The 1950s File Feature
It's Only The Good Times
It's Only The Good Times — Tommy EdwardsThe Singer Who Remade His Own CareerTommy Edwards occupies a genuinely unusual position in pop history. By the time h…
01 The Story
It's Only The Good Times — Tommy Edwards
The Singer Who Remade His Own Career
Tommy Edwards occupies a genuinely unusual position in pop history. By the time he charted with It's Only The Good Times in June 1959, he had already lived through one of the more remarkable second acts in the business. His ballad It's All in the Game, first recorded in the mid-1950s, had sunk without commercial trace in its original form. Then MGM Records remade it with a lush, string-driven orchestration in 1958, and the result was a number one hit that spent six weeks at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. Edwards had reinvented himself not by changing what he did, but by finding the right frame for the voice and material he already had. It's Only The Good Times arrived in the afterglow of that second act, a follow-up from an artist who had proven he could connect with mass audiences when circumstances aligned.
The Sound of Late-Fifties Pop Ballads
Edwards was a practitioner of the lush, orchestrated pop ballad that dominated the softer end of the late-fifties chart. This was music that existed largely independent of rock and roll's energy, drawing instead on the Tin Pan Alley tradition of crafted sentiment and formal melodic grace. His voice was a warm, flexible instrument with a natural affinity for this kind of material: capable of tenderness without cloying sweetness, of sincerity without sentimentality. It's Only The Good Times is a record built around those qualities, leaning into the orchestral arrangements that had served him so well on It's All in the Game and asking his vocal to do the emotional heavy lifting.
A Brief Chart Entry
The song's chart life was modest. It's Only The Good Times debuted on June 1, 1959 at its peak position of number 86, then drifted through three weeks on the chart before disappearing, spending time at 97 and 94 in its second and third weeks. Three weeks total on the Billboard Hot 100 and a peak of 86 places this squarely in the category of a record that made its presence known without generating sustained commercial momentum. The chart behavior suggests solid regional or demographic enthusiasm that did not translate into nationwide breakout.
Edwards in Context
The commercial reality of 1959 was that the pop chart was intensely competitive. Edwards was working against the grain of rock and roll's continuing dominance among younger record buyers, a demographic shift that made it progressively harder for the lush-orchestration ballad tradition to score major hits. His enormous success the previous year with It's All in the Game was in some ways exceptional; the mid-chart performance of It's Only The Good Times may more accurately reflect his typical commercial footprint in the rock and roll era. That context makes the 1958 chart run all the more remarkable, and it helps explain why this follow-up, despite being a genuine piece of craftsmanship, could not replicate those heights. The pop chart of 1959 was not a meritocracy; it was a battlefield where timing, radio relationships, and the cultural moment mattered as much as the quality of the record. Edwards had all of those things break in his favor in 1958, and the law of averages meant they were unlikely to align perfectly a second time on consecutive singles.
A Voice Worth Remembering
Tommy Edwards continued recording into the early 1960s, but he never again reached the commercial peak of It's All in the Game. He died in 1969 at the age of forty-seven, leaving behind a catalog that rewards patient listeners willing to look beyond the big hit. It's Only The Good Times has accumulated 1.6 million YouTube views, a number that reflects genuine affection from audiences who found their way to this quieter corner of late-fifties pop. The record may be a minor entry in Edwards' own catalog, but it captures a voice and a sensibility that deserve to be heard on their own terms.
Give it a spin and hear what the softer side of 1959 radio really sounded like before the next wave arrived.
“It's Only The Good Times” — Tommy Edwards' singular moment on the 1950s charts.
02 Song Meaning
The Meaning of It's Only The Good Times
The Consolation in the Title
There is a particular philosophy embedded in the phrase that titles this song. To say "it's only the good times" is to perform an act of emotional editing, a choice to remember selectively, to let the difficult parts of a relationship or a period recede and hold onto what was luminous. Whether this is wisdom or delusion is a question the song holds open. The ambiguity is part of its emotional texture: the listener is invited to decide whether the narrator's selective memory is a healthy coping mechanism or a form of self-deception that prevents genuine healing.
Memory and Its Distortions
Popular songs about remembering someone have always understood that memory is not a neutral archive. We do not recall people and periods as they actually were; we reconstruct them according to our current emotional needs, emphasizing what we miss and softening what we would rather forget. It's Only The Good Times acknowledges this process directly, building its emotional argument around the act of curated recollection. The narrator is not simply sad; the narrator is actively choosing to be sad about specific things, which is a more complicated and more human state than simple grief.
Late-Fifties Emotional Codes
In 1959, popular music's vocabulary for expressing romantic pain was still heavily regulated by conventions of decorum. You did not articulate anger, or blame, or the messier dimensions of loss; you expressed yearning for what was good and let the sorrow speak for itself. Edwards' delivery fits perfectly within those conventions, but the lyric's focus on selective memory gives the song a slightly more complex interior than a simpler breakup ballad would carry. The emotional restraint of the performance and the emotional specificity of the lyric create an interesting tension.
The Voice as the Message
With Tommy Edwards, as with the best vocalists in this tradition, the meaning of the song is inseparable from the way it is sung. His voice does not narrate the feeling; it embodies it. When he sings about good times, you hear the warmth of genuine remembering; when the lyric implies what has been lost, the slight shift in his delivery communicates loss more eloquently than words alone could manage. This is the particular art of the pop ballad singer: to make the musical performance itself a form of meaning-making, so that the song and the singing become one continuous act of expression.
Why Selective Memory Resonates
The theme of choosing to remember the good has resonated with every generation of listeners because it describes a strategy that virtually everyone employs in the aftermath of loss. Whether the loss is a person, a relationship, a period of life, or something harder to name, the impulse to hold onto what was beautiful while releasing what was painful is nearly universal. It's Only The Good Times gives that impulse a form, a melody, a voice, and in doing so makes it available to listeners who need exactly that kind of permission to grieve selectively and survive intact.
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