voice never matched with all of that good stuff. Bless his little pea-pickin’ heart.”
Reynolds at the time called his debut a concept album that was designed to reveal the real sensitive Burt:”We didn’t do the album, quite honestly, to prove that I could sing,” he explained. “The album is, what they call, a concept album and I had some things that I wanted to say… I found myself in the last couple of years listening to Kris Kristofferson, not to hear him sing, but to hear what he had to say. And I thought, well why don’t I just do an album and maybe if even a couple of people who are fans of mine – or not fans of mine, either way – listen to it, they’ll come away and know me a little better which is kind of important to me.” Those fans certainly came away knowing Burt a little better: there was no doubt about it, the man could not sing.
Reynolds obviously was very aware of his vocal limitations (although he later described his own singing voice as being “halfway between Roy Acuff and Kris Kristofferson”) because some of the tracks are just spoken-word affairs and others have him almost whispering the melody, such as the first track, “Childhood 1949,” which begins with a wistful Burt singing about sweet memories of growing up: “Flying kites/Pillow fights/Lay me down to sleep nights.” The second song “Slow John Fairburn” is basically Reynolds telling a story about an old man taking a motorcycle ride – complete with character voices – with some musical accompaniment (this one even includes an at-the-time super trendy Evel Knievel reference!).
These first two tracks have their charms, particularly “Slow John Fairburn,” which displays that old Burt humor, with the wink-to-the-camera charm of the Smokey & The Bandit films. The rest of the album though descends into pure easy-listening middle-of-the-road blandness with Reynolds trying his very best to hit the notes but often failing. The syrupy “The First One That I Lay With” is obviously one of the tunes written specifically with Reynolds in mind as it tells the tale of a teenage boy losing his virginity to an older woman (we’re guessing this is based on Reynolds’ real life experiences as Burt tells a similar story in his his autobiography).
“She’s Taken A Gentle Lover” apparently is one of the only songs not specially written for Burt and tells a sad tale of woe: a lady who leaves her man for another woman (obviously no woman could ever leave Burt!) The song is a little more upbeat, filled with strumming guitars and lots of backing vocals, all dragged down by Reynolds often out-of-tune voice. Let’s put it this way, the song is pretty enough but he makes David Soul sound like Freddie Mercury. (You can judge for yourself, as someone has kindly uploaded the whole thing to YouTube, as posted above, but please keep your expectations low.)
Another song on the album was actually a hit for Tammy Wynette, “Till I Get It Right” in 1972. Despite Reynolds’ weedy attempt at covering the First Lady of Country Music, the pair would actually date in the late ’70s. Sadly a Burt/Tammy duet never materialized.
His lady friend at the time, the legendary entertainer Dinah Shore, also makes an uncredited appearance on the album at the very end accompanying him on the jaunty “I Like Having You Around.” You would imagine a singing talent such as Shore could have saved the world from a Burt Reynolds album but apparently she was cheering on her boyfriend all the way. “The most endearing thing that Burt did was to call Dinah Shore (who he was dating at the time) every night after that day’s sessions were over and play her the results holding the phone up to the speakers,” Winfrey recalled. “I kept his vocal down in the mix so it was hard to tell how really bad it was. But he seemed to be so proud of his shot at being a recording artist.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5H-w2hbBRs
If you are wondering about the title, it was because poor misunderstood Reynolds wanted to clear up people’s misconceptions of him through the power of song. “One of the things that has happened to me in the last couple of years, I’ve taken on a whole image with the public whether it’s right or wrong,” he told The Five Count. “A lot of people decided that they are for me or against me not because of what I am but because of what they think I am… It just had to be the title of the album, because in essence that’s what the whole album is. Ask me what I am.”
Billboard reported that the album was being rush-released in November 1973 in order to coincide with an NBC TV special starring Reynolds. It came with a large detachable poster of Burt in a snazzy and snug blue polyester leisure suit and white cowboy boots, the record company were obviously, having heard the record, hoping that his fans would still buy the album for the poster in spite of the music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H48HhPVUfss
Two singles were released (“I Like Having You Around” and the spoken word tale “A Room For A Boy Never Used,” which according to Winfrey was Burt’s favorite track “I believe it had great personal meaning to him.”) but neither charted and the album itself bombed. People loved seeing Reynolds play the likeable tough guy on screen but weren’t ready to hear sensitive Burt struggling to hit the notes on record. Not surprisingly Reynolds abandoned his short attempt to be a country music star and went back to his film career, where he continued to be one of the most popular movie stars for the rest of the ‘70s and into the ’80s.
Despite Reynolds obvious defects as a singer he did sing again, in his movies at least. He had plenty of tunes in Peter Bogdanovich’s homage to 1930s musicals, At Long Last Love from 1975 and of course duetted with Dolly Parton in The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas in 1982. And yes, that’s his “singing” in the animated movie All Dogs Go To Heaven (1989).
Believe it or not, Reynolds did actually score a minor hit eventually in 1980 with the country single “Let’s Do Something Cheap And Superficial” from the Smokey And The Bandit 2 soundtrack. It reached the heady heights of #51 on the country charts (for some reason it did even better in Canada making it to #33) despite the fact that the boozy country tune did sound like Reynolds was three sheets to the wind.
Reynolds though sounded like he was having a huge amount of fun on the single and even his one forgotten album, despite its wimpy sound, was obviously the actor having a great time in the studio with his buddies and briefly living out his dreams of being a country music star. Reynolds was a great movie star and a talented (often under-appreciated) actor but this album proves that his talents, sadly, did not stretch to music. Even so, you can tell that he did it all with that famous twinkle in his eye. R.I.P. Burt.
