Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

In June 1986, Eddie Rabbitt walked into Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital with an acoustic guitar and helped dedicate a playroom to the two-year-old son he had lost the previous summer. Only a few years earlier, Eddie’s life had been moving at the speed of his biggest records. “Drivin’ My Life Away” and “I Love a Rainy Night” had carried him beyond country radio, while “You and I,” his duet with Crystal Gayle, became one of the defining love songs of the early 1980s. Then his son Timothy was born with biliary atresia, a rare disease that prevented his liver from functioning properly. Eddie began removing himself from the road. Against the advice of people managing his career, he reduced his recording and concert schedule and spent as many as four hours a day, six days a week, at Vanderbilt. Timmy underwent four operations while the family waited for the liver transplant that represented his best chance of survival. The transplant finally took place in Minnesota in July 1985. Timmy died less than two days later. He was twenty-three months old. Eddie stayed home with his wife, Janine, and their young daughter, Demelza, who could not understand why her little brother had disappeared. He later remembered the family talking with her about God and heaven while trying to answer questions for which the adults had no easy language. Nearly a year after Timmy’s death, memorial donations were used to furnish and refurbish a playroom at Vanderbilt, where the boy had spent much of his life. Eddie and Janine returned for the dedication. Then Eddie took out his guitar and played for the children inside the hospital. His full return to country music came later. A new son, Tommy, brought laughter back into the house, and in 1988 Eddie reached No. 1 again with “I Wanna Dance with You.” But one of the first rooms to receive his music after the family’s long silence was not a recording studio or concert hall. It was the hospital playroom carrying Timmy’s name, filled with children who needed somewhere to be children between treatments. More from the years Eddie Rabbitt stepped away from the road—and the quiet way he entered public life again—is explored below.

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

THE ROOM EDDIE RABBITT OPENED AFTER HIS SON WAS GONE

For nearly two years, Eddie Rabbitt measured his days by the drive to Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital.

He would arrive, remain with his son for several hours, then go home or complete whatever work could not be postponed. The touring calendar that once carried him from city to city had been reduced to a repeating route through Nashville.

Home. Hospital. Home again.

Later, when the hospital placed Timothy Rabbitt’s name on a playroom, Eddie returned carrying the instrument that had once kept him away so often.

Six Days a Week

Timothy Edward Rabbitt was born in 1983 with biliary atresia, a condition in which the ducts needed to carry bile from the liver are blocked or absent.

For Timmy, survival depended upon intensive treatment and, eventually, a liver transplant.

Eddie and Janine entered a routine few people outside the family could see. Timmy spent long periods at Vanderbilt. Eddie later said he visited for as many as four hours a day, six days each week.

The hospital became the place where the family waited for blood tests, operations and the next report from a physician. A hopeful week might be followed by another setback. Eddie described protecting himself by expecting the worst, then feeling relief whenever a doctor said the child appeared slightly better.

Timmy learned to walk along the corridors holding his sister’s hand. He also learned “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

The songs inside the hospital were considerably smaller than the ones his father had been singing outside it.

A Career Still Moving

The timing made Eddie’s withdrawal particularly costly.

At the beginning of the 1980s, he was one of the few country singers who could move easily between country and pop radio. “I Love a Rainy Night” reached No. 1 on both charts. “Drivin’ My Life Away,” “Step by Step” and “Someone Could Lose a Heart Tonight” kept his voice in cars, kitchens and roadside restaurants across America.

His duet with Crystal Gayle, “You and I,” became another major crossover record.

The ordinary response to that degree of success was more touring. Each hit created demand for another album, television appearance and concert. Time away from the public carried the risk that radio would simply move on.

Eddie began turning work down anyway.

One biographical account says he did so against his manager’s advice. His explanation required no business calculation: if he was any kind of man, he needed to be with his son.

The records had already been made. Timmy’s days could not be rescheduled.

Four Operations and a Transplant

Timmy underwent four operations while the family waited for a workable path forward.

The medical expenses eventually approached $90,000, according to Eddie’s later account. His income from touring and songwriting fell because he was working less, but he continued reducing the schedule.

