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Country Music

For years, the man making sure Willie Nelson got paid was sitting behind the drums. Paul English collected the band’s money, kept its accounts and confronted club owners who tried to change the fee after the final set. Long before Willie became the face of outlaw country, Paul helped keep his touring operation alive with money of his own. They had known each other since the rough Fort Worth club years. When work brought Willie through Houston, Paul sometimes gave him a place to stay. In 1966, after drummer Johnny Bush decided to pursue a singing career, Willie asked Paul for another musician’s telephone number. Paul told him to hire him instead. He had more confidence than experience, but he learned to play the way Willie needed. Willie’s singing rarely sat squarely on the beat; Paul learned to follow the movement of his phrasing rather than hold him inside a rigid arrangement. When Bush left, he also handed over the account books. Paul became drummer, accountant, road manager and investor. The cash he had made outside music helped carry Willie’s struggling band through years when the songs were better known than the man who wrote them. His appearance eventually became part of the show: pointed sideburns, a narrow goatee and a black satin cape lined in red. He looked dangerous because, when necessary, he was. But most nights required less visible work—counting money, settling payroll and making sure the musicians reached the next town. Willie wrote “Me and Paul” from the arrests, missed engagements and worn-down miles they accumulated together. He later said practically every line had happened. When Paul’s wife Carlene died by suicide in 1973, Willie stood beside him and wrote “I Still Can’t Believe You’re Gone.” Their partnership lasted beyond the outlaw years. Paul helped establish Farm Aid and served as its treasurer. After a stroke and a broken hip limited his playing, Willie kept him with the travelling Family as long as his health allowed. Paul died in 2020 after roughly seventy years of friendship. Willie Nelson came to represent a life lived beyond Nashville’s control. But that freedom was never held together by Willie alone. Night after night, the man keeping time behind him was also keeping the books.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE FRIEND WHO KEPT WILLIE NELSON ON THE…

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Johnny Carson’s First Decade Was Recorded—Then NBC Used the Tapes Again Some NBC videotape logs carry several programs on the same reel. A broadcast was recorded. The tape returned to storage. Later, someone threaded it through a machine and placed another program over the first. News, comedy, cartoons and talk shows could occupy the same physical object at different times, each new recording removing most of what had been there before. That routine erased much of Johnny Carson’s first decade on The Tonight Show. Carson began hosting in October 1962. Night after night, the program captured monologues, conversations, comedians making their first national appearances and public figures speaking in a looser setting than the evening news allowed. The broadcasts felt permanent to viewers because Carson was always there again the next night. The tape itself was expensive. NBC routinely reused two-inch videotape, and most Carson episodes from 1962 through the early 1970s disappeared. Even the first broadcast survives principally through photographs and audio rather than a complete video recording. Control changed the fate of the later shows. After Carson’s contract negotiations gave his production greater authority in 1972, the order was clear: the tapes were to be kept. Ownership arrangements developed further in subsequent agreements, but the preservation line is visible. Most of the early years are missing; the later twenty years remain largely intact. After Carson retired, thousands of tapes were stored roughly 650 feet underground in a Kansas salt mine, where temperature and humidity remained stable. In 2010, 3,300 hours of surviving footage were digitized and indexed so individual guests, monologue subjects and sketches could be located without screening entire programs. The archive preserves more than television comedy. It holds thirty years of American voices passing through one chair beside Carson’s desk. But the empty first decade remains part of its meaning. Television once entered millions of homes and then disappeared beneath the next night’s program—not metaphorically, but on the same reel of tape.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE NIGHTS NBC ERASED AND JOHNNY CARSON SAVED…

Country Music

Hank Williams was buried on January 4, 1953. Two days later, in the same Alabama city, a baby girl named Antha Belle Jett was born carrying a connection to him that would take more than thirty years to establish in court. Her mother was Bobbie Jett, a Nashville secretary who had been involved with Hank during the final year of his life. On October 15, 1952, with Bobbie pregnant, Hank accompanied her to his attorney’s office in Montgomery. There, they signed an agreement covering her living expenses, medical bills and the care of the unborn child. Hank died before any of it could unfold as planned. His mother, Lillie Williams Stone, took in the baby, legally adopted her and renamed her Catherine Yvonne Stone. Then Lillie died. The child became a ward of Alabama, entered another adoptive home and received another name: Cathy Louise Deupree. By the time Cathy was four, she had passed through four families and several identities. The records capable of explaining why had been sealed. At 21, her adoptive parents gave her $2,000 that Lillie Stone had left for her. The money carried a question no one answered clearly: Why had Hank Williams’s mother provided for this particular child? Cathy began searching. Years of adoption records, courthouse files and family leads eventually brought her to attorney Keith Adkinson. In 1984, he uncovered the 1952 agreement signed by Hank and Bobbie. The document had existed since before her birth. It showed that Hank knew about the pregnancy and had taken formal steps to support the child. In 1985, an Alabama court recognized Cathy as Hank Williams’s natural daughter. Further litigation reached state and federal courts before her right to share in the continuing estate was upheld. She adopted a name made from both biological parents: Jett Williams. The legal victory later changed more than her own life. In another case, Jett and Hank Williams Jr.—once opponents in the inheritance dispute—stood together as Hank’s heirs to protect his unreleased Mother’s Best Flour radio performances. A 2006 court ruling placed control of those recordings with them, clearing the way for the historic broadcasts to be released. Hank never heard his daughter’s first cry. Decades later, her name helped decide who could speak for his voice.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” FIVE DAYS AFTER HANK WILLIAMS DIED, HIS DAUGHTER…

