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(William
McCall/Eddie Miller/James Pebworth/W.S. Stevenson/Robert Yount)
Kayton Roberts & Little Roy
Wiggins recordings
Stoneway
No. 1084 (LH-10058)
This
community effort was covered by a community of singers, including Loretta
Lynn, Dolly Parton, Ray Price, and Willie Nelson, but it was Engelbert
Humperdinck who put it into the stratosphere (and it, him) in 1967, when it
reached #1 in nine countries, including the U.S. and the U.K., where it
would stay at #1 for six weeks, end The Beatles' run of seventeen #1s in a
row (nobody beats Engelbert Humperdinck eighteen times in a row) and spend
a record-breaking fifty-six weeks on the U.K. charts. (It only reached #7 on the U.S.
charts and spent a paltry thirty-one weeks on the Billboard Top 40.) According to co-writer Eddie
Miller, it was inspired by an overheard conversation in a bar between a
husband and wife. We presume
it was their last.
Sources:
- http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1660
- http://homepage.ntlworld.com/gary.hart/lyricsh/humperdinck.html
- http://www.tremolocowboys.com/Lyrics_R/Ray_Price_Lyrics/Release_Me_Song_Lyrics.html
- http://freakytrigger.co.uk/popular/2006/02/engelbert-humperdinck-release-me/
- The Billboard Book of
Top 40 Albums by
Joel Whitburn (Billboard Publications, Inc.)
- The Complete Book of
the British Charts
by Tony Brown, Jon Kutner and Neil Warwick (Omnibus Press)
7.
8.
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