Late 1970s and The 1980s
Riley's great success brought a number of offers from Hollywood, and she appeared with Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Bette Davis, Tom Jones, Ed Sullivan and others on various television programs.
Riley left Plantation Records for MGM Records in 1972, recording several albums, but only two of her singles from the period, "Good Morning Country Rain" and "Give Myself A Party," cracked the top 30. Later stints at Mercury Records and Warner Bros. Records produced only a couple of charted singles, but Riley remained highly in demand as a concert artist well into the 1980s.
In the 1970s, she became a Born Again Christian and began recording gospel music. As result of her conversion, she distanced herself from the song for a time, due to its content. However, it was never removed from her live set and she still performs it. In 1980, she published her autobiography, From Harper Valley to the Mountain Top, which told her story of stardom in pop music to moving more into gospel music. The following year, she released a new gospel album with the same title.
Read more about this topic: Jeannie C. Riley
Famous quotes containing the word late:
“No such sermons have come to us here out of England, in late years, as those of this preacher,—sermons to kings, and sermons to peasants, and sermons to all intermediate classes. It is in vain that John Bull, or any of his cousins, turns a deaf ear, and pretends not to hear them: nature will not soon be weary of repeating them. There are words less obviously true, more for the ages to hear, perhaps, but none so impossible for this age not to hear.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)