Rub It In

Rub It In: Layng Martine and the Summer-Baked Novelty of 1971

The Songwriter Steps Out Front

Most people who know the song Rub It In know it from Billy "Crash" Craddock's 1974 country hit, the version that made it a genuine standard of country novelty music and gave it a second and far more commercially dominant life. But before Craddock got there, the song belonged to the man who wrote it: Layng Martine Jr., a Nashville songwriter and performer who in the autumn of 1971 stepped in front of the curtain and released his own version of the song, taking it to the pop charts on the strength of what was, even in a crowded field, a genuinely delightful piece of sunbaked silliness. Understanding the song's history means starting here, with the original recording and the pop chart run that proved the concept worked before Nashville's country apparatus amplified it to country-classic status.

A Song About Suntan Lotion and Something Else Entirely

The genius of Rub It In is its double meaning, deployed with the lightest possible touch. On its surface it is a song about sunbathing, about a man requesting that a woman apply suntan lotion to his back at the beach. The lotion, the beach, the heat of the sun: these are entirely real and present in the lyric. But the song knows exactly what it is doing with its verbs and its subject matter, and the audience always knew it too. The charm lies not in hiding the subtext but in maintaining plausible deniability while winking broadly at everyone present. It is beach comedy of a very specific and very 1970s variety, built for AM radio and summer afternoons.

The Chart Journey

The song debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on October 2, 1971, entering at number 94. It climbed steadily through the fall: 80, then 76, then 74, then 70, reaching its peak position of 65 during the week of November 13, 1971. The run covered eight weeks on the chart, a respectable performance for a novelty single by a songwriter-performer who was not yet a household name. The timing was slightly paradoxical: a summer-themed song charting in October and November, when the beaches had long since cleared, but radio audiences apparently found the evocation of sun and sand welcome enough even in the cooling months.

Nashville's Songwriting Machinery

Layng Martine Jr. was primarily known as a craftsman behind the scenes. His catalog of songs covered by other artists is considerably longer and more commercially impactful than his performing career, which is the normal destiny of Nashville's best songwriters. Artists like Craddock, who found the song's country potential and ran with it three years later, validated something Martine had put on tape in 1971: this was a genuinely durable piece of songwriting, funny enough to transcend changing fashions, with a central conceit clear enough to survive any arrangement. The songwriter's advantage is that the song outlasts any individual recording of it.

The Pop-Country Novelty Tradition

In 1971, the boundary between country and pop on AM radio was considerably more porous than it would later become. Artists moved between formats, songs crossed over routinely, and novelty material found audiences regardless of which genre claimed it as home territory. Rub It In inhabited this porous zone comfortably, its good humor and its uncomplicated beach-party premise making it palatable to pop audiences who had no particular interest in country music as a genre. It is a small but genuine piece of early-1970s pop history, a reminder that the charts of that era had room for pure fun in a way that later format consolidation would make increasingly difficult. Go find the original recording and let the summer in, regardless of the season.

"Rub It In" — Layng Martine's breezy, winking beach dispatch from the 1970s charts.