After her song “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue” blew up the charts, every song pitched to Crystal Gayle had the word “blue” in it.
The year was 1977, and Gayle’s country music career was heating up. Her 1975 song “Wrong Road Again” performed well, hitting No. 6 on the Billboard chart, but then songwriter Richard Leigh came along and helped propel her into a singer heard around the world. First came his “I’ll Get Over You,” the 1976 single that became Gayle’s first No. 1 hit. But it was the epochal song about brown eyes a year later, also by Leigh, that sealed her reputation as a hitmaker.
Gayle will perform Sunday at Phil Long Music Hall at Bourbon Brothers.
“When I first heard it I knew I wanted to sing it,” Gayle said from home in Nashville, Tenn. “I went into the studio and it was the very first take. I did record it again, but what we chose to put out was the first take. I knew it was a special song. The pianist came up with the piano sound that put everyone in a certain mood and it fell together.”
That song, off her fourth album, “We Must Believe in Magic,” earned her a Grammy Award and helped her cross over from country to pop country. Rolling Stone ranked the song No. 109 last year on its list of 200 greatest country songs.
“You never know what a song is going to do,” Gayle said. “I wanted it to be the first single of the album. I had to do a lot of talking with the studio. They always want to lead with an up-tempo song, and this was a ballad. I’m sure they were glad I talked them into it.”
What makes the success of the songs even more serendipitous was the chance meeting of Gayle and Leigh years before.
“We both booked a telethon in Bristol, Tenn.,” she said. “That was the first time I met him. We were both talking about going to Nashville and trying to get into the business, and little did I know our paths would cross and he’d write two big hits for me.”
Gayle is nothing but prolific, with 25 albums and numerous hit singles through the decades, including “Talking in Your Sleep,” “Half the Way,” “You and I,” “Ready for the Times to Get Better” and “The Sound of Goodbye.”
Her last album, “You Don’t Know Me: Classic Country,” dropped in 2019 and featured Gayle covering classic country songs, including “Ribbon of Darkness,” “Walkin’ After Midnight” and “Put it Off Until Tomorrow,” with her sisters, the country star Loretta Lynn and Peggy Sue, who also had a brief career as a country singer.
Gayle’s also often credited for being one of the most successful country pop crossovers and helping ease the way for other women in the genre to follow, such as Shania Twain and Faith Hill.
“If my music has touched people, it makes me feel good,” she said. “I’m happy they’ve listened to it and found something that made them want to do something in the world of music.”
Gayle, the youngest of eight children, remembers herself as a shy child. “I could open my mouth and start singing, but I was nervous to talk,” she said. “My mother would push me out there and open me up to everything. She loved that I could sing.”
Her older sister Lynn also encouraged her singing career, but told her to find her own voice, as any big sister might instruct her little sister.
“There were 19 years in between us,” Gayle said. “I was born in Kentucky, grew up in Wabash, Ind., and started recording in Tennessee. My background was different than my sister. Even though I could sound like my sister, she didn’t want me to. ‘Go on your own and do this.’ It went that way.”
Lynn died in 2022 at 90. Gayle remembers all the stories in the media about the sisters fighting.
“We’d laugh at it,” she said. “And she’d say, ‘just remember, as long as they spell your name right.’”
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‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source gazette.com ’
