One critic’s view: “It’s a clumsy, galumphing ballad with a farting tuba that reminds me, more than anything else, of the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme music.” – Tom Breihan @ Stereogum
The public’s view: 2.19 / 5.00, the worst #1 hit of 1961
Other than novelty and novelty-ish records, “Wooden Heart” has – by far – the lowest Rate Your Music score of any #1 hit of the 1960s. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it on an oldies station or blaring in the frozen foods section at Kroger. The guy who recorded “Wooden Heart” managed to score only one other top 40 hit and then disappeared from sight. If not for its one week as the most popular song in America, which forces me to review it for this feature, I would remain happily unaware of its existence. All of this makes it more intriguing. It is exactly the type of lost hit whose alleged badness is the most fun to investigate.
Much like the previously discussed 1961 hit “Calcutta”, “Wooden Heart” has roots in German folk music. And much like “Calcutta”, it features a pleasing but unmemorable melody that needs a boost from a megastar like Lawrence Welk before anyone will pay attention to it. That boost arrived when Elvis Presley performed “Wooden Heart” alongside a dancing puppet in his G.I. Blues movie. The King released a 45 RPM disc of “Wooden Heart” in the U.K., where it went to #1, but there were apparently some concerns that the song was too silly for the mature image that he was trying to craft after leaving the Army. Any time that people heard it, they’d think of him singing with that stupid puppet. (This was long before an opportunity to duet with Kermit the Frog became a highly sought after experience.) Elvis and his label decided not to make the track available in the U.S., and so the task would fall upon someone else to record “Wooden Heart” for the American market.
Pretty soon there were five or six different cover versions floating around by singers who thought they could be the next Elvis. Most of these recordings have been lost to history, but Joe Dowell had the tenacity and ego to believe that his might be a hit – even though he churned it out the very first time he set foot in a studio. Without his ambitious promotional tour of radio stations, someone else probably would have walked away with the #1 hit. Just think how differently history would have turned out if the more charismatic Gus Backus had been the one instead of Joe Dowell. The subsequent British Invasion might have been averted, as girls would have been too busy passing out from Backusmania to ever notice any Liverpudlians trying to get their attention. Unfortunately for Gus, his version peaked at #102.
I don’t think “Wooden Heart” is as horrible as Tom Breihan’s Stereogum review and the Rate Your Music score would indicate. Dowell was a competent singer and the studio musicians did some interesting things to cope with the minimal budget that they were given. Tuba and accordion rentals are expensive, but who really needs them? The bass player was able to make his instrument produce the farting noises that Breihan complains about, and a lot of people couldn’t tell the difference between that and an actual tuba (or actual farting). The organ player was able to mimic the sound of an accordion while daydreaming about one day putting his own name – Ray Stevens – on a couple of critically panned #1 records. But let’s face it, this forgettable song needs more than just competence to save it from obscurity. It needs a distinctive world class voice like Elvis or Tom Petty, and even then it is not going to rise to the top of the catalog.
Much of what I know about Dowell comes from an interview of him by Greg Adams that was conducted at the Beef House restaurant in Covington, Indiana in 2003. (The Beef House is a convenient stop along I-74, and I’ve eaten there on two or three occasions myself. Next time I will ask to sit in the Joe Dowell Booth and see if anyone knows what I am talking about.) One of the more interesting tidbits is that Dowell once wrote a song about a man murdering his own daughter and his daughter’s boyfriend by directing a bull to attack them. Dowell was also not a huge fan of rap music, describing it with words like “idiocy,” “cancer,” and “really devastatingly awful stuff.” I bet 50 Cent feels the same way about “Wooden Heart”.
There is no evidence that Joe Dowell was in England in 1960 when Suggs, the lead singer of Madness, was conceived. So this is probably just a coincidence:
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