Fact #20557
When:
Short story:
Full article:
Skeeter Davis: Chet would give me a stack of songs and say, "Take these home and see what you like." I had a demo of Breaking Up Is Hard To Do by Neil Sedaka but I didn't do it. Carole King had also sent I Can't Stay Mad At You, which I did do.
But anyway, Chet gave me these songs and there was a guy singing The End Of The World on the demo. I just loved it because it expressed all my feelings going through all that tragedy (her singing partner had died in a car accident), and all those years of loneliness and feeling so bad.
It was strange, because I just said that's how you feel when somebody dies. Everybody else thought of it just as a love song. I loved it and I did record it but it stayed in the can; they didn't bring it out. Finally, I told Chet, "I'm not gonna record no more if you don't bring out that song." So they did, and then it didn't do anything. ??The country DJs were playing the other side of it, which was an old pop standard, Somebody Loves You. Finally, Scott Muni, a DJ in New York (WABC) took a notion and played the record and it broke in New York City, USA. It sold 100,000 records in a week.
I was expecting just to have another country hit. And what hurt me was that the DJs weren't playing it; they dropped me like a hot potato. Even some of my fans were coming up to me and asking me why I did it; they were really giving me a hard time. I was surprised because I thought when people liked you they kept liking you, but it wasn't true. Then I made a lot of new friends through it though.
When The End Of The World hit No. 1, I was thrilled, because all of a sudden I had a No1 record and it made me feel really good.
When I played Carnegie Hall I met the writer, Sylvia Dee, and she told me she'd written it when she was 14 and her father died; she was 30 when I met her. It's still a really special song to me.
Tweet this Fact
But anyway, Chet gave me these songs and there was a guy singing The End Of The World on the demo. I just loved it because it expressed all my feelings going through all that tragedy (her singing partner had died in a car accident), and all those years of loneliness and feeling so bad.
It was strange, because I just said that's how you feel when somebody dies. Everybody else thought of it just as a love song. I loved it and I did record it but it stayed in the can; they didn't bring it out. Finally, I told Chet, "I'm not gonna record no more if you don't bring out that song." So they did, and then it didn't do anything. ??The country DJs were playing the other side of it, which was an old pop standard, Somebody Loves You. Finally, Scott Muni, a DJ in New York (WABC) took a notion and played the record and it broke in New York City, USA. It sold 100,000 records in a week.
I was expecting just to have another country hit. And what hurt me was that the DJs weren't playing it; they dropped me like a hot potato. Even some of my fans were coming up to me and asking me why I did it; they were really giving me a hard time. I was surprised because I thought when people liked you they kept liking you, but it wasn't true. Then I made a lot of new friends through it though.
When The End Of The World hit No. 1, I was thrilled, because all of a sudden I had a No1 record and it made me feel really good.
When I played Carnegie Hall I met the writer, Sylvia Dee, and she told me she'd written it when she was 14 and her father died; she was 30 when I met her. It's still a really special song to me.