Glen Campbell scored his second and final number one pop hit with the rollicking "Southern Nights," a song originally written and performed by New Orleans R&B maestro
Allen Toussaint.
more...
Toussaint - whose extraordinary career as a songwriter, arranger and producer yielded Crescent City classics like Irma Thomas' "It's Raining," Lee Dorsey's "Ride Your Pony" and Dr. John's "Right Place, Wrong Time" - wrote "Southern Nights" in tribute to idyllic childhood evenings spent on the porch of his grandparents' home in the heart of Creole-speaking rural Louisiana. "It felt like a soft, clear, white flower settled above my head and caressed me," Toussaint told Songfacts in 2014. "I really felt highly, highly inspired and very spiritual doing that song. It's the only one I felt that much about. Some others have been inspired highly, but not as high as that one."
Toussaint made "Southern Nights" the titular centerpiece of his fourth solo LP, issued by Warner Bros. in the spring of 1975. His rendition failed to chart, but it captured the attention of Jimmy Webb, the virtuoso songwriter who penned Campbell's breakthrough smash "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" as well as the hits "Wichita Lineman" and "Galveston."
"Glen was very, very good at arranging things for Top 40 radio," Webb told Songfacts. "He came over to my house one time and spent some time there, and I remember I was playing an Allen Toussaint record… I was playing along, and he said ‘What was that song?' I said 'Southern Nights.' And he said 'Is that your record?' And I said 'Yes.' And he said 'Well, can I have it?' And he was gone, man."
Campbell and producer Gary Klein recorded "Southern Nights" at Hollywood's Capitol Studios on Oct. 2, 1976. Campbell slightly modified Toussaint's original lyrics to more accurately reflect the circumstances of his own hardscrabble upbringing as the child of Arkansas sharecroppers; he also brought to the session the now-immortal "Southern Nights" guitar lick, which he credited to pal Jerry Reed, soon to experience chart success of his own via "East Bound and Down," recorded for the hit film Smokey and the Bandit.
"I can think of only two or three songs out of hundreds I've recorded that I performed as originally written," Campbell wrote in his autobiography. "I like to become intimate with the material, and change it to suit me."
Capitol released "Southern Nights" on Jan. 17, 1977, and in late March, the record reached the top of Billboard's Hot Country Singles chart, climbing to number one on the pop Hot 100 a few weeks later –– Campbell's first crossover chart-topper since "Rhinestone Cowboy" two years earlier. "Southern Nights" was later nominated for Song of the Year by the Country Music Association, losing out to Kenny Rogers' "Lucille." Toussaint was brief but effusive in his praise for Campbell's efforts, proclaiming "Glen made it into a real song."
