Seasoned Nashville star Lorrie Morgan got “a little bit mad” when, after thinking she had finished her new album, she was called into the office of the RCA Label Group boss, Joe Galante, to discuss it further.
“It was like, `Man, I’m done,’ ” recalls Morgan, scheduled to perform with Carlene Carter and Pam Tillis on the Kraft Country Tour Aug. 18 at the New World Music Theatre in Tinley Park.
As it turned out, she wasn’t “done.” Galante said he was going to play her a song, and if she liked it he wanted her to go back into the recording studio to record it and a couple of others. He then popped into his tape machine a demonstration recording of a song about an ex-wife confronting her former husband and his new, younger flame in a restaurant.
Titled “Good As I Was to You,” the piece of material was so stunning that as soon as the demo singer hit the first crescendo of the title line, Morgan’s annoyance vanished. She realized, she says, that she finally had found a song she had been seeking for years.
“Up to this point, I’ve always closed my show with `Something in Red,’ ” she explains. “It was like, `Guys, we can’t go back for a second encore, because there ain’t nothin’ gonna top it.’ Finally, we found a song that could be sung after `Something in Red.’ “
The new song and the album in which it occupies a notable place, “Greater Need,” mark a turning point in the career–and seemingly the life–of a performer whose prominence on the country scene spans nearly a decade.
Up to now, Morgan has tended toward girlish songs that seemed tailored to her glamorous appearance, belying a much more adult charisma she has brought to the stage since her late star-father, George Morgan, taught her the tricks of his trade in her teens. Since the late 1980s she has had a succession of hits, but “Something in Red,” an awe-inspiring 1991 song using changes of clothing to symbolize stages of a woman’s life, was the sole representation of profound lyrical depth.
Now “Good As I Was to You” and a whole album of other unmistakably grown-up songs have arrived to reinforce “Something in Red.” Which is exactly what Morgan says she wanted this time.
“From the first . . . meeting with (RCA executives) Joe Galante and Randy Goodman and Thom Schuyler and those guys, I said, `This is me as a woman now–I don’t want any bubblegum songs,’ ” she remembers.
“The last album I recorded was `Warpaint,’ and we had a lot of fun little ditty songs on there. Then we put out the `Greatest Hits,’ and that ended that era. This (`Greater Need’) must begin phase two of my career.
“I just feel we accomplished something new for me. It’s beginning a new life for me. I’m a totally different person than I was. I’m in my mid- to late-30s (having turned 37), and I’m more stable, more mature.”
Small wonder. She has had to walk through fire and rain from almost the beginning. First, a couple of weeks past her 16th birthday in 1975, there was the death of her first professional adviser, her father, with whom she was very close.
Then, in the mid 1980s, there was her signing with MCA Records, whose cool-conscious executives suggested she quit hanging around her father’s old show, the Grand Ole Opry, to enhance her contemporary image. Having been friends with Opry members since childhood, she ignored the suggestion and was dropped from the MCA roster.
Her 1986 marriage to Keith Whitley, whose mixture of talent and personal problems turned fatal on May 9, 1989, when he died of an alcohol overdose. Soon afterward, Morgan’s career took off, reaching stardom and even achieving notice by Hollywood moviemakers, but she floundered personally. A 1991 marriage to Clint Black’s bus driver ended a couple of years later, and since then she has dated people in the limelight–such as Dallas Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman and Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson–as well as people outside it.
Morgan’s identification with country music history is further emphasized by her current tour with Pam Tillis and Carlene Carter.
“I’ve been wanting to do a female tour for years now, and so have a few other country females, but nobody had been able to put it together,” Morgan says.
Then Kraft Foods did. The company suggested a tour using women who were second-generation country stars.
Tillis, of course, is not only a Country Music Association Female Vocalist of the Year but the daughter of former Country Music Association Entertainer of the Year Mel Tillis. Carter, whose career has included an early rock stint in England, is the granddaughter of the late Mother Maybelle Carter of the Original Carter Family as well as daughter of 1950s star Carl Smith and June Carter and stepdaughter of Johnny Cash.
Morgan says she signed on with the Kraft venture, which she reports has drawn “great” crowds some places and lighter ones in others, because “this is something that’s never been done.” She hopes the tour can prove country women can sell tickets, thus opening “the doors for the future for some of these great new females that are singing now.”
At the same time, she feels it also lets her carry a torch for some predecessors.
“I was talking to Tammy Wynette a few weeks ago,” she says, “and she said that when she was having No. 1 records she was still the opening act because she was female. She said, `I’m real proud of you girls for doing this.’
“But it wasn’t exactly like something we did, you know. Tammy and Loretta (Lynn) and (the late) Dottie West and people like that have paved the way for us to do this. It isn’t like we are the ones who created it.”
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THE FACTS
Lorrie Morgan, Pam Tillis and Carlene Carter
When: 7:30 p.m. Aug. 18
Where: World Music Theatre, Tinley Park
Tickets: $17.75-$27.75
Call: 312-559-1212
