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Milton Sims " Mickey" Newbury Jr. (May 19, 1940 – September 29, 2002) was an American singer-songwriter and a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Newbury started out releasing singles of his own, with his first release being "Who's Gonna Cry (When I'm Gone)" in 1964; he also wrote songs for other artists. In 1966, country star Don Gibson had a Record chart country hit with Newbury's "Funny, Familiar, Forgotten Feelings" while Tom Jones scored a world hit with the same song.
In 1968, Newbury saw huge success with four Top 5 songs across four charts: "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" #5 on the Pop/Rock chart by Kenny Rogers and the First Edition; "Sweet Memories" #1 on Easy Listening by Andy Williams; "Time is a Thief" #1 on the R&B chart by Solomon Burke; and "Here Comes the Rain Baby" #1 on the Country chart by Eddy Arnold. This feat has not been repeated.
Owing to a verbal agreement with Steve Sholes, Newbury was able to get out of his five-year contract with RCA and sign with Mercury Records, where he could work with his good friends Jerry Kennedy and Bob Beckham. Just about every aspect of his next recording, Looks Like Rain, was unconventional by Nashville's standards at the time, beginning with Newbury's choice of studio. Cinderella Sound was located in a residential area of Madison and was run by guitarist Wayne Moss, who had converted his two-car garage into a recording studio. Newbury's decision to record outside the Nashville studio system would inspire other country singers, such as Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, who were also frustrated by the confines of Music City's traditional recording practices.
Newbury would record three albums at Cinderella Sound that defied categorization. One significant aspect of their production is the inclusion of sound effects to link the songs, which gave the LPs a conceptual feel and would become a Newbury trademark. His next album, Frisco Mabel Joy, includes his most famous song, "An American Trilogy," later made famous by Elvis Presley. The song is actually a medley of three 19th century songs: "Dixie", a blackface minstrel show song composed by Daniel Decatur Emmett that became the unofficial anthem of the Confederacy since the Civil War; "All My Trials", originally a Bahamas lullaby, but closely related to African American spirituals and well known through folk music revivalists; and "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," the marching song of the Union Army during the Civil War.Ponce de Leon, Charles L. Fortunate Son, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007, p. 172,
According to Joe Ziemer's Newbury memoir Crystal & Stone, Newbury was moved to perform the song—which had been banned by some southern radio stations—as a protest against censorship. It is the song most associated with Newbury and his highest-charting original recording, reaching #26 in 1972, and #9 on Billboard's Easy Listening chart. Newbury's version would remain in the Top 40 for seven weeks. In 1972, Elvis Presley's version reached #66 and peaked at #31 on the Easy Listening chart, but it became the grandiose highlight of his live shows. The song gained worldwide exposure when Presley performed it during his Aloha From Hawaii television special in January 1973.
Newbury was not even living in Nashville by 1975, having moved to Oregon with his wife and son. Ironically, his profile could not have been higher on the radio in 1977, albeit in a referential way; in April, Jennings released the #1 smash "Luckenbach, Texas (Back to the Basics of Love)," which contains the lines "Between Hank Williams' pain songs, Newbury's train songs..." The song became an instant classic, but most of those who sang along likely had no idea who Newbury was. Although cited by Jennings, Kris Kristofferson, David Allan Coe, and several other country stars as a primary influence on their songwriting and albums, Newbury had little interest in cashing in on the outlaw country movement, telling Peter O'Brien of the Omaha Rainbow in 1977, "It's just categorising again, making a new pigeonhole to stick somebody into. You got to be dressed a certain way, you got to be a drinker and a hell-raiser, cuss and make an ass of yourself, act like a kid. I've told 'em I quit playing cowboys when I grew up. I just get turned off by all that."
In 1976, Newbury signed with ABC Records Hickory Records and recorded Rusty Tracks (1976), His Eye Is on the Sparrow (1977) and The Sailor (1979). Despite featuring some of the best musicians in Nashville (as well as film scorer Alan Moore), the recordings failed to find an audience, although his work remained highly regarded by critics and fellow artists. In his AllMusic review of The Sailor, Thom Jurek observed, " The Sailor, once again, refused to sell, perhaps because it was too late, perhaps because it was too early—Merle Haggard and George Jones made records that sounded exactly like this only three years later and scored big... Nashville's radio machine wasn't having it, and therefore the public never got the chance to make up its mind."
In 1988, Airborne Records planned a release in which Newbury demos were treated with synthesizers and other then-contemporary production effects. These demos stemmed from sessions with producer Larry Butler in Nashville in March 1983 and featured new-age synthesizer sounds, which Newbury came to loathe. "I was so drunk then," he later explained. "I hate those cuts and never want to hear 'em again." Newbury also claimed to have thrown a cassette of the recordings on the ground and stomped on it. Newbury was aghast when he heard Airborne was planning to release the recordings and had even printed up the album art, but after learning that no CDs or cassettes had yet been made, Newbury instead re-recorded the songs Airborne planned to use, and the album was released with these new recordings, effectively Newbury's first recordings in years. Newbury recorded the album solo with accompaniment from violinist Marie Rhines.
