"Everything Is Beautiful" by Ray Stevens (1970)

One person’s view:  “[T]his is a garbage piece of songwriting, melody writing, and lyric composition.  It’s a disaster from bottom to top and is the worst #1 of the year.” – dagwood525 @ Rate Your Music 

The public’s view:  2.20 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1970 

I looked for any excuse not to give this record a write-up here, but there’s no way to avoid it.  “Everything Is Beautiful” has a Rate Your Music score that is almost a full point below any other chart-topper from 1970.  My go-to reviewers for this project, Tom Breihan and dagwood525, both hate it.  Oldies radio rarely plays it because no one is clamoring to hear it.  So despite all of the good intentions that Ray Stevens poured into this song, it regrettably must be included in the museum of the worst #1 hits of all-time.

As with most #1s, I’ve heard “Everything Is Beautiful” a number of times in my life.  However, my memories of it have become tangled with a couple of other way-too-joyful early 1970s songs – “Isn’t She Lovely” and “The Candy Man”.  Those three records have congealed into a single unwelcome glob in my mind, a combination that is worse than its constituent parts.  Have you noticed that no one ever plays “Everything Is Beautiful”, “The Candy Man”, and “Isn’t She Lovely” back-to-back-to-back unless they are conducting a ritual to summon Satan?  But when I listened to the Ray Stevens hit before writing this post, it wasn’t the foul experience that I expected it would be.  I even admired some of the little piano flourishes that he put into his performance.  I could do without the choir of second-graders, but you’ve got to appreciate Ray hiring non-union background singers who would work cheap.

One of the ways that #1 hits get labeled “bad” is by having inconsistent lyrics that fight against each other.  “Everything Is Beautiful” does not have this problem.  There’s nothing that undercuts the optimistic message of inclusion and spirituality.  It isn’t the song’s fault that the ‘70s would yield other chirpy, overly cheery entertainment that soon turned such uplifting sentiments into a widely despised cliché.  Getting happy was a lot more fun when it was done voluntarily, before it was a chore dictated to the public by the Partridge Family.

It also isn’t the song’s fault that Ray Stevens later earned a reputation as sort of a right-wing crank.  In 2020 he recorded a “50th Anniversary Edition” of “Everything Is Beautiful” that begins with a diatribe against liberals.  He slams “those who use diversity for their own evil purpose to divide you and me.”  I’m guessing that a record label public relations executive told him that his novelty songs “Ahab the Arab” and “Bridget the Midget” were now deemed offensive, and made him sit through a seminar or something like that.  The irony is that one of the most unconditionally positive tunes ever to hit #1 – a song with a message that no one outside of the KKK could oppose – was later repurposed by its creator as a divisive weapon in the culture wars.