Inside her insect-stained bus, Jeannie C. Riley sat licking a Dannheim’s ice cream cone.

The high-heeled boots, the mini-skirt and the computerized image that followed “Harper Valley PTA” are gone now.

Instead, she wears a western pantsuit and mentions freely that she hasn’t had a big hit since 1968 and that her popularity may be somewhat less than it used to be.

But the 29-year-old country-western singer who brought her vibrato to the Brown County Fair Friday night says she is happier now.

THE MAIN reason for it, she says, is that she has found Jesus Christ.

Before that happened, Riley points out, she used to be concerned with her image, worried that people might not like what they saw when she got on stage.

‘Harper Valley PTA’ created a thought in my mind that what I wear is important. I thought people were coming out to see me rather than hear me,” she says.

“NOW, I just go out and do what’s natural. My salvation is the most real thing about me.”

A minister’s daughter, Riley says that as a child, she had a belief in Christ, but it wasn’t a commitment to Him. When she moved to Nashville, she adds, the pressures of show business made it that much tougher.

BUT IN 1972, she turned to him when her nephew died.

“I knew I was going to need something to get me through this,” Riley remembers. “My sister’s children were like my own to me. I knew I was going to have to have something.”

About 6 p.m. the day after he was buried, she recalls, she went out to the cemetery.

“I got down on my knees and said, ‘Lord, somehow I’ve got to know if you’re there’,”she says.

At that moment, a bright star appeared momentarily and reappeared again. It was her proof.

SINCE THEN, she says, she has changed.

“I used to just lend my voice to someone else’s tunes,” Riley points out. “What’s that unless I’ve got something to say?”

Now, she writes much of her own music. But it is still country-western. That is the best way to do God’s work, she says. If it wasn’t, she believes he would have shown her that she should sing gospel music.

COUNTRY music, in general, she adds, is more popular than ever before, and she’s bothered by those who classify it as a lower art form than classical or rock or jazz.

“The joy that it’s brought so many people who are interested in it and promote it–if they were the only ones who enjoyed it, it would be worth it,” she says.”It takes two different parts to make a body of anything, and it’s the same way with music.

“I’ve seen with my own eyes the popularity of country music growing by leaps and bounds. It’s aggravating to find people that think their music is the only music available.”

New Ulm Daily Journal

Aug. 17, 1975