She Even Woke Me Up to Say Goodbye was Lewis's sixth album for Mercury since his 1968 comeback album Another Place, Another Time. Lewis was also in competition with himself, as Shelby Singleton, who had bought the entire Sun Records catalog from Sam Phillips on July 1, 1969, began releasing albums featuring unheard recordings by Lewis, many of them country songs, to capitalize on Jerry Lee's revitalized commercial appeal. As country music historian Colin Escott recounts in his essay for the 1986 Bear Family retrospective The Killer: The Smash/Mercury Years, "Singleton continued to release titles from the old Sun catalog (sometimes with new overdubs) as though they were current product, usually timing the releases so that they appeared just as Jerry's new smash single had peaked...Singleton began programming albums with vague themes, using contemporary photos wherever possible to create the illusion that these might be new recordings." Consequently, the market was flooded with product, turning Lewis into one of the most in-demand country artists in the business.

By the dawn of the new decade, Lewis had scored five straight Top 5 country hits for Smash in less than two years (including the chart topper "To Make Love Sweeter For You"), and his streak continued with "She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye," which made it all the way to number 2. The song had been co-written by Mickey Newbury, who would become best known for his arrangement of "An American Trilogy," later made famous by Elvis Presley, but it was Lewis who had been the first major artist to cover one of Newbury's compositions, having recorded "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)" for his 1967 album Soul My Way. Lewis's vocal on "She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye" has been widely praised, with biographer Rick Bragg opining in Jerry Lee Lewis: His Own Story, "Some songs make people think they were written for them. This is the opposite: in this song, it's as if Jerry were living inside the lyrics." In the book Jerry Lee Lewis: Lost and Found, producer Jerry Kennedy marvelled to Joe Bonomo, "He learned 'She Even Woke Me Up To Say Goodbye' and did that cut of it after hearing the song one time. He really is a genius." The album also features the top 5 hit "Once More With Feeling," which was written by Kris Kristofferson and Shel Silverstein. Bonomo quotes Kristofferson: "I consider Jerry Lee Lewis one of the great singers of all time. Put him up there with opera singers. He had a way of transforming my songs into something I couldn't believe I was hearing."

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