1973 · Behind the Songs
A tender ballad about two muskrats — and the strangest near-miss in America’s catalog.
In the autumn of 1973, America — the trio of Dewey Bunnell, Gerry Beckley and Dan Peek — released Hat Trick, their third album. Tucked among its twelve tracks was one of the strangest songs ever to brush the American Top 100: “Muskrat Love,” a tender ballad about two muskrats in love. The single climbed only to number 67 on the Billboard Hot 100, a footnote in the band’s chart history. But the song refused to die. Three years later, Captain & Tennille took the same rodent romance to number 4, and it became one of the defining novelty hits of the decade — leaving America’s original as a curious what-might-have-been.
The song did not begin with America at all. It came from Willis Alan Ramsey, a young Texas singer-songwriter whose self-titled 1972 debut — the only album he ever released — contained the original version. Ramsey first called it “Muskrat Candlelight,” a phrase lifted from the song’s opening lyric, before settling on “Muskrat Love,” taken from the words that close the chorus. It was a gentle, fingerpicked oddity: a love song whose sweethearts were two anthropomorphic muskrats, nibbling on bacon and chewing on cheese, doing the jitterbug out in muskrat land. Few people heard it. Ramsey’s album, beloved by critics and fellow musicians, sold modestly, and the song might have vanished entirely had three harmony singers from London-by-way-of-nowhere not gone digging.
America found the song and made it their own. By 1973 the trio had already notched two top-ten hits — “A Horse with No Name” and “I Need You” among them — and they were recording Hat Trick, the album that would follow their second LP. “Muskrat Love” fit the band’s softer side: all acoustic warmth, close harmony and whimsy, the kind of song that could only have been made by musicians young enough to take a muskrat romance seriously. Released as a single, it rose to number 67 on the Billboard Hot 100 — respectable, but hardly the stuff of legend. On the radio it sounded like a joke nobody was quite in on.
Then came the cover that ate the original. In 1976, the husband-and-wife duo Captain & Tennille — fresh off the chart-topping “Love Will Keep Us Together” — released their own “Muskrat Love,” complete with synthesized squeaks and chitters standing in for the song’s furry protagonists. Where America’s version had been wistful, theirs was pure vaudeville, and the public adored it. The single climbed to number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 2 on the Cash Box Top 100, finishing 1976 as the year’s 30th biggest hit. Suddenly the muskrats were everywhere: on television, on jukeboxes, in the national conversation. America’s tender original was all but forgotten, swallowed by a bigger, brasher rodent.
It is easy to treat “Muskrat Love” as a punchline, but the story is kinder than that. America’s version is genuinely lovely — three voices braided in the close harmony that was their signature, guitars warm as lamplight, the whole thing played with a straight face. That was the point. The band never winked at the material; they sang about muskrats the way they sang about deserts and highways, with total sincerity. It is the same sincerity that made “A Horse with No Name” feel like a dispatch from another world. The muskrats were ridiculous, and America knew it, and they sang it anyway — which is precisely why the record still charms.
Ramsey, for his part, became one of rock’s great cult figures. His lone album grew in stature with every passing year, championed by musicians who heard in it a songwriter of rare delicacy — and “Muskrat Love” became its most famous emissary, carried around the world by two different hitmakers. There is a pleasing symmetry in that: the most obscure song on a cult album became, via America and then Captain & Tennille, one of the most universally recognized tunes of the seventies. Everybody knew the muskrats. Almost nobody knew Ramsey. He seemed unbothered; the royalties, one imagines, softened the anonymity.
On record, America’s “Muskrat Love” is a small masterpiece of understatement. The arrangement never strains for comedy: acoustic guitars murmur, the harmonies float, and the whole performance leans into the song’s lullaby quality. It sits on Hat Trick among more conventional fare, and its very strangeness makes the album feel braver in retrospect. This was a band at the height of its commercial powers willing to spend a single on a song about rodents in love. In an era when rock was busy taking itself very seriously — concept albums, twenty-minute solos, capes — there was something quietly radical about three young men singing a lullaby to muskrats.
History, of course, remembers the brasher version. Captain & Tennille’s “Muskrat Love” — all synthesized nibbling and knowing winks — became a staple of seventies nostalgia, the kind of record people mention with a groan and a grin. It won the commercial battle decisively: number 4 against number 67 is no contest. But commercial battles are not the only ones worth winning. America’s original has outlasted the joke. Stripped of the squeaks and the vaudeville, it is simply a beautiful, peculiar record — and it captures something essential about the band: their willingness to be gentle in a loud decade, to be sincere about something silly.
There is a final irony worth savoring. “Muskrat Love” is a song about devotion between two unlikely creatures, and it inspired a peculiar devotion of its own — passed from a Texas cult hero to a harmony trio to a pop duo, each hearing something different in it. Ramsey heard a lullaby. America heard a love song. Captain & Tennille heard a hit. All three were right. And somewhere in a Missouri wetland, as the sun goes down over the water, the real muskrats go on nibbling, oblivious to the fact that they once had a Top 5 record. Which is probably for the best.