On January 4, 1993, her 36th birthday, Patty Loveless walked into the studio with her husband and producer, Emory Gordy Jr., and recorded “Blame It on Your Heart.” It was her first time back in the studio since laser surgery on her vocal cords about two and a half months earlier. By June, that song was No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart.
A Warning She Didn’t Want to Hear
The trouble had been building for a while. As far back as 1990, a doctor had noticed a dark spot on her vocal cords. By the fall of 1992, Patty Loveless had just signed with Epic Records and was getting ready to make her first album for the label. She was also about to leave on a run of shows out west.
Before the bus rolled, she saw Dr. Robert Ossoff, a voice specialist connected with Vanderbilt University Medical Center. He found damage serious enough that, as Country Music magazine reported in 1993, she was in danger of hurting her vocal cords permanently. He wanted to operate right away, and he would not let her wait until the concerts were over. Years later, she recalled the warning she got from the doctor:
“If you do this, you’re going to blow your voice, and it’s going to be gone, and that’s it.”
Patty admitted she had been slow to face how bad it was. “I thought I was too busy to deal with it,” she said in 1993, “that I’d be letting too many people down if I stopped.” Her manager, Larry Fitzgerald, heard the seriousness of it straight from the doctor. The rest of her tour dates were canceled.
October 21, 1992
Ossoff performed laser surgery on October 21. Going in, Patty Loveless told herself, “This can’t be over. I’ve got more to do.” Emmylou Harris offered a gentler way to look at it: “God has ways of making us take vacations.”
The vacation was a silent one. Her doctors told her not to make a sound for a month and not to sing for two. She couldn’t even talk to Emory, who was producing the album she now couldn’t record. About three weeks in, she slipped. She was cleaning a mirror and had laid it on the floor, and when Emory was about to step on it, an involuntary squeak came out of her. She later joked that Emory probably enjoyed the quiet.
Starting Over With a Hum
When the silence ended, the work began. Patty Loveless went to a vocal coach at the Vanderbilt voice clinic, and he rebuilt her singing one small step at a time. “I started off humming,” she remembered. “It was like stretching before you run.” In 1993 she put it simply: “You’ve got to bring them back into shape slowly.”
She spent a lot of that recovery praying and wondering what her voice would sound like on the other side. Finally, her coach told her, “I think you’re ready.”
The Birthday Session
The day she went back to the microphone was her birthday. The song on the schedule was “Blame It on Your Heart,” a sassy, fast-talking kiss-off written by Harlan Howard and Kostas, with a long, rapid-fire chorus that gives a singer very little room to breathe. It was hardly the gentlest way to test a voice that had been silent for weeks.
According to Patty, two doctors came to the studio that day. Emory was in the producer’s chair, and once she started singing, he told the engineers she was “blowing it out.” He meant the microphone, not her voice.
“We went in on my birthday to cut ‘Blame It on Your Heart,’ and I just couldn’t believe it. It blew me away.” Patty Loveless, 2008
Her voice had come back fuller and stronger than before. “It felt stronger to me,” she told Country Music magazine that year. She even went back and re-sang some of the songs she and Emory had already recorded, because, as she put it, she felt she could do them better now.
From the Studio to No. 1
Epic released “Blame It on Your Heart” on April 3, 1993, as her first single for the label. On the Billboard Hot Country Singles & Tracks chart dated June 19, 1993, it reached No. 1 and stayed there for two weeks. It was the third No. 1 of her career.
The album, Only What I Feel, released that April, became her first million-seller. It also carried “How Can I Help You Say Goodbye,” one of the ballads that showed just how much that rebuilt voice could hold.
Patty Loveless was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2023. Twenty-five years after that birthday session, she was still telling the story of the two doctors in the studio and the microphone she was blowing out.