‘The Righteous Gemstones’ Turned a 55-Year-Old Country Gospel Song Into a Season 3 Jewel

Steve Greene
·4 min read
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[Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers for “The Righteous Gemstones” Season 3, Episode 3, “For Their Nakedness Is Your Own Nakedness.“]

If you’ve seen the opening scene of the latest episode of “The Righteous Gemstones,” congratulations. “There Will Come a Payday” will now be a resident of your subconscious for the next few weeks.

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And you can credit a few different people. First, there’s the incomparable Walton Goggins, whose poolside Baby Billy performance of the song opens things up with a waltz-time country gospel flair. There’s also Red Sovine, who originally recorded the track for his 1978 swan song album “16 New Gospel Songs,” helping to cap off his own prolific two-decade career as a recording artist.

“The Righteous Gemstones” composer Joseph Stephens is the other key part of the process, fine-tuning this newest cover of the half-century-old song for the HBO show.

“In the script, there’s a big scene where Baby Billy sings a song in front of the crowd at the Zion’s Landing resort. So our music supervisor Devoe Yates put together a list of 10 or so songs that he felt like were a good pitch for Baby Billy to sing. He sent it to Danny [McBride, the episode’s director] and I and ‘Payday’ was the obvious standout,” Stephens said. “We did a demo and sent it to Walton and Danny, and then that demo kept getting bigger and bigger until all the pieces were there.”

It’s not the first time that Goggins has lent his singing voice to the show. On top of the instantly legendary “Misbehavin’” from the first season, Baby Billy has also figured into some of the praise song sequences at the Gemstone Center. But this sun-drenched, pastel-peppered float through Zion’s Landing — from the cocktail bar to the water fixtures and culminating in a group singalong on a footbridge — is the kind of daydream that’s rare for “The Righteous Gemstones.”

“This song, it carries two ideas. He’s performing live on camera, but then it kind of goes into his head. So it becomes more produced, like it’s the album you would be listening to. Then it goes back to the on-camera live performance. So we had to incorporate that with the performances that we would get out of Walton,” Stephens said.

Walton Goggins in "The Righteous Gemstones"

Backing that performance is a collection of instruments mostly played by Stephens himself, with an assist on the pedal steel guitar from longtime “Gemstones” musical contributor Tony Paoletta. Like the original Sovine recording, there’s a small backing choir that fills out the vocals of the chorus. All of this was set before filming the sequence itself, where a beaming Baby Billy takes center stage.

As far as recording Goggins — done remotely in “Gemstones” production hub Charleston, South Carolina with the help of some carried-over Covid-era innovations — Stephens wanted to give the actor some flexibility in how he sang it. That led to different options for the eventual final version and helped the relevant lyrics resonate more for the cash-strapped Baby Billy (whose “Bible Bonkers” lightbulb moment is yet to come).

“We had him do a variety of takes. One that was maybe a little more reserved, one that kind of went for it a little more. What we ended up going with was the middle of that road,” Stephens said. “But Walton is a consummate professional with all this stuff. All the vocal demands that we put on him for the show, he always comes very prepared, and he’s at the ready to do it however we propose. He came in and knocked it out. It’s all great and we don’t really need much after we get a few.”

Covering a country gospel song wasn’t the only bit of adaptation Stephens had to do in Episode 3. Eagle-eared viewers might catch an instrumental variation on the theme song for The Redeemer, the massive monster truck that helped open the season. When the Gemstone kids’ cousins find The Redeemer under a tarp in a family compound garage, you can hear a variation on the ’80s hair-metal anthem sprinkled in throughout the season.

“We did two versions there. One was Spielberg-y and had a lot of orchestration. It was really cool, but it didn’t totally fit with the show,” Stephens said. “The version that I ended up doing was something more on the line of an ‘Iron Eagle’ version of ‘The Redeemer.’ I put a countermelody to it so it wouldn’t feel like exactly like the song, because we use the song a lot. But we liked the idea of there being this moment of wonder as these characters find that truck from their childhood.”

“The Righteous Gemstones” Season 3 airs Sundays at 10 p.m. on HBO. Episodes are also available to stream on Max.

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