Several live recordings followed, including Live in England (1998) and It Might as Well Be the Moon (1999). The final album released in Newbury's lifetime was the autobiographical A Long Road Home in 2002. Like most of his albums, it did not chart but was critically acclaimed, with No Depression's Peter Blackstock calling it "a masterpiece."
Newbury died at age 62 on September 29, 2002 in Springfield, Oregon, following a battle with emphysema.
According to his official website, Newbury has had over 1,500 versions of his songs recorded across many genres of music. His work would be recorded by singers and songwriters such as Johnny Cash, Vampire Weekend, Bob Luman, Roy Orbison, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Bill Monroe, Johnny Rodriguez, Hank Snow, Ray Charles, Tony Rice, Jerry Lee Lewis, Tammy Wynette, Ray Price, Don Gibson, Ronnie Milsap, Brenda Lee, Charlie Rich, Lynn Anderson, David Allan Coe, Sammi Smith, Joan Baez, Tom Jones, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, John Denver, Kenny Rogers, Steve Von Till, B. B. King, Linda Ronstadt, Dax Riggs, Bobby "Blue" Bland, and Bill Callahan, among many others. Elvis Presley's cover of "An American Trilogy" is especially famous. Presley began performing the song in concert in 1972 and released it as a single. He performed it in the 1972 documentary Elvis on Tour and in his 1973 international satellite telecast Elvis—Aloha from Hawaii.
In 2014, Paal Flaata released an album of only Mickey Newbury songs, Bless Us All – Songs of Mickey Newbury.
In 2020, fellow Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member Gretchen Peters released an album of Newbury songs entitled The Night You Wrote That Song: The Songs of Mickey Newbury, which received critical acclaim and debuted at #1 on the FAI Folk chart and reached #1 on the UK Official Country Artists Albums Chart.
Looks Like Rain: The Songwriting Legacy of Mickey Newbury by author Brian T. Atkinson was published by Texas A&M University Press in 2021. The book includes forewords by Larry Gatlin and Don McLean.
Many of Newbury's songs, such as "The Thirty-Third of August", "The Future Is Not What It Used To Be", and "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)", delve into the dark recesses of the human psyche. Newbury, who battled depression in his life, later reflected, "How many people have listened to my songs and thought, 'He must have a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a pistol in the other.' Well, I don't. I write my sadness."
| 1968 | Harlequin Melodies | — | — | — | RCA Victor |
| 1969 | Looks Like Rain | — | — | — | Mercury |
| 1971 | Frisco Mabel Joy | 29 | 58 | — | Elektra |
| 1973 | Heaven Help the Child | — | 173 | — | |
| 1974 | I Came to Hear the Music | — | 209 | 80 | |
| 1975 | Lovers | — | 172 | — | |
| 1977 | Rusty Tracks | — | — | — | Hickory |
| 1978 | His Eye Is on the Sparrow | — | — | — | |
| 1979 | The Sailor | — | — | — | |
| 1981 | After All These Years | — | — | — | Mercury |
| 1985 | Sweet Memories | — | — | — | Airborne |
| 1988 | In a New Age | — | — | — | |
| 1996 | Lulled by the Moonlight | — | — | — | Mountain Retreat |
| 2000 | Stories from the Silver Moon Cafe | — | — | — | |
| 2002 | A Long Road Home | — | — | — | |
| 2003 | Blue to This Day | — | — | — |
| 1968 | "Weeping Annaleah" | — | — | — | — | — | — | Harlequin Melodies |
| "Got Down on Saturday (Sunday in the Rain)" | — | — | — | — | — | — | Sings His Own | |
| 1969 | "Queen" | — | — | — | — | — | ||
| "San Francisco Mabel Joy" | — | — | — | — | — | — | Looks Like Rain | |
| 1970 | "Sad Satin Rhyme" | — | — | — | — | — | — | single only |
| 1972 | "An American Trilogy" | — | 26 | — | 76 | — | 30 | 'Frisco Mabel Joy |
| "Remember the Good" | — | — | — | — | — | — | ||
| 1973 | "Heaven Help the Child" | — | 103 | — | — | — | — | Heaven Help the Child |
| "Sunshine" | 53 | 87 | 50 | — | 41 | — | ||
| 1974 | "If I Could Be" | — | — | — | — | — | — | I Came to Hear the Music |
| "Baby's Not Home" | — | — | — | — | — | 51 | ||
| 1975 | "Lovers" | — | — | — | — | — | — | Lovers |
| "Sail Away" | — | — | — | — | — | — | ||
| 1977 | "Hand Me Another of Those" | 94 | — | — | — | — | — | Rusty Tracks |
| "Makes Me Wonder If I Ever Said Goodbye" | — | — | — | — | — | — | ||
| 1978 | "Gone to Alabama" | 94 | — | — | — | — | — | His Eye Is on the Sparrow |
| "It Doesn't Matter Anymore" | — | — | — | — | — | — | ||
| 1979 | "Looking for the Sunshine" | 82 | — | — | — | — | — | Sailor |
| "Blue Sky Shinin'" | 81 | — | — | — | — | — | ||
| 1980 | "America the Beautiful" | 82 | — | — | — | — | — | single only |
| 1981 | "Country Boy Saturday Night" | — | — | — | — | — | — | After All These Years |
| 1988 | "An American Trilogy" | 93 | — | — | — | — | — | In a New Age |
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