Clint Eastwood pictured on the sleeve of his 1962 single for “Rowdy” and “Cowboy Wedding Song.”
 

“He will never make big as a singer.”

—Lyricist and record producer Kal Mann on Clint Eastwood’s prospects as a singer in the early 60s.

Well, Kal Mann—who wrote songs for Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker—wasn’t exactly wrong, but Clint Eastwood didn’t care. In fact, twenty-plus years after Mann declared Clint’s musical career was a pipe dream, he and Merle Haggard would occupy the number one spot on the Hot Country Singles chart with “Bar Room Buddies” in 1980. Eastwood’s love of music is well documented and, in addition to his many other talents, he is an decent pianist. In all, Eastwood’s musical career spans nearly five decades dating back to 1959 when Eastwood landed the role of Rowdy Yates on the television series Rawhide. There are several occurrences of Eastwood singing on various episodes of Rawhide, and the actor would leverage this experience and record his first EP in 1961 containing two singles put out by Hollywood record label Gothic; “For All We Know,” and “Unknown Girl of My Dreams.”

Eastwood was not a bad singer—but his baritone vocals and style were rather unremarkable within the country genre. Eastwood’s material was pop, but crafted towards a more country & western kind of swing, keeping in line with Eastwood’s Rowdy Yates character in Rawhide.

Eastwood would continue to tap into his success as the star of one of the longest-running TV westerns programs by finally putting out a full-length album 1963 strategically titled, Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites. Clocking in at under 30 minutes, the album contains mostly standards including “Don’t Fence Me In” written by Cole Porter and Robert Fletcher (and first popularized by Gene Autry). It’s not without its charm as at times Eastwood sounds like he is channeling Bing Crosby and his version of “Don’t Fence Me In” from 1944. Posted below is an assortment of audio from Eastwood’s early recordings—others can be found online. CD’s of Clint’s musical contributions are easily found on eBay should you want to add some Clint to your music collection. (PS: you should want to.)
 
Clint Eastwood sings, after the jump…

 
When country singer Chely Wright revealed to her fanbase that she was a lesbian back in 2010, many of the magazine articles at the time referenced k.d. lang or Melissa Etheridge, to name two earlier gay performers who opted to be true to themselves in public, but very few mentioned an even earlier lesbian country music singer to come out of the closet.
 

 
Actually, Wilma Burgess, who had several hit singles in the mid-1960s was never in the closet to begin with. Burgess was a protege of the great country music producer Owen Bradley, one of the chief architects of the slick, string-laden “Nashville sound” of the 50s and 60s. Bradley, who had been Patsy Cline’s producer, heard in Burgess’ powerful voice a performer able to do something similar to the deceased singer and he signed her to Decca Records in June of 1964. Interestingly Burgess was reluctant to perform teary ballads where she was singing to a man, and preferred her material to be gender neutral and ambiguous. When she did agree to sing a song like “Ain’t Got No Man” it was something she negotiated with her powerful hit-maker mentor: One song she liked but that he didn’t have to, for every one of his choices that she went along with but wasn’t too fond of. Their partnership worked well and produced several hits, most notably the Grammy-nominated “Baby,” a 1965 hit Burgess was seen singing in the Jayne Mansfield B-movie The Las Vegas Hillbillys, and “Misty Blue” in 1967.
 

 
For obvious teasons, Wilma Burgess ultimately found herself frustrated by the strict and ostensibly pious Nashville scene and left the music business in 1978. She would go on to open The Hitching Post, the first lesbian bar in Nashville, in the late 80s with the money she made during her career. Wilma Burgess died at the age of 64 from a heart attack on August 26th, 2003.
 

 
More clips of Wilma Burgess after the jump…

Can Mary fry some fish, Mama
I’m as hungry as can be
Oh Lordy, how I wish, Mama
That you could stop that baby crying cause my head is killing me…

So begin the lyrics to Leon Payne‘s utterly unhinged country & western classic, “Psycho.” Payne, known as “the Blind Balladeer,” was a country music singer and songwriter who wrote songs that were recorded by the likes of George Jones, Leon Russell, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Jim Reeves, Hank Williams (Payne wrote “Lost Highway”), Johnny Horton, and Merle Haggard.

“Psycho” is the irony-free, point-of-view ramblings of a hillbilly murderer who you can’t even trust with a cute little puppy. To call it “memorable” is an understatement. It’s downright chilling and yet highly amusing at the same time. No mean feat!

There were several persistent rumors about the story behind the song: One, that it was about Charles Whitman, the former Marine mass murderer who killed his mother, wife and 14 more people at the University of Texas, Austin in 1966 after commandeering a bell tower with a sniper’s rifle. It makes sense as Whitman was famously known to have complained of headaches—he was found to have had a brain tumor during his autopsy—and headaches are mentioned in the song. And he was a psycho, obviously. But it wasn’t about him, or at least not directly about Whitman.

Secondly, that the song was written about the Alfred Hitchcock thriller. It wasn’t. An article about Payne’s oddball first person murder ballad on the Nashville Scene website clears this up:

“The movie story came from my mother, and she was known to exaggerate at times,” says Myrtie Le Payne, Leon Payne’s daughter. Since both Payne and his wife were blind, their daughter did accompany them to movies and whisper descriptions of what was happening onscreen, but cinematic horrors were not the direct source for “Psycho.”

After years of people asking her about the song, Myrtie Le recently tracked down the true story. “Jackie White was my daddy’s steel guitar player,” she says. “He started working with him in 1968, and the song came out of a conversation they had one day.”

According to the story related by White, in the spring of 1968, he and Leon Payne were discussing the Richard Speck murders. Speck murdered eight student nurses in Chicago in July 1966 and was convicted and sentenced to death the following year. Being a history buff, Payne was familiar with the cases of many notorious mass killers, and the discussion soon turned to other famous cases — Charles Whitman, Ed Gein, Mary Bell and Albert Fish. That conversation directly inspired the song, and Payne immortalized White’s contribution by naming the boyfriend killed in the first verse after him, along with working in references to some of the murderers they had discussed in lines like, “Can Mary fry some fish, Mama?”

That same article also dispels the third legend around the song, that Leon Payne, not wanting to sully his good name and songwriting career stipulated that it not be recorded until after his death. Well, the song was recorded before his death, by his pal cowboy singer Eddie Noack, for whom the song was probably written, so that’s another legend dashed.
 
More ‘Psycho’ after the jump…