"Bless Your Heart" was Freddie Hart's third number one hit in a year. The prolific country singer and composer kept the songs coming on Bless Your Heart, his hit album from 1972. Hart wrote or co-wrote six of the ten songs, including the title track. The album strays a bit from the romantic ballads at which Hart excels and offers up some gritty fare in David Frizzell's "Hungry Row," a downcast depiction of poverty. As if to ameliorate that cut's somber tone, Hart follows it up with the optimistic "I'm Not Going Hungry." "Human Rat Race" has something of a rhumba rhythm and a touch of Caribbean color in its arrangement, and stands with "Hungry Row" as one of the two stylistic orphans on the album, since the rest are heartfelt ballads. The love songs reflect Hart's desire to "write songs with words that every man would like to say and every woman would like to hear," a mission he unquestionably accomplished, at least for the country audience, in the 1970s.
FREDDIE HART
BLESS YOUR HEART (Capitol ST-11073)
June/1972
Produced by Earl Ball
I don't have to say I love you you know I worship you
Oh I would give just anything to share my life with you
But I can't leave her I just can't hurt her my mind would climb right up the wall
Conscience makes cowards of us all
I can't tell her I don't love her bacause I'm so afraid
Through hard times she stood by me and with all the heart she gave
And my little man wouldn't understand God knows I love him and he's so small
Conscience makes cowards of us all
Once I had the chance to see my little children grow
And my woman's love I've thought I had there's heavy on my soul
I've lost my wife to another man it's a story too many times told
Now I try to escape from her memory here on Hungry Row
I should mind my own business oh it's not of my affair
Who you're with and what you do I've got no right to care
But when he kisses you I taste it just the way it used to be
Everytime he touches you I feel it all over me
So you found your Prince Charming was just a dream
There wasn't any Palace and you weren't a Queen
In your faded cotton dresses anyone can see you're still Cinderella to me
Cinderella Cinderella this is not the way love should be
Cinderella Cinderella won't you let me take you home with me
Please forgive me but I just had to telephone
To say I want you God knows I miss you please come home
Who's wrong or right seems unimpartant to me now
I never knew how much I need you until now
In old days I recall the door was opened to a friend
When our neighbor was in trouble we lend a helping hand
In so many ways the world was better off than now
Today it's all hurray for me and who cares anyhow
It's the rat race the rat race...
We brag about the progress that we made tear apart
Man's already scoff the wound reaching for the stars
With each step that we take forward seems we take to back
When corruption and stagnation is an everyday fact
It's the rat race the rat race...
Now everybody's wondering just where just it's gonna end
With friends you can count on the fingers of one hand
We should stand up for what's right and try to get invove
Pullin' freight together and our problems will be solved
But it's the rat race the rat race...
Oh it's the rat race the rat race...
**********