Liz Anderson, Who Wrote Hit Country Songs, Dies at 81

[Fansome]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/03/arts/music/liz-anderson-who-wrote-hit-country-songs-dies-at-81.html?hpw

November 2, 2011
Liz Anderson, Who Wrote Hit Country Songs, Dies at 81
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN

Liz Anderson, who wrote breakthrough hits for Merle Haggard and other country singers and recorded songs of her own about faithless men and beleaguered women, died on Monday in Nashville. She was 81.

The cause was complications of heart and lung disease, said her publicist, Pam Lewis.

Ms. Anderson had early success as a songwriter while living in California in the early 1960s, writing Top 20 country hits for Del Reeves and Roy Drusky, as well as “Just Between the Two of Us,” a Top 40 duet for Bonnie Owens and Mr. Haggard in 1964.

Mr. Haggard had his first Top 10 hit the next year with Ms. Anderson’s “(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers.” He reached No. 1 on the country chart for the first time in 1966 with “I’m a Lonesome Fugitive,” an outlaw lament written by Ms. Anderson and her husband, Casey Anderson.

Although best known for the songs she wrote for other performers, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Waylon Jennings and her daughter, Lynn Anderson, Ms. Anderson also had seven Top 40 country hits of her own. Several of them, including “Mama Spank,” a Top 10 single in 1967, and “Husband Hunting” (1970), took wry aim at wayward or unruly spouses. Others, like “It Don’t Do No Good to Be a Good Girl,” in 1971, saw Ms. Anderson’s plucky female protagonists running around on their unfaithful men by way of payback.

Like her contemporary Loretta Lynn, Ms. Anderson gave voice to female survivors, inhabiting their struggles in a soprano at times alluring, at times sassy.

As Mary A. Bufwack and Robert K. Oermann observed of Ms. Anderson in their book “Finding Her Voice: Women in Country Music, 1800-2000,” “hers was the humorous housewife, a matronly blonde who dealt with life’s problems with a smile and a wink.”

Elizabeth Jane Haaby was born on March 13, 1930, in Roseau, Minn., a small rural community 10 miles from the Canadian border. She learned to play the mandolin and sing as a young girl and took up the guitar.

She met her husband after the Haaby family moved to Grand Forks, N.D., in 1943 and married him in 1946, at the age of 16. He survives her, along with their daughter, Lynn, three grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.

Ms. Anderson began writing songs in California, just as the West Coast country scene associated with Buck Owens, Mr. Haggard and the lean, hard-driving Bakersfield sound was gaining momentum.

The Andersons moved to Nashville in 1966, after the producer Chet Atkins signed Ms. Anderson to a contract with RCA Records. She recorded steadily for the label before moving to Epic in the early 1970s. She had no significant hits after that, but by then her daughter’s career had taken off, with an early boost from a version of her mother’s composition “If I Kiss You (Will You Go Away).”

Always a champion of songwriters and songwriting, Ms. Anderson was a founding board member of the Nashville Songwriters Association International.

“When Casey and I moved to Sacramento, there just wasn’t any country stations around,” Ms. Anderson was quoted in Ms. Bufwack and Mr. Oermann’s book. “I wasn’t hearing any new songs, and being the country girl that I am, I just started writing, so I’d have some to sing myself.”