The Anti-Middle-Class Market

Mr. Taylor cheats on his wife. Mr. Harper is a drunk. Widow Jones cavorts without pulling down her window shades. It would all be everyday grist for Peyton Place but, blaring out of radios and jukeboxes, this titillating recital is selling 3,000,000 records. It is Harper Valley P.T.A., a thumping, country-flavored song about a smalltown widow. Her high skirts and low life are criticized by the P.T.A. at her teen-age daughter's school. She storms into the P.T.A. meeting and graphically exposes the membership as a bunch of hypocrites:

Mr. Baker, can you tell us why your secretary had to leave this town . . .

Such obvious thrusts at such obvious targets hardly make for brilliant satire. But as monotonously intoned by singer Jeannie C. Riley on a tiny Nashville label called Plantation Records, P.T.A. is the runaway hit single of the late summer and autumn. It seems to have tapped a new anti-middle-class market. One other recent, lesser success is Singer-Songwriter Ray Stevens' Mr. Businessman, which declares in part: "Eighty-six proof anesthetic crutches brought you to the top/Where the smiles are all synthetic and the ulcers never stop." The market may consist either of middle-class youngsters who are put off by the adult world or middle-class adults who enjoy casting their neighbors in the songs; most likely it is both.

The president of Plantation Records, Shelby Singleton, 36, has followed up the single release with an album containing songs about some of the characters in P.T.A., hopes eventually to produce a movie about Harper Valley. Meanwhile, Texas-born Jeannie Riley, 22, a former $50-a-week secretary on Nashville's Music Row commands prime-time television bookings, $15,000-per-night personal appearances, and record royalties that may amount to $150,000 by year's end. So although she is still in the first grade in the vocal department, she has graduated with honors in tax brackets. The benefits are already evident in her household. Her 25-year-old husband Mitchell has just retired from his job as gas jockey at a Nashville service station.

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