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FROM "FINDING
HER VOICE:
The Saga of Women in Country Music"
by Robert K. Oermann and Mary A. Bufwack,
Crown Publishers, ©1993 |
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Singer/songwriter Linda Hargrove was billed as the "Blue Jean
Country Queen" for a series of five albums in the mid-1970s. This gifted composer,
session musician, producer, and performer developed one of the strongest musical
reputations in Music City before contracting cancer and turning to gospel in the eighties.
The Florida native, born in 1951 (actually 1949), was the teenage veteran of
several rock and soul bands when she arrived in Nashville in 1970. Sandy Posey was the
first to record one of Linda's songs. Steel guitarist/producer Pete Drake was playing on
the session. He signed Linda to a songwriting contract and began using her as a studio
guitarist on discs by Waylon Jennings, Mac Davis, and other stars.
Jan Howard sang Linda's "New York City Song"; Johnny
Rodriguez hit Number 1 with Linda's "Just Get Up and Close the Door"; Lynn
Anderson scored big with Linda's "I've Never Loved Anyone More"; and Ernest Tubb
did her "Half My Heart's in Texas." Olivia Newton-John's "Let It
Shine" and George Jones's "Tennessee Whiskey" are other Hargrove-penned
hits.
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Beginning in 1973,
Linda won critical applause for her own performances. She is a superb crafter of love
songs, but her albums always covered broader topics. Linda's female songs generally dealt
with the themes of lost virginity, soiled innocence, and the degradation of the fast-lane
life-style of drugs and alcohol. She could also be feisty and feminist. Linda made the
lower ends of the country charts eight times between 1974 and 1978. Despite her wide
acceptance on Music Row as a songwriter and instrumentalist, the Blue Jean Country Queen
was not embraced by radio. This was an era of evening-gown glamour in Nashville, and Linda
wore no makeup, had long unstyled hair, and dressed in denims. Behind the scenes Linda
became a producer as well as a singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist, notably of ad
jingles for Plymouth, Frito-Lay, and Dodge trucks.
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"At one point in my life, to be successful in the music business was all that I was
living for," Linda recalls. "The music business nearly killed me. ... I had a
terrible cocaine habit. ... It got to the point where everything was wrong with my career,
and I was getting so burned out all the time. ... I had a gun. I was going to blow my
brains out." She turned to Jesus. Then she married a gentle Christian businessman
named Charlie Bartholomew, became a traveling evangelist,and moved to Louisiana. As Linda
Bartholomew she recorded gospel LPs in 1981 and 1989. Her battle with leukemia began in
1986, and she was still in chemotherapy in the early nineties. The irony of her old,
casual image's becoming accepted in modern country music isn't lost on Linda Hargrove:
"Before, I was the hard-living, hard-drinking country queen. That was the image I was
trying to project, and they weren't buying it. Now they're buying it, and I'm not
selling."
used by permission
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