Crystal Gayle -- Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue

 

My surprise and only regret about Crystal Gayle's wonderful "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" is that it's only a little over 2 1/2 minutes long! For such a congenial country/pop ballad, I thought it would have been a lot longer. But having said that, it's truly a short and sweet love song that would be welcome on the car radio late at night or over the speakers at a bar at about the same time before closing time with a couple of lovers dancing slowly on the floor. Gayle herself cut quite the figure on stage with her extremely long dark hair and that velvety voice.

I've mentioned this a few times over the history of "Kayo Kyoku Plus", but for a time when I was young, our family did watch our fair share of country music programming whether it was any of the Tommy Hunter specials on CBC or "Hee Haw" and those Johnny Cash shows in the United States. Heck, I think we even caught the "Grand Ole Opry" a few times on the telly. So, singers like Conway Twitty, Charlie Rich, Donna Fargo and Crystal's sister, Loretta Lynn, were familiar to us.

Even before I really started to appreciate music in general as a high school student in the early 1980s, there was something about "Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue" that really stuck with me out of the many country songs that I heard. And indeed, it stuck out with a lot of folks on either side of the US/Canada border since it hit No. 2 Stateside and No. 1 in the Great White North in the Top Singles charts (it did hit the top spot on US Billboard's Country Songs list).

The single, created by Richard Leigh for Gayle, was released in June 1977. Of course in Japan, there were plenty of singles released in that month, too.

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