Floyd Tillman – I Love You So Much It Hurts
Floyd Tillman’s obituaries last summer discussed his groundbreaking 1949 cheating song “Slippin’ Around”, which pioneered treating adultery without the usual moral conundrum. In truth, his legacy was nearly as complex as the man himself.
Tillman was a major force in laying the foundation for the honky-tonk idiom as we know it. One can make a case for Rex Griffin’s “The Last Letter”. Al Dexter’s 1937 composition “Honky Tonk Blues” was the first country song with that title, but a Tillman original that same year opened many other doors. As one of country’s pioneer electric guitarists, he was the first vocalist to play pungent, single-string amplified leads. His swooping, boozy and slurred vocal phrasing influenced Lefty and Willie.
Past Tillman anthologies leave the image of a consistent act, but this six-disc collection (covering 1936-1962 and ending with a 1981 tribute LP) reveals an artist whose music often vacillated between inspired genius and indifferent mediocrity. One hears hear him sprout in the ’30s and blossom in the ’40s, only to lose interest by the mid-’50s and emerge in some interesting new directions.
At the beginning, on “Blue Monday” and “Rhythm In The Air”, originals he recorded in 1936 as one of Leon Selph’s Blue Ridge Playboys, the pop influence was substantial, as it was in the oddball melody of “Two More Years (And I’ll Be Free)”. A year later, he created the “weeper” as we know it. The literate, mature “It Makes No Difference Now” was inspired by his annoyance at a woman who stood him up at a beer joint.
While record companies initially turned the tune down, it caused a local sensation when Tillman rejoined the Blue Ridge Playboys in 1938 and began singing it on radio and at dances. Cliff Bruner’s Texas Wanderers’ made it a hit record nationwide. Jimmie Davis, who’d purchased “Nobody’s Darlin’ But Mine” and “You Are My Sunshine” from others, bought the song for $300, though Tillman retained co-writer credit.
Setting aside his electric guitar, Tillman crooned his way through his 1939-44 solo Decca recordings. While many were numbingly ordinary, his 1943 hit “They Took The Stars Out Of Heaven” captured wartime listeners. So did a two-sided hit from a New York session he did with pop studio players: “G.I. Blues” felt like a bouncy Tin Pan Alley ditty, while “Each Night At Nine” captured the essence of a homesick soldier. The brilliant, complex “Dreams Won’t Let Me Forget You”, recorded at the same session, never surfaced until a 1991 CD compilation.
Tillman’s most successful (and inconsistent) period came during his eight years (1946-54) with Columbia. He began strong with a hard-charging hit version of Jerry Irby’s gleefully fatalistic “Drivin’ Nails In My Coffin”. “Some Other World” and “I’ll Be Leaving This Old World Someday” approached fatalism from different directions, the former morose, the latter lighthearted. “I Love You So Much It Hurts” captured pure love’s aching intensity. Yet his misses, too, were spectacular; 1948’s insipid “Cold, Cold Woman” clearly capitalized on Arthur Godfrey’s moronic pop hit “Too Fat Polka”.
“Slippin’ Around”, inspired by a phone conversation he heard between a married woman and her boyfriend, became a hit despite the moral misgivings some disc jockeys had about Tillman’s hit version. As Kevin Coffey’s superb essay explains, Margaret Whiting and Jimmy Wakely’s cover version became a huge crossover pop and country smash because of its sanitized, rewritten lyrics and glossy pop production values. Certainly such a success merited a better follow-up than Tillman’s dreadful “I’ll Never Slip Around Again”, with mediocre lyrics laid upon the melody of the hit.
Nonetheless, Tillman had a few more masterpieces in him. 1949’s “This Cold War With You” ingeniously used the tenuous world situation as metaphor for a failing love affair. “I Gotta Have My Baby Back”, his final hit, remains a study in anguished desperation. Throughout, one can hear his phrasing going from something original to an exaggerated self-parody that made him an acquired taste for many and abbreviated his hit streak.
The pedestrian nature of most of his 1950-54 Columbia takes makes Disc 4 a tough listen. By then, he was losing interest, wearied by performing’s incessant grind and sobered by its physical toll on old friends. Coffey explains how Tillman backed away from the sawdust floors in favor of the more cerebral pursuit of studying philosophy.
His records no longer sold by the late ’50s, though a few of his small-label efforts had the funky charm of an artist with nothing more to prove. A 1957 RCA album produced by Chet Atkins only showed that the nascent Nashville Sound which worked for ex-honky-tonker Jim Reeves didn’t fit all Texans. Tillman’s 1960-61 Liberty singles, particularly “The Song Of Music”, revealed a metaphysical honky-tonker. Its lyrics — “I am the truth/I’m youth/I’m new/I’m old/I’m meek/I’m bold/And I am eternity” — clearly anticipated Willie and other progressive writers.
A year later, he recorded Let’s Make Memories With Floyd Tillman for Leon McAuliffe’s Cimarron label. With backing by McAuliffe’s Cimarron Boys, the LP remains a honky-tonk benchmark. Succeeding as both a song collection and a cohesive whole, it makes the 1981 tribute that ends the collection seem anticlimactic.
While Bear Family’s comprehensive approach succeeds in chronicling Tillman’s rollercoaster career, it’s hard to discern any point in including the laughably bad Columbia solo recordings by Floyd’s wife “Little Marge” and two duets with her second husband Biff Collie solely because they were recorded at Tillman sessions. A few recordings by Texas fiddler-vocalist Link Davis are great, but tangential to a Tillman collection. It’s also regrettable Bear couldn’t obtain permission to include Tillman’s 1960s Pickwick and Musicor LPs.
Floyd Tillman happily avoided the spotlight in the last three decades of his life. Financially secure through composer royalties, he lived frugally and performed infrequently. Nonetheless, between he and Ernest Tubb lay the primordial goo where Texas-grown honky-tonk began. Here, for better and occasionally worse, one can examine it at the molecular level.