Everything is Beautiful?

The early 1970s may not have been the Golden Age of Variety Shows, but there were sure an awful lot of them on television then.

It wasn’t only comedy stars like Carol Burnett, Flip Wilson and Redd Foxx who got their own hour-long fun-fests. It seems that all kinds of people with hit songs were handed their own variety extravaganzas.

Two singers of novelty songs back then were Jim Stafford and Ray Stevens. Both of them were crossover artists, getting airplay on MOR, rock and country stations. A broad demographic led to larger potential audiences, so both were inked to TV contracts.

Stevens had appeared on Andy Williams’ show. So it was he was Williams’ summer replacement in 1970.

By then, he had cut several hit records over the course of eight years, made guest shots with Johnny Cash, Dean Martin and Glen Campbell, and hosted the Grammys, but his producers decided to go with a gimmick that he was unknown to TV viewers. His series was called Andy Williams Presents the Ray Stevens Show??? (with three question marks).

Here’s a bit of background from one of the newspaper syndicates, published around June 17, 1970; the show debuted on the 20th.

Ray Stevens Replaces Andy in Show
By CHARLES WITBECK
HOLLYWOOD — Who is Ray Stevens?
This question comes up every Saturday night on the Andy Williams summer replacement series, kidding the young, sleepy-eyed host Stevens, who happens to be the author of the top-ranked pop tune, "Everything is Beautiful."
Judging from the first two shows, Stevens enjoys playing the unknown. He beams when the cast interrupts a line of dialogue, and pretends to take punishment as the piano lids bang down on his fingers at least during the hour, allowing Ray to cry out in anguish after much sucking in of air.
The Georgian composer acts as if he were just one of the performers, not the star. The "put-down" approach was adapted by producers Allen Blye and Chris Beard [sic] after Stevens taped four Andy Williams guest spots during the winter, receiving a "totally favorable" mail response, beating out runner-ups [sic] Don Ho and Jonathan Winters.
"We figured the humorous angle was the only way to go," says Blye. "Ray isn't sexy and handsome like Glen Campbell. He's cute and has a sense of fun. Later, we learned he was a deep, deep kid judging from his new album 'America, Communicate With Me.' "
While viewers are in the dark over Ray Stevens, the pop music business knows the singer as a dependable source of record hits. Beginning with "Ahab, the Arab," in '62, Ray, out of Clarksdale, Ga., knocks them out year after year —"Mr. Businessman," "Harry, the Hairy Ape," "Gitarzan," "Along Came Jones."
"I have 15 years of classical piano behind me," Ray said, flying into Hollywood from his Nashville home for a round of publicity interviews. Wife Penny, with big saucer eyes and a handsome curved nose, sat quietly by, listening.
The songwriter spends half his time at the piano, playing with ideas. The lyric or the tune may come first, it doesn't matter. When something pleases, a few notes are jotted down on paper and put inside the piano bench. Overflow goes into a big chest. Or, Ray will write a melody, and tape it on a cassette for safekeeping.
One morning the composer started turning pages of a rhyming dictionary, and in a few hours, a novelty piece, "Gitarzan," emerged. "I sung it to a friend over the phone," Ray told me. "He said it was nice. Then I stuck it away in the piano bench. Two years later we moved and I found the song again. It pays to move now and then."
The Stevens’ songwriting career began at the age of 17 when he gathered up his nerve and went to Atlanta contacting music publisher Bill Lowery. Ray played one song, and Lowery politely offered encouragement. In a few days, the novice was back with another, "Silver Bracelet," and this improved piece earned Lowery's backing and led to a contract with Capitol Records.
Nowadays Stevens writes, arranges and produces his own product. "I junk from 75 to 80 per cent of my ideas," he estimates, "and keep about 20 per cent. Only five per cent turn out to be any good."
So far the writer shows a sensitive ear for his own work. 1968 was a vintage year with two hits and two misses, and '70 may equal the high with "Everything Is Beautiful," riding along at a million-and-a-half sales during a recession, a Broadway score for "Johnny Appleseed" in the making, and his serious album, "America, Communicate With Me" due in August, a "poetic, arty inside view of the country about dope, Vietnam and the man in the street." "I like to think I'm a sounding board," says Ray "I want to be known as a singer of the people. I don't want to turn my songwriting into an ego trip, to think everything I do is good."
And that is the aim of the summer show — keep Ray in his place. Avoid the big head, laugh at the star.

Dwight Newton of the San Francisco Examiner wasn’t impressed. His review appeared on July 3, 1970. Let’s face it. If you’re doing an Al Jolson joke in 1970, you’re stretching.