By 1985, doctors attempted the liver transplant.

The procedure required the family to travel to the University of Minnesota Hospital in Minneapolis. A successful transplant could have given Timmy the childhood that hospital rooms had repeatedly interrupted.

He died from complications less than two days after the operation.

The public announcement contained the necessary facts: the child of a famous singer, twenty-three months old, had died following transplant surgery. It could not describe the empty hours left behind after nearly two years of arranging a household around his care.

The Child Still at Home

Eddie and Janine returned to Nashville without Timmy.

Their daughter, Demelza, was four. She had spent much of her early childhood walking beside her little brother through hospital corridors. Now she wanted to know where he had gone.

Eddie later said he remained at home because Janine was devastated and Demelza was confused. The family talked with the little girl about God and heaven, trying to place an irreversible event inside words a child could carry.

Eddie did not immediately turn those months into an album or public statement. He largely withdrew.

The distinction mattered to him: he had not quit music, but the place where he was needed had changed. For a time, the work of being a husband and father occupied the hours once reserved for stages.

Most audiences simply stopped seeing him.

Timothy’s Playroom

Timmy had spent much of his short life at Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital.

After his death, donations made in his memory paid for new furnishings and the refurbishment of a hospital playroom. On June 25, 1986, Eddie and Janine returned to Vanderbilt to dedicate the room to their son.

A hospital playroom has a modest purpose. It cannot alter a diagnosis or shorten an operation. It gives a child somewhere to find toys, color a picture or sit with a parent in a space that does not feel completely medical.

For the Rabbitts, that function would have required no explanation.

Eddie brought an acoustic guitar to the dedication and performed for children in the unit. He did not arrive with the band or stage production that had accompanied his hits. The room needed only enough music to reach from one side to the other.

Timmy’s name remained in the hospital. The children using the room did not need to know who his father was.

Laughter Returning to the House

During the period after Timmy’s death, Janine became pregnant again.

Their son Tommy was born healthy in 1986.

Eddie later described the change through the sound inside the family home. After years that had seemed gray, there was laughter again. Tommy did not replace the child they had lost, but his presence gave the household new routines that were not organized around illness.

Eddie began writing more regularly.

He had been absent long enough to wonder whether his audience would still be waiting. Country music was also changing. A new group of traditional-minded singers was arriving, and the smooth crossover sound associated with some of Eddie’s largest records no longer controlled the format as completely as it once had.

Returning meant testing whether there was still a place for him.

The Number One After the Silence

In 1988, Eddie released I Wanna Dance with You.

He wrote or helped write eight of the album’s nine songs. The title track reached No. 1 on the country chart.

When discussing the record that spring, Eddie did not treat the chart position as something guaranteed by his earlier success. He said he considered it a real achievement because he had been outside public view for nearly three years.

The title sounded light, almost deliberately so. After hospital rooms, transplant decisions and the long quiet inside his family, the invitation to dance carried no need for explanation.

Eddie was working again, but not at the same pace. Accounts of his later career note that he never fully returned to the relentless schedule he had maintained before Timmy’s birth.

The family years had permanently changed the amount of himself he was willing to place on the road.

What Timothy’s Playroom Really Leaves Behind

Eddie Rabbitt’s commercial return can be located on a chart. “I Wanna Dance with You” reached No. 1, proving that radio had not forgotten him.

The earlier return was smaller.

It occurred when Eddie entered Vanderbilt with one acoustic guitar and sat among children whose families were still living by test results, visiting hours and cautious reports from doctors.

The donations made in Timmy’s name had bought chairs, toys and a room where illness did not occupy every inch. Eddie supplied the music for its dedication, then left the space for other families to use.

His son never heard the next No. 1 record.

But at the hospital where Timmy had learned “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” other children were given a place to play while they waited to go home.

