MOKB Covers Project : Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town

You may have thought that Kenny Rogers wrote Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town - I did. Well, we're both wrong, and that's why we do and love the MOKB Covers Project...we can all learn something. Anyway, Mel Tillis wrote the song, but in 1969, Kenny made it famous.

The song, as you can easily tell, is about a disabled soldier returned from the Korean War and his cheatin' wife. Tillis based the song on a couple who lived near his family in Florida. In real life, the man was wounded in Germany in World War II and sent to recuperate in England. There he married a nurse who took care of him at the hospital. The two of them moved to Florida shortly afterward, but he had periodic return trips to the hospital as problems with his wounds kept flaring up. His wife saw another man as the veteran lay in the hospital. Tillis changed the war to the more recent Korean War in the song, and departed from the ending that happened in real life: the man killed his wife in a murder-suicide. (source)

Kenny's version was timely to the Vietnam War, and an era where many of the vets were treated quite badly upon their return home.

Kenny Rogers - Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town (Mel Tillis Cover)
Waylon Jennings, Mel Tillis, Bobby Bare & Jerry Reed - Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town (Mel Tillis Cover)

The Killers - Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town (Mel Tillis Cover)
Cake - Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town (Mel Tillis Cover)
Jason & The Scorchers - Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town (Mel Tillis Cover)
Leonard Nimoy - Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town (Mel Tillis Cover)
Walter Brennan - Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town (Mel Tillis Cover)
Wolfsheim - Ruby, Don't Take Your Love To Town (Mel Tillis Cover)

There are apparently versions by Johnny Darrel, Roger Miller and ALL out there, so if you have them, or any others, and can send them in, I'd love ya.

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