Johnny Bush came to Nashville to record a song he had never heard. By the end of the night, he had heard it sung by the one man nobody could top, and he was not sure he wanted to go through with it.
The story comes from Johnny Bush himself. He told it to Marty Robbins biographer Diane Diekman in a 2008 interview, and it is one of the best late-night moments in the history of country radio.
A song he hadn’t heard yet
It was probably 1969. Johnny Bush was recording for Stop Records, the label run by steel guitar great Pete Drake and Tommy Hill. Drake had heard Frankie Laine’s pop recording of “You Gave Me a Mountain” and thought it was made for Bush, a Texas singer with a big, soaring voice who could handle songs most country singers wouldn’t touch.
Bush asked who wrote it. The answer was Marty Robbins. That surprised him. Why hadn’t Marty put it out himself? Nobody seemed to know. Pete Drake gave him a copy of the record, but by the time Bush arrived in Nashville, he still hadn’t had a chance to listen to it.
A night with Ralph Emery
Back then, Ralph Emery hosted an all-night show on WSM, the powerful Nashville station that could be heard across much of America after dark. Bush remembered that when you came to town, you went and spent the night with Ralph. He would have you read a commercial, play your records and talk about what was going on.
So that night, Johnny Bush walked into the WSM control room. Marty Robbins was already there.
That was no accident. Bush described Marty as a night owl with so much energy he couldn’t sleep. He would spend whole nights at the station with Ralph, singing, playing the piano and visiting.
“I’ll sing it for you”
After the hellos, Ralph asked Johnny what brought him to town. He said he was there to record. Did he know what he would be recording? Johnny pointed at Marty and said it was one of his songs.
Marty asked which one. Johnny told him “You Gave Me a Mountain,” and admitted he hadn’t even heard it yet. Marty’s answer was simple. He would sing it for him.
And he did. Live on clear-channel WSM, at two or three o’clock in the morning, Marty Robbins sat down at the piano and sang his own song to the singer who was about to record it, with untold numbers of night-shift workers, truckers and insomniacs listening in.
For Johnny Bush, this was not just another singer. He had been hooked on Marty’s voice since Marty’s first record came out around 1952. Bush said it took Texas by storm that anyone could sing like that. Now his idol was sitting at a piano a few feet away, singing to him. Bush’s reaction was honest:
“After I’ve heard you sing it, I don’t know if I want to try it.”
He tried anyway
Johnny Bush went ahead and recorded the song, working from the record Pete Drake had given him. His version climbed to No. 7 on the Billboard country chart in 1969. It was the biggest hit he ever had as a recording artist.
There was one more surprise waiting, though Bush did not learn it until nearly forty years later. Frankie Laine had softened one of the song’s harshest lines, about the singer’s father, and Bush’s record followed Laine’s version. When Diane Diekman told him in 2008 that Marty’s original was rougher, Bush said he would have to go back and listen, because he never knew.
Why Marty never had the hit himself
The question Bush asked at the start had a real answer. Marty Robbins had recorded the song himself back in 1966, but he never released it as a single. Instead, he kept trying to get it to Frankie Laine. Laine later wrote that Marty had spent several years trying to bring the song to his attention before finally succeeding in November 1968. Laine’s version became the highest-charting recording of all, and Marty’s own take only came out on an album in 1969.
Marty Robbins had already given the song away more than once. That night at WSM, he gave it away one more time, to one man, in the middle of the night.
Johnny Bush died on October 16, 2020, at 85. He never forgot that night.
Did you ever hear Marty Robbins on the radio late at night?