Margo Smith (1939–2024), 1970s country music star
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3 min readMargo Smith was a country singer and songwriter who had No. 1 hits with “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You” and “It Only Hurts a Little While.”
- Died: January 23, 2024 (Who else died on January 23?)
- Details of death: Died in Nashville, Tennessee, after suffering a stroke at the age of 84.
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Margo Smith’s legacy
Smith was known as “The Tennessee Yodeler” for her vocal style. But she didn’t initially set out to be a professional singer. She worked as a kindergarten teacher for years, and she began performing at PTA meetings and in local venues. As she attracted a local following, Smith pursued a recording contract, releasing her first album in 1971. She first cracked the country music charts in 1975 with the Top Ten hit “There I Said It.”
Smith achieved her greatest fame in the late 1970s with back-to-back No. 1 hit ballads “Don’t Break the Heart That Loves You” and “It Only Hurts a Little While.” Other popular singles from that decade include “Take My Breath Away,” “Love’s Explosion,” and “Little Things Mean a Lot.” In 1979, she released “Still a Woman,” a groundbreaking anthem for middle-aged women with its sexually charged lyrics. That year, Smith won an ASCAP Award for Country Artist of the Year. She pursued this new direction for several years and continued to chart singles, such as “If I Give My Heart to You,” “The Shuffle Song,” and a cover of “My Guy.”
By the early ‘80s, Smith had returned to her roots, singing ballads and yodeling. She ventured into creating Christian music and began marketing a tape teaching aspiring singers how to yodel. Among the yodelers she mentored was “America’s Got Talent” contestant Taylor Ware. Smith continued performing for much of her life, releasing her most recent record in 2005, “Nothing to Lose.”
Smith on writing “Still a Woman”
“I wanted to write a song that said, ‘hey, even though I may have a few children and a few grey hairs, I’m just as good now as I ever was.’ I also wanted to say that I was now more intelligent, but I didn’t want to say that I was better than anyone because I didn’t want to put the young girl down he was looking at, and I never put a man down in a song. That’s very important to me. So every line was labored over, and every line was true.” —from a 1979 interview for Billboard
Tributes to Margo Smith
Full obituary: Springfield News-Sun
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