Video

Related Post

Country Music

One Christmas, Tom T. Hall Hung Thirteen Stockings for the Dogs—and Opened Fox Hollow to Children Whose Parents Were in Prison At Christmas in 1977, thirteen stockings hung above the fireplace at Tom T. Hall’s home. Every one belonged to a basset hound. The dogs were part of the unruly household Miss Dixie Hall had created at Fox Hollow, the couple’s sixty-acre farm outside Nashville. On that cold December morning, however, the rooms were also filled with children brought up from Chattanooga. A television crew had arrived to film a holiday special, but the children were not actors or relatives assembled for the camera. They lived at Bethel Bible School, a residential home serving children whose parents were incarcerated. Hall had been quietly helping support the institution for years. Each spring, he organized a celebrity golf tournament to raise operating money. A 1978 profile reported that his contributions had become so substantial that he was regarded as nearly the home’s sole financial supporter. He refused to publicize several other charities because he did not want people examining his motives. The scene at Fox Hollow was far removed from Hall’s own Kentucky childhood. He had grown up in a family of ten children and remembered one Christmas waiting late into the night for older brothers and sisters returning from industrial jobs in the North with whatever gifts they could bring. By 1977, “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” “The Year Clayton Delaney Died” and his own hit records had given him a beautiful farm, a writing cabin and enough money to make Christmas easier for children outside his family. The television production did not proceed smoothly. One compressor failed. A replacement brought from town also broke. While the crew tried to repair its equipment, the children moved constantly through the den, past a leather sofa, a door reportedly taken from a British castle and the thirteen dog stockings hanging over the fireplace. Hall had written some of country music’s most exact portraits of people overlooked by respectable society. At Fox Hollow, that instinct did not end when he put down his pen. The holiday program could be filmed again. The children’s home had to remain open after the cameras left, and that was the part Tom T. Hall kept paying for.

Country Music

A Doctor Told Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to Put Their Baby Away. They Took Her Home. After Robin Elizabeth Rogers was born in August 1950, a doctor advised Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to place their daughter in an institution. Robin had Down syndrome and a serious heart defect. The doctor warned that she might not live long and that caring for her would take attention away from the other children in the Rogers household. In mid-century America, when children with intellectual disabilities were frequently hidden from public life, the recommendation was not unusual. Roy answered that they would take Robin home. At the time, he and Dale were among the most recognizable entertainers in America. Roy had announced Robin’s birth to a rodeo crowd of roughly 90,000 people. Their films, radio appearances and merchandise presented a bright Western world where good people always found their way safely home. The private reality awaiting them was more fragile: medical appointments, constant vigilance and a child vulnerable to illnesses her body had little strength to resist. Robin lived within the family rather than apart from it. Dale later said that those two years changed the household’s understanding of patience, faith and responsibility. Then mumps passed through the family. Robin developed encephalitis and died on August 24, 1952, two days before her second birthday. Dale responded by writing a small book. Published in 1953, Angel Unaware was only sixty-three pages long and told Robin’s story as though the child were speaking to God after returning to heaven. It was openly religious and deeply personal, but its public consequence reached beyond the Rogers family. Dale had written plainly about raising and loving a child whom many parents of that era would have been urged to conceal. The book became one of the year’s bestsellers. At appearances, parents began bringing children with Down syndrome out to meet Dale—children who had seldom been taken into stores, theaters or large public gatherings because their families expected rejection. That same year, a group of Oklahoma parents established a school for children with developmental disabilities. After reading Angel Unaware, they named it for Dale. The organization eventually became the Dale Rogers Training Center, providing employment and support services far beyond its original classroom. Roy Rogers spent his career playing a cowboy who brought people safely home. With Robin, he did something quieter. He refused to send his own child away.

