American country music singer Kenny Dale, who had a hit song with Bluest Heartache of the Year and was endearingly popular in New Zealand, has died at the age of 68.
Dale, born Kenneth Dale Eoff, died on Wednesday at a hospital in San Antonio, Texas, United States after a short battle with coronavirus. Dale, who lived in San Antonio, was reportedly admitted to hospital last Sunday with breathing complications.
While in his twenties, Dale released his debut single Bluest Heartache of the Year in 1977. The song, on his album Bluest Heartache, rocketed up the country charts, spending 17 weeks on the United States chart, peaking at number 11. It also reached number 23 on the Canadian country chart and peaked at number 25 on the New Zealand Top 40.
From the same album, Shame Shame on Me (I Had Planned to Be Your Man), also peaked at number 11 and number 16 on the United States and Canada country charts. However, it was his cover version of Gene Pitney's Only Love Can Break a Heart that became his biggest hit when it reached number 7 on the American country chart in 1979.
Dale, born in Artesia, New Mexico, was now becoming known in the country genre throughout the United States. That same year, he developed a following in New Zealand where Bluest Heartache of the Year entered the NZ Top 40 and spent 17 weeks on the charts.
While it was his only charting hit in New Zealand, Dale remained admiringly popular with kiwi audiences. This was evident when New Zealand country singer Joy Adams brought Dale to New Zealand for a 13-stop tour in 2005, something she describes as her "biggest achievement" and the most "memorable, hardest thing I think I've ever done".
Speaking to Walter "The Wiz" Walsh on Gisborne radio station Tūranga FM on Thursday, Adams told Walsh how she came to know the American country singer.
"Like just about everybody in New Zealand I grew up listening to Kenny Dale music, in fact, he was probably one of the first records I ever bought, so I was one of his biggest fans," said Adams.
She had organised with her promoter, Gary Bradshaw, in early 2000 to go to the home of country music, Nashville, Tennessee and record an album while she was there. They were having a conversation when the subject turned to Dale, someone Bradshaw was good friends with.
"[Bradshaw] said, 'Oh, I used to manage Kenny Dale' and of course my jaw dropped. 'Oh my God, I would love to meet Kenny Dale. I'm his biggest fan.' He said, 'Well, if you come out to Nashville, I'll fly from Arizona and I'll organise it for you to meet Kenny'," she said.
"So next minute I'm sitting in the Cracker Barrel [in] Nashville which is a café and here's Kenny Dale sitting opposite me laughing at my accent. It was just a surreal experience."
Later in 2001, Adams was recording songs for her album Two Minus One when Dale entered the studio, so she and her producers pitched the title track to him.
"Kenny liked the song and he said, 'Well, I'll sing a duet with you'. I thought, 'My goodness what an opportunity'," she said.
The pair went on to record the album's title track, written by Billy Powell (Lynyrd Skynyrd), as a duet and Adams told Bradshaw that she was keen to bring Dale to New Zealand, knowing that Dale had a huge following down under.
"When I come back to New Zealand, I approached a couple of the main promoters here in New Zealand and both of them just told me I was a bit silly, that I didn't know what I was doing and don't waste your time kind of thing, which was disappointing because I just thought 'Well, everybody knows Kenny Dale, everybody would come see Kenny Dale'," she said.
Adams also told Mark Wasley News that those promoters "flatly told me they weren't interested, so I did it myself".
"It wasn't too long after that my mum passed and I had a little bit of money to put into the project and I thought if they're not going to do it, I'm going to figure out a way of doing it myself," Adams told Walsh.
Doing her 'homework' while herself performing throughout the country, Adams received considerable interest from people eager to see Dale perform. She believed people would attend shows as long as it was affordable and set out to recruit musicians and select ideal venues.
"I figured that if I could get a really good band together and pick really nice venues and try and keep the cost of things really affordable for people [I could make it work]," she said.
Adams told Mark Wasley News how she "hadn't done anything on that scale before" and how she went about it.
"I made a point of handpicking the best musicians I knew. It was important to try and recreate Kenny's sound, which was great harmonies and dripping reverb and by all accounts, we achieved that," she said.
The tour turned out to be an overwhelming success, especially with Māori fans, but was a "huge gamble", a lot of hard work and not without worry, Adams informed Walsh.