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JOHN AMOS LOST GOOD TIMES WHILE TRYING TO PROTECT THE FAMILY AT ITS CENTER During the third season of Good Times, John Amos began returning scripts with questions the writers did not welcome. Why was J.J. receiving the strongest material while Thelma and Michael were being pushed to the edges? Why did a sitcom built around a struggling Black family increasingly depend on one son behaving like a television caricature? Why were there so few Black writers in the room deciding how James Evans should speak inside his own home? Amos was not objecting to Jimmie Walker’s talent. He understood why audiences loved “Dy-no-mite!” His concern was what the success of that character was doing to the rest of the family. When Good Times began in 1974, James and Florida Evans represented something still unusual on network television: a Black mother and father raising three children together in a Chicago public-housing apartment. James worked temporary jobs, swallowed disappointments and kept returning to the kitchen table. Amos wanted the comedy to grow from that recognizable pressure. His arguments with the predominantly white writing staff became increasingly heated. Amos later admitted that he had the conviction to know something was wrong but not yet the diplomacy to fight it safely. During the hiatus after season three, producer Norman Lear called him. Amos was dismissed. The fourth season opened with James working in Mississippi and preparing to move the family out of the projects. Instead, a telegram arrived announcing that he had died in an automobile accident. The father Amos had fought to protect was removed without appearing onscreen. A year later, Amos played the adult Kunta Kinte in Roots, earning an Emmy nomination and entering another landmark depiction of Black family history. He and Lear eventually reconciled; decades later, they publicly embraced during a 2019 television reunion. But the apartment in Good Times never fully recovered its original balance. James Evans’s empty chair became part of the show. Amos had lost the job. The argument he made about who was allowed to define that family outlived it.

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THE EMPTY CHAIR JOHN AMOS LEFT IN THE EVANS APARTMENT During script meetings for Good Times, John Amos carried an…

Country Music

MARTY ROBBINS DROVE SO FAST AT TALLADEGA THAT NASCAR KNEW SOMETHING WAS WRONG At Talladega on May 7, 1972, Marty Robbins began passing men who normally disappeared far ahead of him. His Dodge had qualified well behind the leaders. Now it was running laps roughly fifteen miles per hour faster than its qualifying speed, carrying the singer of “El Paso” into traffic where Richard Petty and NASCAR’s established professionals made their living. Robbins had not suddenly discovered a better racing line. The carburetor restriction intended to hold down his engine had been defeated. He completed 179 of the Winston 500’s 188 laps before withdrawing. Officials initially wanted to recognize him as Rookie of the Race, but Robbins refused the award and admitted what had been done to the car. His explanation was almost childlike in its honesty: he wanted to know what it felt like to run near the front. Racing was never a publicity appearance for Robbins. He had been driving small cars since the 1950s, moved into modified stock cars at Nashville Speedway and entered his first NASCAR Grand National event in 1966. He scheduled himself late on the Grand Ole Opry so he could come directly from the racetrack. He also understood the distance between being famous and being fast. Robbins could afford equipment and draw attention, but the drivers around him raced every week. Talladega gave him a forbidden taste of their world. Once he had it, he would not accept a trophy built on a car he knew was illegal. He continued racing after heart surgery, eventually making thirty-five starts at NASCAR’s highest level. His best finish was fifth at Michigan in 1974. In November 1982, already a Country Music Hall of Fame member, he entered one final Cup race in Atlanta. He died of heart trouble a month later. On records, Marty Robbins could invent a gunfighter and make listeners believe every mile of the journey. At Talladega, he borrowed speed for an afternoon—and told the officials exactly where it came from.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE AFTERNOON MARTY ROBBINS PASSED THE MEN HE…

