Hello Darlin' Records from Around the World

It's been 51 years since Conway's iconic Hello Darlin' topped the charts and it remains one of country music's most well known and beloved masterpieces. 

On June 6, 1970, Hello Darlin' hit #1 on Billboard and stayed there for the rest of the month. It went on to become the #1 song of the entire year, setting the stage for the legendary career he would go on to achieve.

DID YOU KNOW...

1) Conway wrote Hello Darlin' 10 years prior, in 1960 while he was still recording rock music. Actually, he wrote it twice. The original lyrics were in a notebook filled with hundreds of songs he had written that was in a suitcase that had been stolen from him. He had to rewrite the song from memory. (I wonder if that notebook ever surfaced, and if it did, did anyone realize what they'd found?)

2) While finishing up his 9th country album in 1969 he needed to put down one last song and pulled out Hello Darlin'. He first recorded it by singing that classic first line, but for some reason it just didn't work. Producer Owen Bradley suggested he speak the words instead. Everyone in the studio immediately realized they had recorded something truly special and not simply an "album filler," but then the question came as to what to call it? It's an unusual song without the typical verse and chorus structure, and the words hello darlin' are only spoken once, yet what else could it have possibly been titled?

3) The recording was added to the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999.

4) In 1975 the last mission of the Apollo program took place with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, United States–Soviet link up in space. Commander Thomas Stafford was a huge fan of Conway's, and as a gesture of goodwill from the American astronauts to Russian cosmonauts, he asked Conway to record a Russian version of Hello Darlin' (Privet Radost, which was released as a special edition single) to be played to a worldwide audience on board the Apollo module...which he did, taking lessons from a professor at the University of Oklahoma to learn Russian. He was on hand to witness the historic launch at Cape Kennedy on July 15, 1975, and two days later watched from his California hotel room as Privet Radost was played in space. It doesn't have the same beauty that the English version does, but it's still a very cool piece of history that Conway was a part of.

From my collection, overseas Hello Darlin' singles from Japan, Spain, Italy and Germany...

and a Japanese version of the Hello Darlin' album...

Every single Conway concert until the last on June 4, 1993, began with him walking on stage and pointing to one lucky lady in the audience as he started singing Hello Darlin'. Every woman in the audience melted and he held them in the palm of his hands for the next hour. That was the magic of Conway and those two little words.