Country Music

Bobby Bare Jr. was five when his father placed him beside a studio microphone and let him ask a string of impossible childhood questions. Shel Silverstein had written “Daddy What If” as a conversation between a boy and his father. Bare did not polish the child out of the recording. His son’s small voice, uncertain timing and complete trust were the reason the song worked. Released on Lullabys, Legends and Lies, it reached No. 2 on the country chart in 1973. Television producers noticed. The Bare family followed with Singin’ in the Kitchen, an informal album featuring Bobby’s wife, Jeannie, and their children Cari, Shannon and Bobby Jr. For one summer, the family traveled and performed together. There was an obvious commercial future available. Bare ended it. When Hee Haw wanted to hire Bobby Jr. after the children appeared on the show, his father said no. He had enjoyed making the records with them, but he did not want his son living inside the attention given to a successful child performer. Bobby Jr. later remembered that his parents removed the children from entertainment because they did not want them becoming washed-up performers before reaching their teens. The decision carries additional weight beside Bare’s own childhood. His mother died when he was five—the same age his son was when they recorded “Daddy What If.” His father could not support three children alone, and the family was divided among relatives and neighbors. By fifteen, Bobby was working on farms and in factories. Fame had finally given him the money to keep a family together. He would not allow fame to reorganize that family around itself. Bobby Jr. eventually became a musician, but he returned as an adult and chose a harder, noisier path far outside his father’s shadow. In 2005, he produced The Moon Was Blue for the elder Bare. By then, the little boy had acquired his own voice. His father had helped preserve the years in which he was allowed to find it.

You Missed

Country Music

In June 1986, Eddie Rabbitt walked into Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital with an acoustic guitar and helped dedicate a playroom to the two-year-old son he had lost the previous summer. Only a few years earlier, Eddie’s life had been moving at the speed of his biggest records. “Drivin’ My Life Away” and “I Love a Rainy Night” had carried him beyond country radio, while “You and I,” his duet with Crystal Gayle, became one of the defining love songs of the early 1980s. Then his son Timothy was born with biliary atresia, a rare disease that prevented his liver from functioning properly. Eddie began removing himself from the road. Against the advice of people managing his career, he reduced his recording and concert schedule and spent as many as four hours a day, six days a week, at Vanderbilt. Timmy underwent four operations while the family waited for the liver transplant that represented his best chance of survival. The transplant finally took place in Minnesota in July 1985. Timmy died less than two days later. He was twenty-three months old. Eddie stayed home with his wife, Janine, and their young daughter, Demelza, who could not understand why her little brother had disappeared. He later remembered the family talking with her about God and heaven while trying to answer questions for which the adults had no easy language. Nearly a year after Timmy’s death, memorial donations were used to furnish and refurbish a playroom at Vanderbilt, where the boy had spent much of his life. Eddie and Janine returned for the dedication. Then Eddie took out his guitar and played for the children inside the hospital. His full return to country music came later. A new son, Tommy, brought laughter back into the house, and in 1988 Eddie reached No. 1 again with “I Wanna Dance with You.” But one of the first rooms to receive his music after the family’s long silence was not a recording studio or concert hall. It was the hospital playroom carrying Timmy’s name, filled with children who needed somewhere to be children between treatments. More from the years Eddie Rabbitt stepped away from the road—and the quiet way he entered public life again—is explored below.

Country Music

One Christmas, Tom T. Hall Hung Thirteen Stockings for the Dogs—and Opened Fox Hollow to Children Whose Parents Were in Prison At Christmas in 1977, thirteen stockings hung above the fireplace at Tom T. Hall’s home. Every one belonged to a basset hound. The dogs were part of the unruly household Miss Dixie Hall had created at Fox Hollow, the couple’s sixty-acre farm outside Nashville. On that cold December morning, however, the rooms were also filled with children brought up from Chattanooga. A television crew had arrived to film a holiday special, but the children were not actors or relatives assembled for the camera. They lived at Bethel Bible School, a residential home serving children whose parents were incarcerated. Hall had been quietly helping support the institution for years. Each spring, he organized a celebrity golf tournament to raise operating money. A 1978 profile reported that his contributions had become so substantial that he was regarded as nearly the home’s sole financial supporter. He refused to publicize several other charities because he did not want people examining his motives. The scene at Fox Hollow was far removed from Hall’s own Kentucky childhood. He had grown up in a family of ten children and remembered one Christmas waiting late into the night for older brothers and sisters returning from industrial jobs in the North with whatever gifts they could bring. By 1977, “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” “The Year Clayton Delaney Died” and his own hit records had given him a beautiful farm, a writing cabin and enough money to make Christmas easier for children outside his family. The television production did not proceed smoothly. One compressor failed. A replacement brought from town also broke. While the crew tried to repair its equipment, the children moved constantly through the den, past a leather sofa, a door reportedly taken from a British castle and the thirteen dog stockings hanging over the fireplace. Hall had written some of country music’s most exact portraits of people overlooked by respectable society. At Fox Hollow, that instinct did not end when he put down his pen. The holiday program could be filmed again. The children’s home had to remain open after the cameras left, and that was the part Tom T. Hall kept paying for.