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WHEN HOLLYWOOD STOPPED HIRING WILL GEER, HE GREW VEGETABLES AND BUILT A STAGE IN THE WOODS In the early 1950s, Will Geer sold his Santa Monica home, moved his family onto a cheap piece of land in Topanga Canyon and began planting food. Hollywood had stopped calling. After refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee, Geer had been blacklisted by the major studios. The actor who had appeared in films such as Winchester ’73 could no longer depend on acting to feed his wife and children. Fortunately, he knew the ground. Geer had studied botany before the stage took over his life, and the family supported itself partly by selling vegetables, fruit and herbs grown on the property. His daughter Ellen later remembered him gardening furiously because survival had become the immediate work. Among the trees, another kind of work continued. Geer began staging plays on the land and invited other blacklisted actors and folk singers to join him. Burgess Meredith passed through. So did Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and others whose politics or associations had made conventional stages difficult to reach. Geer called the place Theatricum Botanicum—a garden theater. As the blacklist weakened, he gradually returned to film and television. In 1972, at seventy years old, he began playing Grandpa Zeb Walton on The Waltons. The role made him familiar to millions of viewers who knew little about the years when he had been unable to work. He won an Emmy in 1975. Money and recognition from the series helped Geer reopen the Topanga theater as a public workshop in 1973. Shakespeare was performed beneath the oak trees. Folk musicians returned. Audiences arrived in numbers the informal grounds had never been built to accommodate. Geer died in 1978. The Waltons allowed Grandpa’s death to become part of the family’s story rather than replacing him with another actor. Back in Topanga, Geer’s wife Herta Ware, their children and a small company kept the theater alive. Ellen Geer eventually became its artistic director. The blacklist had taken away the rooms where Will Geer was permitted to act. On the land he bought afterward, his family still performs beneath the trees.

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THE YEARS WHEN GRANDPA WALTON HAD NO STUDIO DOOR TO WALK THROUGH Will Geer’s hands were in the soil because…

Country Music

In 1972, Richie Albright found Waylon Jennings ill, discouraged and close to being worn down by the career he had spent years trying to build. Waylon possessed one of the most recognizable voices in country music. RCA still decided how that voice would be recorded. Richie understood the problem because he had been beside Waylon before Nashville entered the picture. They had begun working together in Arizona in the early 1960s, playing clubs where a drummer learned to follow the room as closely as the singer. When Waylon moved east, Richie came with him and helped form the Waylors, the road band whose heavier pulse increasingly separated its leader from the smoother records RCA was releasing under his name. Inside the studio, however, Waylon was generally expected to use Nashville musicians and approved producers. The band that knew how to lean into his phrasing waited outside the process. Richie eventually left the road, exhausted by the mileage, but returned during the season when Waylon’s health and confidence were failing together. He did more than take his place behind the drums. Richie encouraged Waylon to challenge the structure around him and helped connect him with New York manager Neil Reshen. Reshen approached Nashville contracts with fewer inherited assumptions. He renegotiated Waylon’s arrangements, giving him greater control over his recordings, the ability to use his own musicians and the freedom to choose material without submitting every decision to the customary machinery. The change can be heard in the records that followed. Richie’s forceful, forward-moving beat sat beneath Waylon’s voice, while Ralph Mooney’s steel guitar supplied the ache around it. The sound later filed under “outlaw country” had been worked out by men who had already spent years sharing stages, motel rooms and long drives. Richie remained close enough to Waylon to be called his right hand. Waylon and Jessi Colter gave their son the full name Waylon Albright Jennings—Shooter—placing the drummer’s surname inside the family. The contracts changed country music. The records made the change audible. But when Waylon had been too sick and discouraged to see much of a road ahead, it was the man behind the drum kit who came back and helped him find one.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE MAN BEHIND WAYLON JENNINGS’ BEAT In the…

