50 years ago, on June 6, 1970, Conway's classic Hello Darlin' hit the top of the country charts and stayed there for the rest of the month. It went on to become the number 1 song of the entire year and to this day it's one of country music's most well known and beloved masterpieces. It was only his 4th #1 record at the time because country radio had a hard time accepting him because he was still seen as a rock singer, but this song set the stage for the legendary career he would go on to achieve.
A couple fun facts about Hello Darlin':
1) Conway wrote the song 10 years prior, in 1960 while he was still recording rock music. While finishing up his 9th country album in 1969 he needed to put down one last song and pulled out Hello Darlin'. He first recorded it by singing that classic first line, but for some reason it just didn't work. Producer Owen Bradley suggested he speak the words instead. Everyone in the studio immediately realized they had recorded something truly special and not simply an "album filler," but then the question came as to what to call it? It's an unusual song without the typical verse and chorus structure, and the words hello darlin' are only spoken once, yet what else could it have possibly been titled?
2) In 1975 the last mission of the Apollo program took place with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, United States–Soviet link up in space. Commander Thomas Stafford was a huge fan of Conway's, and as a gesture of goodwill from the American astronauts to Russian cosmonauts, he asked Conway to record a Russian version of Hello Darlin' to be played to a worldwide audience on board the Apollo module...which he did! He took lessons from a professor at the University of Oklahoma to learn Russian! It obviously doesn't have the same beauty that the English version does, but it's still a very cool piece of history that Conway was a part of!
From my collection, overseas Hello Darlin' singles from Japan, Spain, Italy and Germany...
and a Japanese version of the Hello Darlin' album...
Every single Conway concert until the last on June 4, 1993, began with him walking on stage and pointing to one lucky lady in the audience as he started singing Hello Darlin'. Every woman in the audience melted and he held them in the palm of his hands for the next hour. That was the magic of Conway and those two little words.
13 comments:
You sure do know your Conway, Melissa! Interesting information, too.
Great songs. Thanks for the great facts.
Those were fun facts and your collection really is impressive!
We never knew all that Darlin!
That's a heck of a collection of "Hello Darlin'." But, that's the kind of a song that deserves to be remembered...
I had NO IDEA Conway recorded this song in Russian! I also didn't know that he recorded rock music, either, so now I need to go find out more about this.
Kim
Great post. Interesting facts about the song.
M&M,
Cool factoids on such an old classic Conway hit. My baby sister turned 50 this month. My how the years pass by! Thanks for sharing the dance floor with the 4M gang, my furriends. Have a boogietastic week!
cool
I like that song
That must have been very hard to sing in Russian, what a great man!😸Pawkisses for a Happy Week ahead🐾😽💞
Mudpie, have you been hearing Hello Darlin' on repeat? Yes? Well, there are certainly worse things than that. Purrs!
I didn't know that this song was written in 1960 but, now that you mention that fun fact, I can pick up the 1960 vibe in it. Now the Russian version - that was kind of interesting listening to, but to think that he took Russian lessons. One of my cousins has made a career of the Foreign Service and I remember her taking Russian (she speaks several languages fluently, including Russian, Spanish and French)and her first posting was in the then Soviet Union. Russian is a hard language, so much respect to Conway! Alana ramblinwitham.blogspot.com
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