Olivia Just Laughs About Early Rebuffs
LOS ANGELES (AP)
When Olivia Newton-John hit the country music scene, she caused quite a furor among Nashville traditionalists. The hairdo wasn’t beehive, the twang wasn’t middle Tennessee, rather Australian, and what kind of a name was Newton-John in a world of Billie-Sues?
Besides, went the grumbling along Music City Row, there was the lady’s music it was nice, even, catchy. But doggone it, was it country?
It was, indeed.
“Let Me Be There,” Miss Newton-John’s first foray into the country and western world, was an instant success. It topped the country charts for weeks and gave Olivia the 1973 Grammy award for the best female country singer of the year.
Nashville was incensed. This young woman from Australia - Australia! couldn’t “drawl with a mouthful of biscuits,” - moaned the Nashville Tennessean.
Now, three years, two more Grammies and several tele-visions specials later, Miss Newton-John laughs when reminded of the early rebuffs directed her way from those protectors of the country music status quo.
“Even though there was a lot of resistance from the old school of country the twangers and all, I think I’ve done them a favor,” she says, eating lunch in the Beverly Hills Hotel, one full world away from the Grand Ol’ Opry House.
“My music’s opened the doors for a lot of people who’ve never listened to country be fore. They’re now listening to standard-type country singers.”…
Pretty high-falutin’ stuff for a young woman who, upon being told she had a country hit on her hands, had to be told what country music was.
“Let Me Be There did nothing in England, did nothing in pop,” she recalls. “We came out here and my producers said they were vere re-releasing it country - and I didn’t even know what they were talking about”.
“The publisher rang me up about three weeks later and said, ‘Listen, this is going to be a country hit’ and I didn’t know what that meant.”
It was during an appearance on the Dean Martin show that someone finally “explained to me the difference between country and pop.”
Miss Newton-John can be forgiven her early ignorance of one of America’s most popular art forms; her credentials as a country singer aren’t exactly sterling.
While some little girls, pig-tailed and barefoot, dawdled at barn dances and dreamed of growing up and going to Nashville, Olivia was in Australia being bounced on the knee of a Nobel Prize-winning physicist - her German grandfather, Max Born. Her playground was the campus of University College in Melbourne, where her father was headmaster and professor of German.