"[Dale] was a really special guy and he gave me the opportunity to shine in the role of a promoter as far as things go because I never knew I was capable of doing that and I certainly made a lot of mistakes and had we had more money we probably would have tried different ways."
"But we were lucky because in those days we were able to sell a venue directly rather than having to go through a ticket agency. It was a huge gamble because the venues were giving me the money to use the money for more advertising and you know, had it fallen over, had he not been able to get here, I would have had to reimburse that money from somewhere so I probably would have still been living in a cardboard box," Adams laughed.
"I remember doing one of the shows in Taupō. I remember one of the Māori elders came up to me and thanked me for keeping it affordable for them to go. I was really proud about that, I thought, well, I didn't make huge amounts of money. In fact, like three weeks before the tour I was still $40,000 in the red. It was very scary. It was a very scary time because New Zealand audiences don't tend to buy tickets until the last moment so it was a worrying time.
"Except for Gisborne of course, which was sold out. I could have sold that show probably three times over."
Adams explained that fans thought they might not be getting the real deal and rather an impersonator, due to the attractive ticket price.
"We had the situation where initially I think people thought because the prices were quite reasonable that it wasn't the real Kenny Dale and they thought it was perhaps just a sound-alike or something. It wasn't really until people realised 'Oh no, it is really the real Kenny Dale', we filled venues all over the place," she said.
Adams had many memories of the tour, including of the rousing welcome Dale received at his performance at the Gisborne War Memorial Theatre.
"I remember in the foyer just before we started, a lady came in and she had I think it was her elderly father in a wheelchair and she asked me if there was any way that we could get him in because he was just the biggest fan of Kenny Dale," she said. "I said we are so full that we've got the fire inspector standing right there and I actually, physically, can't get you in."
"I said look, go just outside there and just wait and see what we can do and then honestly, it was meant to be. Just a few moments later, a lady came in and just said to me, 'Look, we've got two tickets for the show and we're not able to make it' and 'Look, here's the tickets, give them to somebody' and I just went out I got those two people and my eyes were just crying, I just couldn't believe it.
"Gisborne was such an intimate venue and you know, you really felt so connected with the audience and I think that's why Kenny just really enjoyed it, because it's not like being on a huge stage and it's very impersonal. I think that's why New Zealand audiences really gelled with it.
"I remember somebody had a van and it had Two Hearts Tangled, or Two Hearts, or something with a big heart and we ended up having to take Kenny out the front there and get his photo taken with a whole lot of ladies."
It was a tour of provincial New Zealand, including stops in the cities Whangarei, Napier, New Plymouth and in small towns like Dannevirke, Thames and Kaitāia. The tour opened in Kaitāia and Dale was welcomed to the area with a pōwhiri at Roma Marae in nearby Ahipara, as well as performing his songs on the marae.
"Kaitāia was amazing because it was our first show as well and there [were] a lot of other special things that happened in Kaitāia because we went out to the marae and that was really a very special moment," said Adams.
Dale's discography included singles Red Hot Memory, The Loser, Two Hearts Tangled in Love, Down to Earth Woman, Let Me In, Two Will Be One and Daylight. He also recorded covers of Crazy, by Patsy Cline and Release Me, made famous by Englebert Humperdinck. All were favoured by his fans and popular in country music clubs from the 1970s to today.
Bluest Heartache of the Year has been covered by Māori entertainers Dennis Marsh, Pinati Williams and TJ and Huri.
"They were all good songs. We had an Elvisy song to start off with and the whole audience just erupted and everybody got on their feet," said Adams.
She spoke of overselling the show in Pukekohe, Auckland.
"I think it held 850 people and we actually oversold. People were in the aisles and even the fire inspector was sitting in the aisle. He was having a great old time," said Adams. "My aim for the tour was to try and get the band and the overall sound similar to what his record sounded like and everybody knows that Kenny Dale was famous for great party songs, good singalong songs and also the reverb. I mean he was 'dripping reverb'. Everybody could sing those songs, you know."
Adams also put together a limited edition CD with EMI for the tour, "a real collector's item" as only 2,500 were pressed.
"I know that Kenny took a few home with him and I know that EMI sold a few, so if you are one of the people that went on that tour and bought that, eventually that's going to be a real collector's item because there won't be any more of that CD," she said.
There was no doubt Dale was well received in New Zealand. A greatest hits album, The Very Best of Kenny Dale, was especially released in New Zealand by EMI in 1999 and was certified platinum for selling 20,000 copies. Dale was presented with an award from the Recording Industry Association of New Zealand, at his final show in Thames, Adams said.
"We were the ones that really took to his music more so than in the States. You know he was a regional success in Houston and other smaller areas but he was never a major artist like he was here. He had big hits here but I don't think that that was similar over in the States, not in the real big-time anyway. I think he was more appreciated here in New Zealand. I think he went home knowing that he was well-loved here in New Zealand and I think he was very surprised. He didn't realise how people really took to his music."
Adams said she still receives positive comments about the tour, 15 years on.
"Thank God we had the most amazing band, who did their homework and learnt all his songs and my songs and we had [hypnotist-comedian] Guy Cater, who was the just most amazing emcee.
"I still to this day get people who email me, or comment how they went to one of the Kenny Dale shows and it was the best show they've ever been to and after the tour finished I just got inundated by people sending notes of appreciation which was very heartening and 'When are you going to do it again?'"
Adams said she had sent a message to Dale's wife Judy, after getting a "shock" reading the news of his passing on Thursday morning. Speaking about the global coronavirus pandemic, which caused his death, she asked for people to show compassion.
"It's pretty bad over there, especially in the area he's in. I've sent a message off to his wife, Judy and you know, I don't want to ask [for] the gory details. Somebody posted online, 'did he have something else, an underlying health condition?'. I mean we don't really want to know that. That's their business and it's been reported that he passed with [coronavirus] and you know, we just hope it wasn't a too painful time during his passing.
"We know that here in New Zealand he had a huge following, people just loved him to bits provided you didn't knock his hat off. I've had the privilege of seeing Kenny Dale without his hat on but I don't think anyone else in New Zealand has."
Adams regretted that she couldn't sell the tour to the South Island.
"We almost got him to Nelson.
"If I had a flash place, if I could have, I would have loved to have had the energy and the money to have bought him back and done it all over again and many people wanted me to. I just knew what toll it took on me the first time. It was a lot of work and we travelled a lot of miles. It cost a lot of money."
"It was a magic time and you know there was just no politics involved in things. Everyone was there for just great music. That's what we did."
In the late 1980s, Dale semi-retired from the country music scene and most recently worked as a school bus driver in San Antonio.
A planned tour in 2016 with kiwi country musicians Gray Bartlett, Brendan Dugan and Jodi Vaughan never eventuated.
Country music fan Mark Wasley grew up listening to Bluest Heartache of the Year, which was a favourite with his grandparents.
"My grandma and grandad played Bluest Heartache of the Year often. I think they might have had the 1999 The Very Best of Kenny Dale album. I think it would have been a staple in the households of many kiwi country music fans and even those who weren't big on the genre," he said.
"It was the soundtrack of any drive throughout Manawatū and such a great singalong. My grandparents had Bluest Heartache of the Year on cassette. Kenny will be sorely missed."
Fans and musicians who performed with Dale on the 2005 tour, took to Facebook to express their condolences after hearing of the country singer's passing.
Marsh's wife Yvonne thanked Adams for "bringing Kenny to NZ and giving [Marsh and Yvonne] the opportunity of meeting him".
Many fans said they grew up listening to the country "legend" and their parents were often playing his records.
One fan said they could "guarantee [Dale's] music had played at almost every Māori household party, rest peacefully Kenny Dale".
Char Martin's husband, Joe, was a part of the tour band, as was guitarist Rob Galley.
"It was a true honour for Joe to have been part of your New Zealand tour with Joy Adams," said Martin. "Joe always said of the many tours he had been on, you were at the top of his admiration list."
"Moe mai ra, Kenny Dale. You will remain alive as we keep singing your beautiful songs. Rest peacefully."
Galley said he and Dale shared some "good laughs".
"He was a real Gem and a great guy. It was very special touring with him, we had some good laughs. Loved playing his music. R.I.P. Kenny, your music lives on."
Dale is survived by his wife, Judy and daughters.
Be the first to comment