Issue #12: 'Funny How Time Slips Away' and Moving Beyond Category

Al Green released his version 50 years ago, but there's so much more to the story.

Hello Don’t Rock The Inbox family! Natalie here — hoping you’ll indulge me in a little more nostalgia (for a song about nostalgia!), I was inspired by my Tina Turner research a couple weeks ago. This post is free for everyone; however, if you’d like to support our work and join the Don’t Rock The Inbox community, you can subscribe here! We’d love to have you.

"Nelson will never write a 'Funny How Time Slips Away' again, but neither will anyone else," as Robert Christgau put it in a 1998 column for the Village Voice, succinctly summing up the power of one of our greatest songs — a song that exists more as the words and notes it's made of than as any one performance in our collective musical memory.

The product of one apocryphally prolific week in Willie Nelson's life during which he also wrote "Crazy" and "Night Life" (his "Jolene"/"I Will Always Love You" day), "Funny How Time Slips Away" is rooted in cliché — at least as he tells it. "Somewhere during the trip the line that I had heard someone say probably a thousand times in my life, 'It's funny how time slips away,' came to me," Nelson recalled in 1975 of the long drive during which he wrote the song. "I thought, 'It's funny there's never been a song by that title,' and it started coming to me." 

Almost fifty years later, the phrase feels impossible to separate from the song. If it was idiomatic then, he certainly owns it now — or maybe the American Songbook owns it. The song is certainly Willie's most universal composition: the one that's touched the most people whether they know his name or not, and whether they like country music or not. The phrase is the very tune it's sung to. 

Written at a time when Nashville was grappling towards the slick, schmaltzy pop songwriting of the '50s (the more things change/ain't it funny how time slips away/etc. etc.), there's very little detectable twang in the bones of the song. The original (country) recording, released in 1961 by Texan country singer Billy Walker, does have a little pedal steel and barroom-sounding piano, but otherwise is barely distinguishable from the era's pop music. 

Fittingly, it almost immediately ran up the pop charts, reaching no. 22 on Billboard's Hot 100 in early 1962 once the pedal steel was done away with by another country singer, Jimmy Elledge. Elledge, a "white guy who sounded like a Black woman" as an embittered Walker put it in a 2001 interview (his version was only a modest hit on the country charts), was a one-hit wonder, but he launched the song into the stratosphere, prompting a glut of recordings by Black and white artists alike. 

Country soul pioneer Arthur Alexander was the first Black artist to release the song, also in 1962; soul singer Joe Hinton brought the song to its highest chart peak — no. 13 on the Hot 100 — in 1964 with his slow dance-ready big band rendition, which he concludes with a mind-boggling, ear-splitting falsetto (as an aside, Hinton's record was for Houston-based Back Beat Records, and was recorded at the city's Gold Star Studios…where Willie made some of his first recordings! Texas all the way, baby…). By the numbers, there is a very solid case to be made that it's as much an R&B song as (and certainly more a pop song than) it is down-the-middle Nashville country. 

Willie himself had recorded it by that time, for his debut studio album — a version that I believe is still the definitive one, though he's done it as many times as he's been asked to (and more — many, quite understandably, love this one). The corny background crooners make Willie sound so much cooler by comparison, and the mellow, jazz-inflected waltz feel is the perfect layer atop the song's bluesy foundation. Here, his mastery as an interpreter is obvious, as is his effortless, conversational singing (nobody since has tossed off "Well hello there" with as much tuneful ease). This one, with blues singer Francine Reed, is also excellent: 

Resisting the temptation to go through every single cover (and there are a lot), I'll skip ahead to my other favorite (it is…a lot of people's favorite): Al Green's version on his 1973 classic Call Me. It was not his first country cover (if you can really call it that, given how many R&B and soul artists had recorded "Funny" by this point) — that honor goes to Kris Kristofferson's "For The Good Times." But it was, especially paired with "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry," a uniquely memorable one: the record is so intimate that Green seems to have the microphone inside of his mouth, each breath and utterance clearly audible atop the lush strings and understated, soulful groove. What starts with a whisper ends with a robust gospel-inflected backing and abundant overdubs by Green on the refrain, which he repeats five times to close the song: Ain't it funny how time slips away. 

Green came to country music, according to his biographer Jimmy McDonaugh, through a "friendship" with Audrey Williams — as in, Hank's ex-wife. McDonaugh heavily implies that said friendship was not strictly platonic in spite of the 23-year age difference between the two, explaining that she would have him over to her mansion in Nashville to hang out by the pool and drink champagne. "She said, 'You should sing some country music too. Don't leave country out,'" Green told McDonough of Williams, adding that she played him a bunch of records. 

"Funny How Time Slips Away," though, may not have been part of that initial listening session. Junior Parker, another excellent singer who Green called his cousin, recorded the song just prior to his untimely death in 1971; it was released posthumously in 1972. Parker's version outlines the sultry blues contour that Green would expand on in his own rendition. Sprawling across eight minutes, Parker pads the song with extended spoken-word storytelling — setting up the one-sided dialogue that Willie so vividly paints within its lyrics with a new, more specific context. Green had clearly heard it, and had, in fact, recorded another song that Parker was known for called "Driving Wheel" a few years prior.

Green’s and Nelson’s renditions, connected but certainly distinct, have become among the most familiar; the two men have even attempted oddly uptempo duet versions that seem to undercut the song's emotive potency. I saw Willie perform it on his 89th birthday as a part of a medley that's long been in his repertoire, with "Crazy" and "Night Life," and there's no question that hearing the age in the icon's voice as he sang "My, it's been a long, long time" reiterated what I've always heard as the song's core meaning. 

Yes, there is a very specific story to the song about lost love and longing and regret (and more) — but there's also such a richness to the title and refrain taken alone, to the idea that there's not many ways to understand the inevitability of time's passing besides humor (even when it doesn't seem all that funny). The whole first verse is a straightforward gut punch of a conversation between any two people who might have been around the block a few times (or feel like they have).

When we hear, "Ain't it funny how time slips away," we might hear, "It's heartbreaking how quickly time passes." Yet Willie, wry and plainspoken, would never give us pathos on a platter. Instead, it's perfectly understated, coming across as the country wisdom of someone who's let their fair share of time slip away on a back porch somewhere.

Different performances draw out the song's different sides: its core resignation can be tragic, or something brighter and sweeter — slouching with a smile towards acceptance. Green's version is almost like a hymn, a directive for more of us to adopt Willie’s quiet humor in the face of so much inevitability and awfulness. It’s always going to feel like it was only yesterday; it’s always going to hit you like a Mack truck that the grains of sand are sliding through the hourglass at warp speed (the Days of Our Lives intro is the melodramatic version of “Funny”). A sigh, a shake of the head, a shrug and the corners of your lips curling slightly upwards — it’s all right there in the song, a song that’s been for everyone from the start.

— Natalie