By 1968, Jerry Lee Lewis had been touring the United States and Europe consistently for ten years in hopes of re-establishing the stardom that he had enjoyed during his time at Sun Records in the 1950s, before his marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin Myra derailed his career.

In 1963, Lewis left Sun for Smash (later absorbed into Mercury Records) but, despite a string of musically diverse albums, did not have another hit.

"[1] With nothing to lose, Lewis agreed to record the Jerry Chestnut song "Another Place, Another Time" at the Columbia Studios in Nashville.

At the time of the release, Lewis had been playing Iago in a rock and roll adaptation of Othello called Catch My Soul in Los Angeles but was soon rushed back to Nashville to record another batch of songs with the producer Jerry Kennedy.

Although he was primarily known as a rock and roller, Lewis had been influenced by a wide range of artists and styles, from rhythm and blues to the Great American Songbook, but his affinity for country music – especially the songs of Hank Williams – remained a major part of his repertoire.

Featuring Kennedy's chiming lead guitar and Charlie McCoy's campfire harmonica introduction, Lewis' biographer Joe Bonomo writes in his book, Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost And Found, "The arrangement, including a woodblock rather than a snare, is prime honky-tonk: no instrument dominates, all complement... Everyone involved in the recording must have known that it would be a hit."

He also recorded the Fred Rose country standard "We Live in Two Different Worlds" as a duet with his sister Linda Gail Lewis.

In his book Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, the biographer Rick Bragg notes that the songs Lewis was recording "were of the kind they were starting to call 'hard country,' not because it had a rock beat or crossed over into rock in a real way, but because it was more substantial than the cloying, overproduced mess out there on country radio".

In the February 1, 1969, issue of Rolling Stone, the critic Andy Boehm wrote that the album was "definitely worth buying if you can find it.

In 2009, the producer Jerry Kennedy told Lewis's biographer Joe Bonomo that when the album had a quarter-million sales, Mercury's Chicago office called him to ask what pop stations were playing it "because it couldn't be selling that many country.