A Cornball from Canada
Ray Stevens, an amiable, soft-sell, composer-singer from Nashville, Tenn., is Andy Williams' summer television replacement. Though Ray is a big noise on records ("Mr. Businessman," "Ahab the Arab," "Everything Is Beautiful," etc.), he was, until the summer series began, the Mr. Nobody of television.
Andy had hosted him a few times; that was about it.
Andy tried to get Ray's show off to a talked-about start with a continuing "Who is Ray Stevens?" gimmick. For instance: Andy appeared on last week's show for about four seconds. In response to the question, "Who is Ray Stevens?" Andy mumbled: "Didn't he use to be Stella Stevens?"
In another cameo bit, Bill Dana solemnly observed: "Ray Stevens will be remembered a long time after Al Jolson is forgotten, but not until then."
Two such quips were cute enough but when two dozen more in the same vein were sounded off, the name of Ray Stevens became a pain in the ear. The whole show became a pain in the neck. A shame because Ray is affable and magnetic. He is a highly skilled contemporary pop musician.
His competency was evident whenever he and his piano closed in on a ditty such as last week's "A Catchy Little Tune" . . . "when it had no place to go, it became the closing number on a rock and roll show.")
Tomorrow night Stevens will vocalize the instrumental sounds on his self-written "Freddy Feel-good and His Funky Little Five-Piece Band."
* * *
STEVENS IS a product of our new times. His show is a product of infantile asininity. Never in his lowest depths did Andy Williams have to cope with such a clanging clutter of disorganized guck. One guy never performs but takes thousands of bows. Sketches are performed by sacks and bags. Gags are fired like flack in an air raid. The girls are pretty, the jokes are pretty bad.
The show is stitched together like a poor man's "Laugh-In." Correction: Make that a beggar's "Laugh-ln." Because the show is running on a beggar's budget. The show is produced at Toronto, Canada, for two reasons: (1) Any show can be produced much, much cheaper in Canada than in Hollywood. (2) Any show produced in Canada is not subject to Canada's new quota restrictions on U.S. Television shows.
Stevens' two continuing "star" guests are Lulu from Scotland who bounces through most of the scenes, and Mama Cass Elliot who does her thing and vanishes. Last week she was a frog making a fly vanish by swallowing it ("rib-bit rib-bit.")
* * *
THE FINALE and show-stopper of last week's program was a rousing rendition of "Happy Days Are Here Again" treated as a spiritual — "Jesus walks, "Wash my sins away," "Happy days." As the closing credits rolled, Stevens was on his feet, bustling through the audience, shaking hands, kissing girls.
Ray Stevens has the stuff that Andy Williamses are made of. That's why Andy brought him into the Williams stable. But can Stevens survived [sic] the cornball goings-on of the summer series? It is doubtful that Andy could.

Dirk MacDonald of the Montreal Star was less charitable in his review of Aug. 15.

You have to be pretty starved for something to do to have to expose yourself to most of television's summertime programming.
No longer is it the mere problem of reruns filling the humid hours; the networks have realized that some degree of originality just might be useful at this time of year.
Realization and implementation, however, are two entirely different beasts. In terms of variety shows, we seem to have little to draw us to the set in the evenings. The bulk of the summer programming is so damned bland that you'd be better off digging out the antiquated Viewfinder. Those still pictures of Niagara Falls can be mighty entertaining, after all.
The goals of the Canadian Radio Television Comission [sic] hardly have been achieved by CTV's highly-publicized production of such programs as The Ray Stevens Show. It was a senseless substitute for Andy Williams. I'm sure the Canadian-content cause was set back five years by the overworked techniques used on the Stevens' hour.
As far as I'm concerned, Allan Blye and Chris Beard should stay in California, for all the imagination they brought to the Toronto-produced show. It was a second-rate American program. stamped "Made-in-Canada.” It doesn't fulfill the CRTC's stated objective, by my reasoning, CTV’s Murray Chercover notwithstanding.
The gimmickry of the Stevens' show was nothing less than appalling. It probably was tremendous a couple of years ago with Laugh-In — and Blye and Beard have won Emmy awards for their work — but it most certainly has paled. [...] Allan Blye, meanwhile, said this about the Ray Stevens show in an interview with Cynthia Gunn for THE STAR.
"It's difficult to simply describe the show. We have two people who do everything they do from inside burlap sacks. We have one young boy who's 24 years old, who we've dubbed The World's Greatest Comedian ... we have the Swamp Girl who appears a number of times on our show.
"We also happen to have Ray Stevens, who's the star of the show . . .”
The Stevens' program came off as a bore, caught up in fanciness.

A number of newspaper articles made a comparison to Laugh-In. That couldn’t have been accidental. Chris Bearde was a writer on the show. So were Stevens’ writing supervisors Jack Hanrahan and Phil Hahn. One of the other writers was a young man who appeared after the end credits of the first show—a young man who had worked with producer Allan Blye on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour—Steve Martin (complete with arrow through his head).

Cynthia Lowry of the Associated Press noted in a column the night of the debut that NBC’s deal called for eight programmes and two repeats. The series was never picked up for the fall. Stevens continued recording, climbing the charts in various formats in 1974 with “The Streak.” He’s been inducted into a number of music halls of fame. His attempt at variety TV never hurt his career.

You can view the debut episode of his show below.