Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

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BUDDY EMMONS DIDN’T JUST PLAY PEDAL STEEL BEHIND ERNEST TUBB AND RAY PRICE. HE REWORKED THE PEDALS AND ADDED STRINGS — AND COUNTRY STEEL GUITARS ARE STILL BUILT AROUND IDEAS HE HELPED CREATE. Buddy Emmons was still in his teens when he became good enough to work professionally on steel guitar. By the mid-1950s, however, playing the instrument was not enough for him. Pedal steel was still evolving, and Emmons kept hearing musical moves the hardware could not easily make. So he changed the hardware. In 1956, Emmons helped separate two pitch changes that had previously been operated together, creating the split-pedal arrangement that became standard on E9 pedal steel. He later recalled first using the setup on Ernest Tubb’s “Half a Mind.” That same year, he and steel guitarist Shot Jackson formed Sho-Bud, combining their names and building instruments for a generation of country players. Emmons later developed additional mechanical ideas and eventually co-founded the Emmons Guitar Company. The innovations followed him onto records. In 1962, after joining Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys, Emmons added two higher strings to his E9 setup, helping establish the ten-string tuning that became standard. Price soon made him bandleader. Then came Willie Nelson’s “Night Life.” Ray Price recorded it in 1963, and Emmons opened the track with a dark, blues-heavy steel line that sounded far removed from the bright country clichés often associated with the instrument. His fills and solo became one of the defining sounds of the recording. Emmons spent the rest of his career refusing to stay inside one vocabulary. He played hard country, Western swing and jazz, recording with artists ranging from George Jones and Roger Miller to Gram Parsons and Ray Charles. By then, younger steel players were not simply learning Buddy Emmons licks. They were sitting behind instruments whose basic language had already been altered by his hands.

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

BUDDY EMMONS DID NOT JUST PLAY PEDAL STEEL BEHIND ERNEST TUBB AND RAY PRICE. HE CHANGED THE MACHINE ITSELF — AND COUNTRY STEEL GUITARS ARE STILL BUILT AROUND IDEAS HIS HANDS HELPED CREATE.

Buddy Emmons was still a teenager when he became good enough to work professionally on steel guitar.

But talent was only the beginning.

By the mid-1950s, the pedal steel was still becoming itself. The instrument had not yet settled into the form country players would later take for granted. Pedals, tunings, strings, and mechanical changes were still open questions, and Emmons kept hearing things the guitar could not easily do.

Most players learn the limits of an instrument.

Emmons started moving them.

He Heard Music The Hardware Could Not Reach

In 1956, Emmons helped separate two pitch changes that had previously been operated together.

That may sound technical from the outside, but for steel players it mattered deeply. The split-pedal arrangement gave the player more control, more movement, and more emotional vocabulary. It became part of the standard E9 pedal-steel setup, one of the central sounds of modern country music.

Emmons later recalled first using the setup on Ernest Tubb’s “Half a Mind.”

That is the strange beauty of his influence.

A mechanical idea did not stay in a workshop.

It moved straight into a country record.

A new piece of hardware became a new way for heartbreak to bend.

Sho-Bud Turned Invention Into Instruments

That same year, Emmons joined forces with steel guitarist Shot Jackson.

Together, they formed Sho-Bud, the company name built from Shot and Buddy.

Sho-Bud would become one of the most important names in pedal steel history, building instruments for a generation of country players. The company mattered because the music was changing and the instrument had to change with it.

Emmons was not only one of the men playing the future of steel guitar.

He was helping manufacture it.

Later, he developed more mechanical ideas and eventually co-founded the Emmons Guitar Company, adding another chapter to a career where performance and invention were almost impossible to separate.

He did not just sit behind the steel.

He helped decide what the steel could become.

Ray Price Gave Him A Bigger Bandstand

The innovations kept following him onto records.

In 1962, Emmons joined Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys, one of the most important country bands of the era. Price soon made him bandleader, which says plenty about the trust musicians had in him.

That same period brought another major step.

Emmons added two higher strings to his E9 setup, helping establish the ten-string tuning that became standard for pedal steel.

Again, the change was both technical and emotional.

More strings meant more range.

More movement.

More ways to answer a singer without crowding him.

More ways to make the instrument cry, swing, whisper, or cut.

Country music would keep building on that language long after the first players had stopped thinking of it as new.

Then “Night Life” Turned The Steel Darker

In 1963, Ray Price recorded Willie Nelson’s “Night Life.”

Buddy Emmons opened the track with a steel line that did not sound like bright country decoration. It was darker than that. Bluesier. Smokier. Almost after-hours in its mood.

That opening changed the room before Price even settled into the song.

The steel did not simply announce a country record.

It suggested neon, regret, long nights, and the kind of loneliness that does not hurry home.

Emmons’ fills and solo became one of the defining sounds of the recording because they showed what the instrument could do when it was freed from cliché. The pedal steel could be elegant, but it could also be dangerous. It could carry jazz shadows and blues weight without losing its country soul.

Emmons knew that because he refused to hear the instrument narrowly.

He Would Not Stay In One Vocabulary

That refusal shaped the rest of his career.

Emmons played hard country.

Western swing.

Jazz.

Session work.

Road music.

He recorded with artists ranging from George Jones and Roger Miller to Gram Parsons and Ray Charles. That range did not make him less country. It proved how wide the pedal steel could become in the right hands.

He was a player’s player, but also an inventor’s inventor.

Musicians studied his licks, but they were also sitting behind instruments whose basic design had already been changed by him. That is a rarer kind of influence. It is one thing to inspire another musician to copy a phrase. It is another to alter the machine he uses before he ever plays the first note.

Buddy Emmons did both.

The Sound Became Part Of The Furniture

Over time, many of the ideas Emmons helped push forward became so common that listeners no longer heard them as inventions.

That is how deeply they worked.

A pedal change that once opened new possibilities became standard. A ten-string E9 setup became expected. A steel guitar’s ability to move through country, swing, blues, and jazz began to feel natural because players like Emmons had made the impossible feel inevitable.

His greatness lived in famous recordings.

But it also lived in places most audiences never think about — under a player’s hands, beneath a foot pedal, inside a tuning, inside the mechanical logic of the instrument itself.

That made his legacy larger than a discography.

It became part of the steel guitar’s body.

What Buddy Emmons Really Leaves Behind

The deepest part of this story is not only that Buddy Emmons played behind Ernest Tubb and Ray Price.

It is that he changed what the next steel player sat down to play.

A teenage professional.

A restless ear.

A split-pedal idea.

Sho-Bud with Shot Jackson.

Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys.

Two added strings.

Then “Night Life,” where the steel opened the song like a dark door into another room.

Buddy Emmons did not treat the pedal steel as a finished invention.

He treated it like a living question.

And because he kept answering that question with both his hands and his hardware, generations of country players inherited more than his style.

They inherited an instrument he helped teach how to speak.

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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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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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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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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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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.

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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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.