Satin Sheets, Cold Pillows
On Slipping Away in the Silk Sheets Of Time
I’ve always been a simple country girl at heart.
When I was a little kid, I didn’t want much for my future, all I really dreamed about getting when I was grown up, was satin sheets. Actually, all I wanted was 5 sets of satin sheets in shades of apricot, pale pink, duck egg blue, silver and black. I couldn’t decide.
These humble dreams came true around the age of 15 - my dream sheets in pale pink and duck egg blue were given to me by my grandma who shared or more likely influenced my exotic tastes in bedding. Then I found a very threadbare black satin sheet in a Kings Cross gutter and took it home, despite the fact it was probably discarded from a brothel. Finally I got some brand new silver satin sheets and I had everything I ever wanted except for the apricot ones and I’m not dead yet! It’s hard to say where our fascinations and obsessions come from. I guess I grew up on glamour images of women rolling around in satin sheets looking very content and it just worked its way inside my idea of what perfect adulthood looked like.
Waterbeds were also very popular in the 1980s and yes, I had one. It was actually my boyfriend’s mother’s water bed hand-me-down received when she upgraded, but it was pretty swanky none-the-less, although my friend Emma remembers a sleepover at my place where the waterbed was leaking onto the satin sheets which doesn’t sound too glamorous.
Though they were originally invented for hospital patients with bedsores they were reinvented by Charles Hall in 1968 who was studying furniture design. His first prototype was filled with jello. When he eventually got the formula right, he was given an A and the waterbed became an aspirational luxury item, owned by hippies and hipsters. One ad trumpeted ‘She’ll admire you for your car, she’ll respect you for your position, and she’ll love you for your waterbed’. Playboy’s Hugh Hefner had two; a green velvet one and one covered in opossum fur on the ‘The Big Bunny’, Playboy DC-9 Jet. They were marketed under names like ‘the Wet Dream’ and ‘Pleasure Island’ and the first waterbed promoter millionaire, Michael Valentine Zamoro, told Time Magazine in 1971 ‘I got a vision …I saw a wave of blue water like a breaker. On the wave in golden script was written: The World Wants Waterbeds’.
I also remember when my baby Holiday was born and slept in the bed with us, one night I woke up and I could not find her anywhere, although I could hear a faint cry. After a panicked few minutes of searching the bed for her, it turned out she was in her own little satiny waterbed cocoon underneath my back. That was the end of the waterbed for me.
But I digress. I wanted to talk about satin sheets in songs. Because what they represent in real life and what they are a metaphor for in songs is very different.
I don’t think there are any songs about how nice and silky satin sheets feel. They are all about how cold and lonely they are, and how the fanciest satin sheets in the world can’t begin to make up for the sadness of the cold, dead heart of a rich man with nothing to offer a lady except fancy bed linen.
Country songwriter John ‘Jack’ Volinkaty was out grocery shopping in 1970 when the idea came to him to write a song about satin sheets. He says he ran home and wrote it in 5 minutes, but then it took him another whole year to sell the song.
In February 1973, Jeanne Pruett released ‘Satin Sheets’ as a single, the year after Jan Howard and Bill Anderson had given it a red hot go as a duet. She apparently cut 1,600 pink satin sheets by hand and sent them out to radio DJs across America and got herself a number one country classic hit. It was her only hit but it was a good one. I truly hope one of those promotional pink satin sheets ended up in the Country Music Hall of Hame. Girl had chutzpah!
Jeanne does have one other song that I find strangely compelling - its called ‘Honey On His Hands’ with the main lyric being ‘How can he come home to me with honey on his hands?’ It turns out Honey is the name of ‘the girl in his honky tonk world who is good with a drink and a song’ and that her touch ‘touched too much’. She also stole sweet midnight feelin’s. I’m sorry I cant share it with you, it doesn’t appear to have made it into the digital world yet, but luckily for me every word is seared into my mind. Maybe I’ll sing it for you sometime.
