It was a Russell Smith song that kept finding new voices, new rooms, and new listeners willing to recognize the lonely little bargain inside it.
Before The Amazing Rhythm Aces turned Third Rate Romance into a 1970s crossover smash, this sly tale of a cheap motel room and a small transaction dressed up as romance had already passed through Jesse Winchester’s world. In the early 1970s, bassist Jeff Davis and drummer Butch McDade were working with Winchester in Canada as members of his backing group, the Rhythm Aces. Winchester had left the United States in 1967 rather than submit to the military draft, building his music north of the border with musicians who would soon carry that sound somewhere else.
Then Russell Smith arrived in Montreal during the 1974 sessions for Winchester’s Learn to Love It. He brought songs with him, including Third Rate Romance and The End Is Not in Sight. Smith even sang the lead on Winchester’s recording of Third Rate Romance. But the song did not begin as a clean Amazing Rhythm Aces origin story. It was already moving through another artist’s sessions, another country, another set of circumstances shaped by exile and distance.
Then the personnel shifted. Davis and McDade left Winchester’s orbit and followed Smith into a new band in Memphis. Joined by keyboardist Billy Earheart, multi-instrumentalist Barry Byrd Burton, and pianist James Hooker, they mixed country with rock, blues, R&B, and Southern soul. They became The Amazing Rhythm Aces. For their 1975 debut album, Stacked Deck, they returned to Smith’s composition. This time, the song carried their own name.
The band did not expect much. In a 1976 interview, they recalled hoping the record might receive some regional attention. Instead, it escaped Memphis. Third Rate Romance reached No. 11 on the country chart and No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, a rare crossover for a band that did not fit neatly into either format. In Canada, it went all the way to No. 1 on both the country and general singles charts. Their next single, Amazing Grace (Used to Be Her Favorite Song), reached the country Top 10. Then they returned to another Russell Smith song that had already appeared with Winchester: The End Is Not in Sight (The Cowboy Tune). Their recording earned the Amazing Rhythm Aces a Grammy for country vocal performance by a group.
The band never became easy for the industry to classify. Their records could sound country, Memphis soul, blues, or rock within the same album. Later releases earned critical respect without reproducing the commercial breakthrough, and the original run ended in the early 1980s. But Third Rate Romance still had another trip ahead. In 1994, nearly twenty years after the Aces version, Sammy Kershaw recorded it again and carried the Russell Smith song back onto country radio. A song that had passed through Jesse Winchester’s Canadian exile, a Memphis band, and 1970s crossover radio had found its way into another generation of country music.