My 100 Favorite Charted Country Songs: Cigarettes and Coffee Blues

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Waddaya know, both songs today have “blues” in the title! Totally unintentional (how could that be planned?). Today we have another example of just how crazy my music tastes are. Classic rock is followed by…..classic country! Here’s today’s country song. Cigarettes and Coffee Blues - Lefty Frizzell And let’s welcome Marty Robbins back! This time as a songwriter, although his version of this song, released five years after Lefty Frizzell’s version, was also a hit (peaking at #14, compared to Frizzell’s rise to #13). That was quite common back then. Nowadays you tend to think of a song as by a certain artist, and covers usually come along years or decades after the original (like Poison’s version of Loggins & Messina’s “Your Mama Don’t Dance”). No, back then you could easily find dueling versions of the same song on the charts simultaneously. In fact, some country music chart history: the first #1 song on the country singles chart was “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” and it was knocked out of the #1 spot by….”Pistol Packin’ Mama.” (The song was written by Al Dexter and covered by a lot of people, including Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters. Their version bears the distinction of being the first #1 song in country chart history. No kidding. The second #1 song was Dexter’s original.) Occasionally you had multiple language versions of the same song (like “Sie Liebt Dich,” the German version of “She Loves You, or “Por Amor Viviremos,” the Spanish rendition of “Love Will Keep Us Together”) out, but normally it was different artists singing the same song (such as Tab Hunter doing “Young Love” at the same time Sonny James’ version was a hit, or Guy Mitchell’s “Singing the Blues” competing against Marty Robbins’ original). Here the versions are night and day. Frizzell made it a driving shuffle, with pounding piano that would sound at home on a Jerry Lee Lewis song as easily as it does here. Robbins slowed the tempo down and changed a word: instead of “sitting at a table, where I call my baby’s name,” he sang “sitting at a table where I carved my baby’s name.” (I haven’t heard an early Robbins version to tell how he wrote it originally.) I love both versions; and, in the iPod world, I have both versions on my 100 favorites playlist. (I can cheat there. ) Forced to pick one over the other, I’ll let Lefty drive me home with his rendition. Cigarettes and Coffee Blues Written by Marty Robbins Recorded by Lefty Frizzell From Mom and Dad’s Waltz, 1958 Peak chart position: #13 Today’s rock song: “Deacon Blues” I know that I can’t sleep: