Robert Hoover
“I’ve been singing as far back as I can remember, and there’s always been music around me,” saucy-voiced Sammi Smith recalled in an exclusive interview. “While other kids were out doing other things, I’d be staying home singing, or listening to records by Dinah Washington or Louis Prima and Keely Smith—not country music. I got into country proper a long time later. When I was 12, I started doing pop standards with the big bands, but I also sang with some rock bands.”
While Sammi was fronting a country music unit in Oklahoma in 1967, bassist Marshall Grant, a member of Johnny Cash’s band, the Tennessee Three, spotted her and convinced Sammi to ride the Greyhound to Nashville. There, Johnny Cash hooked her up with his record label, Columbia. Some moderately successful singles were issued like, “So Long, Charlie Brown” in 1968 that didn’t exactly set the world on fire.
Two years later, Columbia terminated their contract with Sammi Smith. “What happened next was, I was playing Printer’s Alley in Nashville, and the chairman of the board for Mega records kept harassing me, saying that he wanted to have me be the first artist with this new label. Finally, I did go ahead and sign with them. The label, I found out later, was actually formed as a tax write-off, and I wasn’t supposed to have a hit record! The trouble for them was that once my album ‘He’s Everything,’ later retitled ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night,’ came out in 1971, the disc-jockeys were playing ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night’ and there was no stopping it. The record company HAD to issue it as a single that reached #8 on March 27th, 1971.” More than 2 million copies of this Kris Kristofferson–penned song have been sold since. The song was awarded a Grammy and was named the Country Music Association’s Single of the Year for 1971. “Help Me Make It Through the Night” was also used on the soundtrack of John Huston’s movie “Fat City” in 1972.
While Sammi Smith had only made the pop listings on only one other occasion with “I’ve Got to Have You” that reached #77 in 1972, she had been continuously popular on the country music charts with songs like “Then You Walked In” (1971), and “Today I Started Loving You Again” in 1975. She had nearly 40 charting country music charting singles, but none could even come close to the impact of “Help Me Make It Through the Night.“
There are those who sell a million records and as quickly as it happens, it’s all gone—I was one of those,” Sammi noted. “But I knew I was going to always sing whether it was for $10 a night or in the big time. I’ve forfeited making the top 10 (again) because l’ve always felt I would only do songs | wanted to do.”
Author: “Help Me Make It Through the Night” is my favorite Kris Kristofferson song and it plays well both as a vocal and as an instrumental.