Country Music

Tina Turner’s name stood alone on the cover, but the room in which she recorded the album still belonged to Ike. In June 1974, she entered Bolic Sound—the Inglewood studio built at the center of Ike Turner’s musical operation—and began work on her first solo LP. The songs did not resemble the volcanic Ike & Tina Turner revue audiences knew. There was Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night,” Hank Snow’s “I’m Moving On,” Dolly Parton’s “There’ll Always Be Music,” and two Bob Dylan compositions. The album was called Tina Turns the Country On! Producer Tom Thacker surrounded her with musicians capable of giving the material room: James Burton on guitar, Glen D. Hardin at the piano, steel guitar, restrained percussion, and backing voices that included Merry Clayton and Clydie King. Tina did not attempt to become a conventional Nashville singer. She carried the songs through the same body that had spent years driving “Proud Mary” across crowded stages, but here the force was gathered rather than released all at once. United Artists issued the record in September 1974. Contemporary reviewers noticed the range in her voice and believed the album might receive country airplay. It did not chart. Its only major institutional recognition came from the Grammys, which nominated it for Best R&B Vocal Performance, Female. A country album had entered the business, and the business returned it to the category already assigned to the Black woman singing it. Two years later, Tina left Ike after a violent confrontation in Dallas. The rebuilding of her career—and the enormous success of Private Dancer in 1984—gave the public a cleaner starting point for her solo life. The 1974 album remained difficult to find and easy to omit. When it finally received an official vinyl reissue in 2024, listeners encountered a record made ten years before the comeback usually described as her beginning. It should not be mistaken for a secret declaration of escape. Tina was still working inside Ike’s studio, marriage and revue. Yet the sleeve preserved one quiet fact ahead of its time. There was only one name on it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE FIRST TINA TURNER SOLO ALBUM WAS COUNTRY—AND…

Country Music

In Dublin, someone drew Charley Pride aside and told him he did not have to continue north. His three Belfast concerts had already sold out. The tickets were printed, the Ritz Cinema was waiting, and promoter Jim Aiken had crossed several American states to secure Pride’s promise. Still, in November 1976, a booking in Belfast could remain uncertain until the performer actually walked onstage. Foreign acts had begun leaving Northern Ireland off their itineraries as the Troubles deepened. Johnny Cash had cancelled a 1971 appearance. The murder of three Miami Showband musicians after a 1975 performance made the road itself part of the danger. Days before Pride was due at the Ritz, newspapers announced that Tammy Wynette had withdrawn from her Belfast engagement. Pride’s wife, Rozene, and members of his band had reservations. He went anyway. By the third sold-out night, Pride had begun to understand what attendance required of the people in front of him. While singing “Crystal Chandeliers,” a 1967 album track that had never charted in the United States, he looked across a room holding listeners from both sides of a divided city and became visibly emotional. “I don’t do fake tears,” he later said. The concerts gave Aiken something the Belfast music business badly needed: proof that an international star could arrive, perform and leave safely. Tom Paxton and Joan Baez followed. Johnny Cash eventually returned in 1979. Local journalists began writing about a thaw in a city whose nightlife had been thinned by cancellations and violence. The record travelled differently, too. “Crystal Chandeliers” was reissued for the British and Irish market, inspired numerous local versions and, in a 1980 BBC poll, was named Britain’s favourite country song. In Northern Ireland it passed into pubs and community halls, sung by audiences whose politics did not otherwise place them in the same room. Charley Pride did not end the Troubles, and three concerts did not repair Belfast. What he altered was smaller and practical: the calculation made by the next performer, agent and promoter considering the road north. The warning in Dublin had offered him a way out. Pride kept the date, and Belfast slowly returned to the touring map.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THREE NIGHTS AT THE RITZ Someone in Dublin…

Country Music

Ted Webb died in 1959, just as his daughter was beginning to sing outside the home and write songs of her own. He never lived to hear “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” For Loretta, that title was never an invented piece of country imagery. Ted had worked in the Van Lear mines near Butcher Hollow, supporting eight children on a miner’s wages while Clara Webb kept the household running. The family lived without electricity or indoor plumbing, and Loretta later described a childhood built around field work, coal dust, a battery-powered radio and whatever could be stretched far enough to feed a large family. Loretta left Kentucky as a teenager after marrying Doolittle Lynn and moving west to Washington. By the time Ted died, she was raising four children of her own and only beginning to perform seriously. PBS places his death in the same year she started writing songs and appearing more regularly in public, leaving almost no overlap between the father who had raised her and the career that would eventually turn their family history into national memory. More than a decade later, Loretta wrote “Coal Miner’s Daughter” from those details rather than from nostalgia polished smooth by success. The song kept Ted at work in the mines, Clara at the washboard, the children inside the cramped home, and Butcher Hollow exactly where it had always been. Released in 1970, it became one of the records most closely associated with her life and later supplied the title for her autobiography and the 1980 film based on it. The family story did not remain frozen in the song. Loretta’s brother Herman stayed near Butcher Hollow for decades, operating Webb’s Grocery and helping preserve the family home for visitors, while younger siblings such as Peggy Sue and Crystal Gayle carried other branches of the Webb family into music. Ted Webb never saw the daughter from that mining camp become one of country music’s defining writers. But the house, the hollow and the work he did there became permanent parts of the record she left behind.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TED WEBB DIED BEFORE LORETTA LYNN BECAME A…

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