Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends

Ronnie Milsap and the Kris Kristofferson Bridge: "Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends" (1974)

Few trajectories in American popular music are as dramatic as Ronnie Milsap's rise from regional obscurity to country superstardom, and few songs mark that trajectory as precisely as "Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends." When the recording debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on September 14, 1974, at number 95, and held that position for two weeks before exiting the chart, it told only part of the story. What the pop chart data obscured was the song's simultaneous performance on country radio, where Milsap was establishing the commercial dominance that would make him one of the defining artists of the country crossover era.

The song was written by Kris Kristofferson, the former Rhodes Scholar and Army helicopter pilot who had reinvented himself as Nashville's most celebrated songwriter in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Kristofferson had arrived in Music City with a gift for literary narrative and an understanding of emotional complexity that set his writing apart from the more conventional sentimentality of mainstream country songwriting. His catalog included "Me and Bobby McGee," "Help Me Make It Through the Night," "Sunday Mornin' Comin' Down," and "For the Good Times," songs that had been recorded by artists ranging from Janis Joplin to Sammi Smith to Ray Price. "Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends" sat comfortably within that body of work, its title functioning as both a narrative device and a metaphor for the painful desire to delay an inevitable conclusion.

Ronnie Milsap was born in 1943 in Robbinsville, North Carolina, and had been blind since birth due to a congenital condition. He had studied classical piano at the Governor Morehead School in Raleigh and later attended Young Harris College in Georgia, where he formed a band and began performing. His early career had taken him through rock, soul, and R&B territory, and he had recorded for Scepter Records in the late 1960s. The move to Nashville and to RCA Records in 1973 represented a deliberate strategic pivot toward country music, a genre where his piano-centered approach and his gift for emotional delivery found the most receptive audience.

Producer Tom Collins worked with Milsap to build arrangements that honored the sophistication of Kristofferson's writing while giving the recording a commercial accessibility that could work on multiple formats simultaneously. The result was a production that felt simultaneously rooted in country tradition and open to the smoother pop sensibility that crossover artists needed to cultivate if they hoped to reach beyond the country format's traditional audience. Milsap's piano playing gave the recording a distinctive character, his classical training providing a technical foundation that informed even the most understated passages.

The song reached number one on the Billboard country chart, a far more significant achievement for Milsap's career than the modest pop showing suggested. Country radio in 1974 was a genuinely large and loyal market, and a number-one country single established an artist's credibility within the Nashville infrastructure in ways that pop chart positions could not replicate. For Milsap, the success of "Please Don't Tell Me How The Story Ends" was the foundation upon which everything else would be built.

The pop chart performance, while brief, indicated that Milsap's music had an appeal that extended beyond the country format's traditional geographic and demographic boundaries. The two-week pop chart appearance at number 95 was not a failure but a signal, an early indication that Milsap possessed the crossover potential that would later manifest more fully in songs like "It Was Almost Like a Song" and "(There's) No Gettin' Over Me," recordings that would place him firmly in the pop mainstream during the late 1970s and 1980s.

Nashville in 1974 was itself in a period of creative ferment. The countrypolitan sound pioneered by producers like Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins had given way to a more diverse musical landscape that included the outlaw movement associated with Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings, the country rock crossovers emanating from California, and the more traditional sounds that still dominated mainstream country radio. Milsap navigated this landscape with considerable skill, aligning himself with the professional Nashville system while bringing enough originality to his work to stand apart from generic product.

Kristofferson's lyrical framework gave Milsap ample room to demonstrate his considerable interpretive gifts. The song's narrative of a relationship on the verge of dissolution, seen through the speaker's desperate wish to remain in a moment of connection before the inevitable ending arrives, suited Milsap's emotional directness. He had a quality in his voice that communicated vulnerability without sentimentality, and Kristofferson's literate writing gave that quality something genuinely worthy to engage with.

The recording has endured as one of the key documents of Milsap's early Nashville period, a time when he was assembling the artistic identity that would sustain one of the longest and most successful careers in country music. The forty-plus number-one country singles that would follow over the next two decades all owe something to the foundation laid by this early Kristofferson collaboration. The song demonstrated that Milsap could bring genuine interpretive depth to sophisticated material, a capability that producers and record labels would continue to rely on for decades.