Some singers hit No. 1 with their very first record. Barbara Mandrell had to wait. By the summer of 1978 she had put 19 songs on Billboard’s country singles chart, yet not one had reached the top. Her 20th would finally do it, and the idea behind it came from a quiet, ordinary scene that her producer could not stop thinking about.
A long road to the top
Barbara Mandrell grew up surrounded by music. She was a gifted musician from childhood, and her years as a young girl in California would later inspire one of her most famous songs. Her first single, released in 1969, did not chart at all. A year later she scored her first hit, and from then on she stayed on country radio, release after release.
What she did not have was a chart-topper. Through the early and mid-1970s, her singles kept climbing and then stopping short.
A producer and two new writers
In the late 1970s, Barbara was working with producer Tom Collins, who also ran a Nashville publishing company called Pi-Gem Music. Collins had a knack for spotting talent and matching it to the right artist.
One of his new writers was Kye Fleming. She had spent years performing as a folk singer in coffeehouses in New York, Boston and Los Angeles, and she was close to giving up on a music career altogether. Then Jerry Scheff, the bass player in Elvis Presley’s band, recommended her to Collins. Fleming later called that meeting life-changing.
Collins teamed her with Dennis Morgan, a guitarist from Tracy, Minnesota, who had worked as a session musician and written commercial jingles after hitchhiking back to Nashville. Fleming would later describe Morgan as her perfect creative partner. Collins was in touch with them almost every day, pointing them toward songs his artists needed.
Two grandparents and a small bed
According to accounts of how the song came together, the spark came from Collins himself. His wife’s grandparents, after a lifetime of marriage, still slept together in a small bed. Collins found that image touching and passed the idea along to Fleming and Morgan.
The writers flipped it into heartbreak. Instead of two people happily sharing a small bed, their song told of someone left alone in a bed meant for two, regretting the words never said and the love let go. They called it “Sleeping Single in a Double Bed.”
Finally, No. 1
Barbara recorded the song for her album Moods, produced by Tom Collins for ABC Records. It was released as a single in August 1978. It climbed steadily through the fall and reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart in November, where it stayed for three weeks. In Canada, it topped the RPM country chart in December.
The song brought Fleming and Morgan a Grammy nomination, and at the American Music Awards in January 1980, it won Favorite Country Single. For Dennis Morgan, it was his first songwriting success.
The breakthrough opened the floodgates. The next single from Moods, Barbara’s version of “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right,” also went to No. 1 and even crossed over to the pop chart. “Sleeping Single in a Double Bed” turned out to be the first of six No. 1 singles in her career.
The songwriting team behind Barbara’s biggest years
Fleming and Morgan went on to become one of the most successful songwriting teams in Nashville, winning BMI’s Songwriter of the Year award three years in a row, from 1981 to 1983. They wrote “Smoky Mountain Rain” for Ronnie Milsap and “Nobody” for Sylvia, the former receptionist at Collins’ office who became a star herself.
They kept writing for Barbara, too. Barbara has recalled that they wrote one of her biggest songs after a long conversation with her about her early years as a little grade schooler in California. That song, “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” went to No. 1 in 1981 and became her signature.
A simple picture
Barbara Mandrell retired from performing in 1997, leaving behind a string of hits that helped define country music in the late 1970s and 1980s. But her journey to the top of the chart began with something anyone could understand: an old married couple who still chose to sleep side by side, and two young writers who imagined what it would feel like to be left alone on the other side of that bed.