Here’s Jeanne singing ‘Satin Sheets’, lamenting that big long Cadillacs and the tailor made clothes on her back aren’t enough to keep her satisfied, and she just wants a man who can hold her tight on a long, cold night.
Johnny Paycheck’s Slide Off Of Your Satin Sheets treads a similar path.
Growing up, this fabled Willis Alan Ramsey 1972 album was often on the turntable at our place …and my dad would sing the laidback classic hit ‘Satin Sheets’ from it at his gigs.
There’s a fascinating story behind it, which is that Willis was just a twenty year old kid with all these great songs who followed Leon Russell back to his hotel room after a concert and played them to him. Leon - also known as ‘The Master of Time & Space’ - was blown away and offered to record Willis and then released the album on his label Shelter Records. It was pretty popular and incredibly influential on other songwriters, like Jimmy Buffet and Lyle Lovett. The Captain & Tennille hit ‘Muskrat Love’ is from this record (watch this video for the incredible wacky triple keyboard action from The Captain!). The Bellamy Brothers had a hit with their cover of ‘Satin Sheets’. Seven other songs from the record were covered by big time singers. There was a lot of expectations around what he would do next. But the follow up album never came. Willis gigged for a while and when people would ask him when he was making a new album, he’d reply ‘What’s wrong with the first one?’
Then Willis just disappeared. Stopped playing shows and no-one knew what had happened to him. He reemerged a few years ago and said he was working on the follow up album still, but it was taking him a long time. In his own words, in 2021, he finally revealed the reason why: ‘Most popular records require a good deal of funding on a timely basis in order to enable a smooth, orderly production process. Since my experience with Shelter, the simple truth is that I’ve not been able to secure another production deal like that.’
‘I wish I was a millionaire
I’d play rock music and grow long hair…
…Pretty women would come to me
I’d give ‘em all the third degree
I’d give ‘em satin sheets to keep ‘em off the streets’
I don’t have satin sheets anymore but I still sleep with my beloved satin pillows, long ago given to me by my grandma and patched up every couple of years by my mother. I met up with my cousin last year who is a similar age and has very similar aesthetic tastes which obviously run through our bloodlines somehow, and amazingly she told me that she still had satin pillows from our grandma that she has patched over and over too. I think thats kind of wild.
I loved this Wanda Jackson song “Fancy Satin Pillows’ when I was a teenager - another song that hasn’t made it to streaming services (a good reminder to keep your vinyl!). The story of this one is her boyfriend gives her a set of fancy satin pillows and then leaves her. Ooh it’s a heartbreaker.
‘I can’t use ‘em both, and I thought sharing them was what you had in mind’
Shannon Shaw also released a cracker of a song called ‘Cold Pillows’ a couple of years ago on her great album ‘Shannon In Nashville’. Seek it out!
In 1971, the Rolling Stones previewed songs from their yet to be released album Sticky Fingers at the Marquee Club in London, before they had to flee to France so they didn’t lose all their money to taxes. Mick Jagger looked incredible in a short sequinned bolero and not much else, showing Harry Styles how to do it right. They performed not one but two cracker versions of the song ‘I Got The Blues’, one of my very favourite Stones songs, with this lovely sultry lyric:
In the silk sheet of time I will find peace of mind
Love is a bed full of blues
They did not perform the song live again until 1999.
All I really want now is some silk sheets of time. When I grow up I’m gonna get me some.
I like the part about the ‘black satin sheet in a kings cross gutter’ . . what a classic ! 😂
My very first city job at the age of 19, was delivering the daily early morning newspapers to all those lovely old art deco apartments in that area, from the kings cross newsagency.
The trolley would be highly stacked up to the top, saturday’s SMH & sunday’s were the heaviest to push . . great excersise 💪 I must say 😉
thankyou for your story, Lo
cheerio for now, ally x
Great post Lo. Fancy Satin Pillows is on YouTube streaming. I searched and found it when you mentioned it. And damn that’s a great Stones song and moment in time. Listening to them kind of ramble into a song the way only they can.