Harper Valley PTA

Oddly, the late 60's were not chock full of hot female solo singers; only Mary Hopkin, Nancy Sinatra, Mary Ann Faithful, and Michelle Phillips come quickly to mind. The most marketable female singer was Mary Weiss of the Shangri-las, who should have been aggressively pushed into a solo career for not just her voice but her tough-girl hotness. In retrospect this is probably the biggest promotional failure of era, imagine what a producer could do with her look if she was coming on the scene today.

There was a country singer named Jeannie C. Riley with a lot of sizzle. Jeanie should not be confused with Petticoat Junction's Billie Jo Bradley, who was played by "Jeannine" Riley - easily one of the decade's top ten television babes.

Harper Valley P.T.A. was a huge crossover hit late in the decade and the other Riley was able to parlay it into a decent country music career. It came out about the same time as "A Boy Named Sue", both were less songs than stories set to music and they got a lot of AM radio play. Jeannie C. had a look that was somehow both delicate and hard, with perhaps a hint of hillbilly inbreeding. The contradictions worked very nicely and I'm sure that the photos on the jackets sold a lot of records. One of her albums even had a gatefold cover which opened up into a 36-inch poster of her in miniskirt and boots - Mama Cass was not a candidate for that kind of marketing.

No I wouldn't put you on because it really did,

it happened just this way

The day my Mama socked it to the Harper Valley P.T.A.

Cultural historians will tell you that these lyrics reveal that the song was written and recorded sometime after the term "sock it to me" was popularized by "Rowen & Martin's Laugh-In" television series, which premiered in January 1968.