The quieter song his wife had written reached only No. 41 when Charlie Rich released it, yet musicians admired it for decades and Ricky Van Shelton later carried it into the country Top Five in 1990.
Margaret Ann’s song preserved the years when fame had not arrived and the marriage still had to make room for another thing it could not afford.
Margaret Ann Rich wrote a song from inside the lean years of her marriage, then Charlie Rich recorded it before Nashville finally made him a star.
In 1969 Charlie Rich recorded a song about a husband returning home without the raise his wife had been expecting. A dress remained in a shop window. Plans for a new house would wait another year. Outside, the flowers she had planted continued blooming as though the family’s finances had not changed. The writer was Charlie’s wife Margaret Ann Rich.
She Knew What Waiting Cost
By then she knew what waiting cost. She and Charlie had married as teenagers in 1952. After his Air Force service he tried farming in Arkansas while they raised young children and recorded songs at home on a small Webcor machine.
Without telling him Margaret Ann carried one of those tapes across the river to Sun Records in Memphis. Bill Justis listened, handed her a Jerry Lee Lewis record and told her Charlie could return when he could play that well.
Charlie eventually did return to Sun as a session musician and songwriter. Success remained unreliable. Records failed, labels changed, drinking damaged the household and there were stretches of several years when nothing he released sold.
Margaret Ann wrote songs and kept pushing his work toward people who might hear what she heard.
Life’s Little Ups And Downs Came From That Long Middle
“Life’s Little Ups and Downs” came from that long middle period. Charlie sang it without the protective distance of a borrowed character.
The disappointments in Margaret Ann’s lyric were ordinary with postponed purchases, dust gathering on plans and a marriage absorbing another piece of bad news.
Released by Epic the record reached only No. 41. Four years later “Behind Closed Doors” and “The Most Beautiful Girl” turned Charlie into a major star.
Charlie and Margaret Ann stayed married until his death in 1995. On his final studio album Pictures and Paintings he again recorded songs written by the woman who had first carried his homemade tape to Memphis.
The largest hits made Charlie Rich famous, but Margaret Ann’s song held onto the harder years before that fame, when a dress stayed in a window and a house stayed a plan and love had to keep going through another disappointment.