Willie Nelson – Blue Eyes Crying In The Rain

About The Song

Willie Nelson first moved to Nashville in 1960, but it took 15 years and a return to Texas before he finally connected with the public in a big way as a recording artist. He had his first chart successes in 1962, reaching Billboard’s Top Ten with “Touch Me” and “Willingly,” – the latter a duet with then-wife Shirley Collie – but Nelson failed to follow through on that early promise.
Willie made a number of albums for the RCA and Atlantic labels in the ensuing years, but onlookers said he was “ahead of his time” or that he “played too many chords.” Settling in Austin, Texas in 1971, he found his audience – a mixture of hippies and rednecks – through the Armadillo World Headquarters, where he first appeared on August 12, 1972. A year later, he held his first quasi-annual “Willie Nelson Picnic” on the Fourth of July, but just as he was establishing his niche, Atlantic closed its country division. Willie bought out his contract in 1974 and signed with Columbia Records, where he was given “creative control.”
Nelson really had no idea what to do with that “creative control” until a drive from Colorado to Texas. During the trip, he and his wife Connie formulated a concept album about a preacher in the Old West based around the song “Red Headed Stranger” first recorded by Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith on the MGM label in 1954. While the tune received decent radio airplay, it did not chart nationally. Nelson remembered playing this record while working as a disc jockey at a Fort Worth station in the mid-1950s.
The material that Willie and Connie came up with for the new album mixed older songs with several of Nelson’s own compositions to tie the storyline together. Willie recorded the whole thing in just three days at a cost of $20,000 at the “Autumn Sound Studio” in Garland, Texas. However, Columbia was less than thrilled with the results.
To the label’s executives, it seemed the record wasn’t finished. They thought it was under-produced and too sparse in its instrumentation, but since they had already put out money for the project, it was decided to go ahead and try to distribute and market the album under the legal terms of Nelson’s contract.
“Red Headed Stranger” was released in May of 1975 and by July 19th (the very day of Lefty Frizzell’s passing, by the way), Willie’s first selection for a single had made Billboard’s country chart and was starting its slow but steady climb to the top. The song was “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” written by Fred Rose way back in 1945.
Many artists had recorded the tune over the years, but surprisingly, no one had ever charted with it. Roy Acuff had the original cut on the song, and then Hank Williams did a performance of it on one of his “Mother’s Best Flour” radio programs on WSM. Later versions followed by Ferlin Husky, Slim Whitman, Bill Anderson and several others (just to help fill albums). Before Nelson’s single, the most recent cut of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” had been a rendition by Conway Twitty on his “Hello Darlin’” album in June, 1970.
Willie Nelson’s version of “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” debuted on Billboard’s country singles chart July 19, 1975. Its ascension was slow, but the record eventually reached the #1 plateau by October 4th and catapulted him to super-stardom as a recording artist. Songwriter Fred Rose (who died in December, 1954) would have been pleased.
On February 28, 1976, the single that Columbia didn’t want to release, from an album the company’s executives considered sub-par, brought Nelson a Grammy award for “Best Country Vocal Performance – Male.” Ultimately, the “Red Headed Stranger” collection sold 2.5 million units, and Willie turned it into a movie co-starring Morgan Fairchild and Katherine Ross in 1987.

Video

Lyric

In the twilight glow I see her
Blue eyes cryin’ in the rain
When we kissed goodbye and parted
I knew we’d never meet again

Love is like a dyin’ ember
Only memories remain
Through the ages I’ll remember
Blue eyes cryin’ in the rain

Some day when we meet up yonder
We’ll stroll hand in hand again
In a land that knows no partin’
Blue eyes cryin’ in the rain