Your Cheatin' Heart

 

Joey Bishop
Your Cheatin' Heart

ABC (1968)

From Joey Bishop Sings Country Western, album issued by ABC Records in 1968. The full album is available HERE

The album is featured in the book The Worst Rock-and-Roll Records of All Time (A Fan’s Guide to the Stuff You Love to Hate) by Jimmy Guterman and Owen O’Donnell (1991).  I quote :

Highest chart position: did not chart outside of Las Vegas

At this point we’d like to recommend Golden Throats: The Great Celebrity Sing-Off, a wonderful compilation album Rhino Records put out in 1988. It includes popular songs of the sixties («Proud Mary,» «Like a Rolling Stone,» etc.) as attempted over the years by actors-who-wanted-to-sing like Eddie Albert, Sebastian Cabot, Joel Grev, Andy Griffith, Jim Nabors, Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, Jack Webb, and Mae West. The record is a splendid horror, a joy for those who revel in bad pop, and an (unheeded) warning to future television stars to not get above their raising. Philip-Michael Thomas, don’t you pay attention to anything?

One of the most bizarre of such attempts—and one of the few colossallv bad ones of the sixties not included in Golden Throats—was deadpan comedian Joey Bishop’s attempt to become a country music star. Bishop was a minor member of Frank Sinatra's infamous Rat Pack and was also known as a second-rate Borscht Belt comic and failed late- night TV talk show host. ABC Television featured him in one of their periodic attempts to unseat Johnny Carson. They should have known from the start that "The Joey Bishop Show was doomed to failure: on the first show, guest Ronald Reagan showed up late and another guest, Debbie Reynolds, injured announcer Regis Philbin while showing how to help someone who is on fire. The only thing in flames that night in April 1967 was Bishop’s television career. Not only were his jokes deadpan, but so was his audience.

Probably still under contract to ABC, Bishop moved to their records division. Figuring that his buddies Frank, Sammy, and Dino had the pop-schlock field cornered, he decided to take on country schlock. As Ernie Freeman writes on the back cover ofJoey Bishop Sings Country Western, Joey «approached this album with the same intensity and search for perfection that he brings to his comedy Alas, this is true. And since apologist Freeman is credited as the producer, arranger, and conductor of the record—and as such probably had points on it—it was in his interest to perpetuate the lie that this was a genuine country record. 

Although Bishop predates Kinky Friedman as the original Texas Jewboy, there is nothing outrageous about this album, nothing to indicate that someone known for his alleged sense of humor is the featured artist. Bishop is simply ill-suited for vocalizing. His voice isn’t merely soft; once it touches a word, it evaporates. His off-key singing has zero presence; it sounds like he had so much trouble reading the words on the cue cards that he never got a chance to figure out what the songs meant. And with the responsibility of singing some of the greatest country songs ever (most of them written by or associated with Hank Williams), you can’t get by putting them across in a narcotized fashion. Freeman’s ridiculously overblown arrangements (he makes Billy Sherrill seem like Swamp Dogg) don’t cloak Bishop’s ineptitude. Instead, because there are massive holes in the mix for Bishop’s voice, they just augment the nonsinger’s nontalent. 

It’s hard to tell these ten songs apart, but there is no moment more bizarre than the one at the end of "Your Cheatin’ Heart’ when Bishop drops his high-register whisper and speaks, «Nobody likes a cheatin’ chick,» trying to take a Sinatra-style ad lib. Not only does this mean- spirited comment (he all but spits the words; it’s the only alive moment on the whole album) come out of nowhere—it has no relation to the song—but it exemplifies how Bishop’s smarmy, Vegas/Hollvwood attitude has no relation to the honesty of Hank-stvle country. Joey Bishop Sings Country Western is a record about Bishop’s ego. I’m such a star, he thinks, I can get away with anything. I’m more important than these stupid hillbilly songs. Forget that I can't sing—I’m Joey Bishop!