“We didn’t really have much of a problem with that,” she says. “It’s like it got written down once and has been repeated ever since.”
“I don’t remember it ever even being written about,” says Fisher. “Maybe it did, though, and I’ve just forgotten it. The subject did come up now and then, and if it did, Jeannie went into a shell. It upset her, because it didn’t mean that to us. There was no controversy about it. We just did the songs that we thought were hits.”
It makes sense that the Kendalls would not give much thought to whether their material was “father-daughter appropriate” (in the way that, for example, the Judds would later do). Royce and Jeannie had been harmonizing to whatever good song came on the radio next, and then singing those songs for Melba Kendall and the neighbors, since before they’d left St. Louis.
What’s more, the majority of Kendalls’ hits weren’t duets in the same way that, say, Conway Twitty & Loretta Lynn sang duets. Jeannie and Royce didn’t sing to one another on records such as “Heaven’s Just A Sin Away”, “Teach Me To Cheat”, or the harrowing “Just Like Real People”. Rather, Jeannie cried her heart out while Royce offered the comfort of his harmony, a fatherly arm around the shoulder.
But then, what to make of the exceptions? For instance, on the 1978 Top-10 hit “Pittsburgh Stealers”, which is not about that season’s Super Bowl winner, Royce and Jeannie play-act the roles of blue-collar adulterers.
“It’s just storytelling, like a movie,” Jeannie says. “We didn’t worry about all that too much. We figured if we did, we wouldn’t have a very long career. We picked what we thought were great songs, and just didn’t worry about the rest. We did songs ’cause we liked them, and because we thought they’d sound good with harmony on them.
“And anyway, what was much more common for us was people who commented how great they thought it was that a father and daughter worked together so closely and got along so well. We got that response way more than any raised eyebrows.”
The Kendalls’ tenure as mainstream stars was intense but brief. Like most regional, independent record labels, Ovation had folded by the early 1980s. Royce and Jeannie switched labels again, this time signing to Mercury, where they had several more hits. Still, for all practical purposes, the duo’s time in the spotlight was finished before Ronald Reagan was sworn in for his second term.
But, after a long stretch on the margins — twice as long as it had taken them to get that first big hit — things were at last looking up for the Kendalls at the end of the ’90s. Royce and Melba, and Jeannie and Mack, had bought houses next door to one another in the Arkansas Ozarks. The Kendalls were performing occasional gigs across the state line in Branson, and their comeback was in the works for Rounder.
After Royce died, Jeannie didn’t know if she wanted to go on singing, or even if she could. She didn’t sing at all for over a year, with one exception. “I had to go back there later [where her father died] and do a makeup date,” Jeannie says. “I think it was the hardest thing I ever did in my life.”
But now she’s back, and Jeannie Kendall is the proof. Co-produced by Brien Fisher (who spent the down years, among other projects, producing the Old Dogs albums for Bobby Bare, Waylon Jennings, Mel Tillis and Jerry Reed), the album finds her surrounded by not only a star-studded cast of guest singers, but also by musicians such as guitarist Bryan Sutton, drummer Kenny Malone, and the members of Union Station.
Perhaps the album’s most poignant moment comes on a Larry Cordle song called “Smoky Lonesome”. Trailed by the boo-hooing dobro of Sonny Garish and Larry Franklin’s sympathetic mandolin, Jeannie sings in a voice that is both bruised and beautiful: “You’re right beside me/But all the crowd sees/Is a cloud of smoky lonesome over me.”
“He was a great guy, easygoing, with a great sense of humor,” Jeannie says of her father. She reaches for her iced tea but doesn’t drink. “He loved the music business, everything about it. He loved calling people, doing all the things you have to do. The guys in the band all thought of him as a second father.
“And he was always there for me. He didn’t try to put himself out front. He wanted me to be there. He was always thinking about me and my mom. The last thing he said to me was — I never told anybody this, but it really shows how selfless he was. The last thing he said was, ‘I don’t want to let you down.'”
For a moment, she’s overcome again with emotion. She shakes her head from side to side, then up and down, and takes a deep breath. “He was the best daddy in the world to me,” she says with conviction, her voice steady. “I know he’d want me to keep on singing. I don’t want to let him down.”
ND contributing editor David Cantwell lives in Kansas City, Missouri. Heartaches By The Number: Country Music’s 500 Greatest Singles, co-written by Cantwell and fellow ND contributing editor Bill Friskics-Warren, is due out in March. It includes discussions of two singles by the Kendalls: “Heaven’s Just A Sin Away” and “Just Like Real People”.
