Billie Jo Spears, Country Singer, Dies at 73

[Fansome]

The New York Times

December 17, 2011
Billie Jo Spears, Country Singer, Dies at 73
By BILL FRISKICS-WARREN

Billie Jo Spears, a singer of country songs with strong women as their protagonists, died on Wednesday at her home in Vidor, Tex. She was 73.

The cause was cancer, said Robert Farmer, the funeral director.

Ms. Spears was best known for her 1975 hit “Blanket on the Ground,” written by Roger Bowling and sung from the point of view of a middle-aged woman who coaxes her hesitant husband outdoors to make love in the moonlight. Recorded when Ms. Spears was 38, the single, which reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, was built around an earthy Wall of Sound arrangement, swooning pedal steel guitar and warm backing vocals from the Jordanaires.

“Just because we are married don’t mean we can’t slip around,” she sang, in a seductive alto.

Ms. Spears rose to prominence in the late 1960s with a string of up-tempo, socially conscious songs portraying plucky survivors. “Mr. Walker, It’s All Over,” her first Top 10 single, cast her in the role of a harassed Manhattan secretary, a transplanted Midwesterner who gives her resignation to her unsympathetic boss.

“I fetch paper clips and coffee and help you dodge your domineering wife,” she complains. The righteous anger she conveys is reminiscent of that expressed in “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” Jeannie C. Riley’s 1968 hit about small-town hypocrisy, right down to Ms. Spears’s sassy drawl and the dobro fills jabbing away behind her.

Ms. Spears placed 26 singles in the country Top 40, including 5 Top Ten country hits and “On the Rebound,” a duet with the singer Del Reeves, from 1968 to 1984. In 1976, eight years after her first big hit, she was voted “most promising female vocalist” by the Academy of Country Music.

Billie Jean Spears was born on Jan. 14, 1938, in Beaumont, Tex. Her father was a truck driver; her mother, a shipyard welder, played guitar in the popular western swing band the Light Crust Doughboys.

Ms. Spears, who was married several times, is survived by a daughter, Donna Coker; two sons, Tim Pierce and Kevin Jones; three brothers, Edward Spears, Leroy Spears and Hubert Moore; 5 grandchildren; and 12 great-grandchildren.

Ms. Spears began singing in nightclubs at 13. Recording as Billie Jo Moore, she released her first single, “Too Old for Toys, Too Young for Boys,” in 1953.

After graduating from high school Ms. Spears worked as a waitress and a secretary, experiences that helped her empathize with the characters she would later inhabit. She moved to Nashville in 1964 and signed with United Artists but didn’t have her first hits until she moved to Capitol, for which she recorded from 1966 to 1972. She later recorded for a couple of independent labels while recovering from vocal cord problems.

Ms. Spears returned to United Artists in 1974 and began a fruitful partnership with Larry Butler, a former member of the pop group the Gentrys, who later produced “Lucille” and “The Gambler” for Kenny Rogers. Mr. Butler helped Ms. Spears reinvent herself as a pop-country singer and oversaw the recording of “Blanket on the Ground.” He also directed her successful flirtation with disco, including a remake of Gloria Gaynor’s hit “I Will Survive.” Ms. Spears’s version of the song reached No. 21 on the Billboard country chart in 1979.

In later years her biggest audience was in Britain, where she toured regularly after a successful appearance at the Wembley Festival in England in 1977.