Billy Joe Royal -- "Cherry Hill Park" (1969)

All the girls, they criticized her

But all the guys just idolized her

'Cause Mary Hill was such a thrill after dark

I forgot to mention in the previous 2 or 3 lines – which was about the legendary appearance of Paul Revere and the Raiders in my hometown (Joplin, Missouri) in 1967 (when I was a rising 9th grader) – that Billy Joe Royal was their opening act.  So consider this entry a "P.S." to that one.

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I have a story to tell before we get down to business today.  

Read the first two lines from "Cherry Hill Park" that are quoted above.  I remember a real-life situation where exactly the same thing happened.  

When I was in 5th grade at good old Irving School in Joplin, a new girl moved to town – let's call her "Deborah Lynn X."  She was very cute – a lot of my friends and I came down with instant crushes on her, and this resulted in a certain amount of resentment on the part of the incumbent girls in our class.  

Irving School was destroyed in the 
2011 tornado that caused over 160 deaths

As I recall, Deborah Lynn got the cold shoulder from all those girls, and wasn't invited to join in the daily jump-rope games during recess.  (Some of the guilty girls will no doubt read this post – you know who you are!) 

Deborah Lynn's father was a manager for a retail-store chain that moved its managers to new stores regularly, so her family left Joplin after a few years.  Hopefully she wasn't shunned by the mean girls at her next school.

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Flash forward seven or eight years.  I'm in Dallas, visiting my college roommate for the weekend.  We're at a Pizza Hut one night and he sees this very attractive girl he had gone to high school with.  I don't catch her name, but I do pick up the fact that she is a cheerleader at Southern Methodist University.  (Back in the day, SMU girls had a reputation for being very hot generally, and cheerleaders were often the crème de la crème in terms of their hotness – so this girl was no slouch.)

The next day, my roommate is telling his mother that we had run into Deborah Lynn Blank the night before.  I hear the name and the light bulb suddenly goes on over my head.  We go over to her family's house – they lived just a block from my roommate – and her mother is home.  

She remembers me from Joplin, and even pulls out some old class pictures from our grade-school days to show my friend. 

The program from the Rice-SMU game
where Deborah Lynn and I were reunited

Later that fall, SMU came to Houston to play my college (Rice University) in football, and my roommate and I went on the field after the game to say hello to good ol' Deborah Lynn. 

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Moving on . . .

Billie Joe Royal – he was a Georgia boy, bred and buttered (as the saying goes) – was no Paul Revere and the Raiders, but he wasn't exactly chopped liver.  

His first and most famous single, "Down in the Boondocks," was a top 10 hit in 1965.  "Cherry Hill Park" was another big hit when he released it in 1969.

In between those two hits, he released about ten other singles, none of which did very well.  The few singles he released after "Cherry Hill Park" flopped as well, but he was very successful when he eventually switched to country-western music – he had no fewer than ten top-20 country singles in the late 1980's.  

One of the singles he released after "Boondocks" and before "Cherry Hill Park" was "Hush," which made it only to #52 on the Billboard chart.  The same song was a big hit for Deep Purple just a year later.  Billy Joe's version of "Hush" wasn't bad, but it pales in comparison to Deep Purple's monster cover.

Click here to listen to the Billy Joe Royal original.

Click here to listen to Deep Purple's cover.

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"Boondocks" and "Hush" were both written for Billy Joe Royal by his friend and fellow Georgian Joe South.

South (who was born Joseph Souter) also penned "Walk a Mile in My Shoes," "I Never Promised You a Rose Garden," and "Games People Play":

'Cause you've given up your sanity

For your pride and your vanity

Turns you sad on humanity

And you don't give a da da da da da da da da da da da da

(Do you want a foolproof way to know whether you are old or not?  If you remember a time when you couldn't play song that said "damn" on the radio, you are old.)

However, Joe South had nothing to do with "Cherry Hill Park."

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I think it was shortly before today's featured record was released that a friend of mine met a girl from a similarly-sized but distant Missouri city who was named Mary Hill at a convocation of high-school newspaper editors.  

That summer, he drove to that distant city to visit Mary.   (Actually, I think she spelled her name "Mari.")  And wonder of wonders, there was a "lovers' lane" area in a park in that city known as "Cherry Hill."  Quite a coincidence, n'est-ce pas?

I don't think the relationship went much beyond that one visit.  And I doubt that the real Mary/Mari Hill had much in common with the fictional one, who was a very bad girl – at least in the Ludacris sense ("My chick bad, badder than yours/My chick do stuff that yo' chick wish she could").  But I don't know that for sure.  

In any event, it's none of my business, and it's certainly none of your business either!  

Just like what happened between Deborah Lynn X and me after fate brought us together at a college football game in 1971 is none of your business!  (I think "Deborah Lynn was such a thrill after dark/At Cherry Hill Park," etc., sounds just as good as the actual lyrics.) 

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Click here to see a brief clip of Billy Joe singing this song at the Dick Clark "American Bandstand" Theatre in Branson in 2008.

Paul Revere and the Raiders performed for several years at the Dick Clark venue, although they later moved to the Andy Williams "Moon River" Theatre.  

Someday perhaps both acts will share the stage again – as they did 43 years ago, when so many of us saw them perform at Memorial Hall, in Joplin – and musical history will be made once again!!!

But probably not.

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Click here to hear "Cherry Hill Park."

Click on the link below to buy "Cherry Hill Park" from Amazon: