Still looking for a hit, Drake moved the pair again, this time to United Artists, but that relationship didn’t result in so much as a released single, let alone a hit. All involved had different ideas of what the Kendalls should do. The label wanted to downplay Royce and promote Jeannie as a solo act. Drake thought their best bet would be to pursue the pop charts. Royce and Jeannie, meanwhile, hoped to record in a style more reminiscent of the Louvin Brothers. Eventually, everyone just agreed to disagree and went their separate ways.
“We had an idea of what we wanted our sound to be,” Jeannie recalls. “All of our early records just had two vocal parts on them. But we had decided it would sound good with three parts, with Daddy doing two harmony parts to my lead. So we had our little tape recorder at home — we had one of those little sound-on-sound recorders — and we’d practice on there. Put two on, then he’d put the extra part on. We thought it sounded pretty good. We spent many, many hours in restaurants talking with Brien [Fisher] about what we would do if we got the chance to do it. And then we got the chance.”
Born in the hills of east Tennessee, Brien Fisher grew up in Ohio after his father, a part-time musician who played bluegrass and sang southern gospel, migrated there in search of factory work. When he got out of the Marines in 1955, Fisher pursued a music career. He was a mildly successful rockabilly act, opening tours for Gene Vincent and Dale Hawkins in the late ’50s and once appearing on Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand” when it was still based in Philadelphia. He also had a bit of luck as a songwriter, penning minor hits for the actor Sal Mineo (“Little Pigeon”) and for Red Foley’s daughter, Betty (“Old Moon”). “I had a little success here, a little success there, but never a big success anywhere,” Fisher says today.
By the time the Kendalls were considering a move to Nashville, Fisher had found his way to the Windy City, where he produced a series of blues and blues-rock acts (Chicago Slim, Stu Ramsey) who weren’t much more successful than he had been. In the early ’70s, he produced the first album by TW4, a progressive rock band that shortly thereafter changed its name to Styx.
Fisher thought he might stand a better chance recording country, which at any rate was still the music he most enjoyed. “When I first heard ‘Jet Plane’ [in 1970],” Fisher recalls, “I became a Kendalls fan, even though I didn’t actually know them till a few years later. I just loved that sound of theirs.”
By the time Royce and Jeannie were pondering their next move in the wake of the United Artists disappointment, Fisher had relocated to Nashville. The three met and hit it off, and in 1976 Fisher signed them to a new Chicago-based label, Ovation Records.
“We recorded that entire first album in one day,” Fisher says. “I asked Royce what he wanted to start with, and he says, ‘Why don’t we start with that fast song, just to get everyone going.’ We got it on the second take. [Pianist and session leader Ron] Oates suggested we could put a little clavinet on there, and that really gave the record its distinctive feel, I think.”
The Kendalls’ first single for Ovation, a version of the country standard “Making Believe”, topped out at #80 on the charts. “I thought we had a real shot with that one,” Fisher says, “but when Emmylou [Harris] released her version, she just beat the crap out of us.”
It was the number Royce had called “that fast song,” the Kendalls’ second Ovation single, “Heaven’s Just A Sin Away” (the B-side to their second single, actually), that won the Kendalls and Fisher the radio success they’d been chasing for years.
The record changed their lives. “Heaven” topped the country charts for four weeks and crossed over to #69 on the pop charts. Within the year, the Kendalls had appeared on the syndicated television programs “Pop Goes The Country” and “Hee Haw” — they stood in the show’s famous cornfield and shouted “Saaa-lute!” to their hometown of St. Louis — and they’d scored three more Top-10 hits, including “Sweet Desire”, a Jeannie Kendall original that became the pair’s second chart-topper. They also were able to hire a band (led by a former Del Reeves sideman, guitarist Mack Watkins, who Jeannie married in 1978) and, consequently, became a top concert draw as well. Jeannie remembers that “we would actually break some of Kenny Rogers’ attendance records when we played.”
Royce and Jeannie Kendall had become an overnight success, albeit nearly a decade into their career. “You have to really want to make it in this business because it’s long, hard work,” Jeannie says. “You don’t just fall out of the sky in a rhinestone suit.”
Like most of the duo’s hits, “Heaven’s Just A Sin Away”, written by Jerry Gillespie, is a cheating song — and one in which Jeannie Kendall finally decides to give in to the earthly heaven her sin will provide. Incredibly, even with such unmistakably secular content, “Heaven’s Just A Sin Away” managed to receive spins on some gospel radio stations.
One can imagine, perhaps, a program director’s arguments about object lessons. But it’s more likely what really made such an unlikely crossover possible was the record’s irresistible clavinet bouncing along with Kendall as she rushes to her lover. The Kendalls’ haunting close harmony, combined with the record’s joyous melody and thumping southern gospel backbeat, probably didn’t hurt either.
In other words, “Heaven” was successful because it was good record, an obvious point but one that can hardly be overemphasized. For in the rare instances today when the Kendalls are included in histories of country music, there is inevitably a smirking mention, if only in passing, of how creepy and titillating it was supposed to have been, or at least how odd, to hear songs of illicit love sung to one another by a father and his daughter. Jeannie believes such comments are primarily revisionist history and, at any rate, beside the point.