Country Music

A Doctor Told Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to Put Their Baby Away. They Took Her Home. After Robin Elizabeth Rogers was born in August 1950, a doctor advised Roy Rogers and Dale Evans to place their daughter in an institution. Robin had Down syndrome and a serious heart defect. The doctor warned that she might not live long and that caring for her would take attention away from the other children in the Rogers household. In mid-century America, when children with intellectual disabilities were frequently hidden from public life, the recommendation was not unusual. Roy answered that they would take Robin home. At the time, he and Dale were among the most recognizable entertainers in America. Roy had announced Robin’s birth to a rodeo crowd of roughly 90,000 people. Their films, radio appearances and merchandise presented a bright Western world where good people always found their way safely home. The private reality awaiting them was more fragile: medical appointments, constant vigilance and a child vulnerable to illnesses her body had little strength to resist. Robin lived within the family rather than apart from it. Dale later said that those two years changed the household’s understanding of patience, faith and responsibility. Then mumps passed through the family. Robin developed encephalitis and died on August 24, 1952, two days before her second birthday. Dale responded by writing a small book. Published in 1953, Angel Unaware was only sixty-three pages long and told Robin’s story as though the child were speaking to God after returning to heaven. It was openly religious and deeply personal, but its public consequence reached beyond the Rogers family. Dale had written plainly about raising and loving a child whom many parents of that era would have been urged to conceal. The book became one of the year’s bestsellers. At appearances, parents began bringing children with Down syndrome out to meet Dale—children who had seldom been taken into stores, theaters or large public gatherings because their families expected rejection. That same year, a group of Oklahoma parents established a school for children with developmental disabilities. After reading Angel Unaware, they named it for Dale. The organization eventually became the Dale Rogers Training Center, providing employment and support services far beyond its original classroom. Roy Rogers spent his career playing a cowboy who brought people safely home. With Robin, he did something quieter. He refused to send his own child away.

Country Music

Bobby Bare Jr. was five when his father placed him beside a studio microphone and let him ask a string of impossible childhood questions. Shel Silverstein had written “Daddy What If” as a conversation between a boy and his father. Bare did not polish the child out of the recording. His son’s small voice, uncertain timing and complete trust were the reason the song worked. Released on Lullabys, Legends and Lies, it reached No. 2 on the country chart in 1973. Television producers noticed. The Bare family followed with Singin’ in the Kitchen, an informal album featuring Bobby’s wife, Jeannie, and their children Cari, Shannon and Bobby Jr. For one summer, the family traveled and performed together. There was an obvious commercial future available. Bare ended it. When Hee Haw wanted to hire Bobby Jr. after the children appeared on the show, his father said no. He had enjoyed making the records with them, but he did not want his son living inside the attention given to a successful child performer. Bobby Jr. later remembered that his parents removed the children from entertainment because they did not want them becoming washed-up performers before reaching their teens. The decision carries additional weight beside Bare’s own childhood. His mother died when he was five—the same age his son was when they recorded “Daddy What If.” His father could not support three children alone, and the family was divided among relatives and neighbors. By fifteen, Bobby was working on farms and in factories. Fame had finally given him the money to keep a family together. He would not allow fame to reorganize that family around itself. Bobby Jr. eventually became a musician, but he returned as an adult and chose a harder, noisier path far outside his father’s shadow. In 2005, he produced The Moon Was Blue for the elder Bare. By then, the little boy had acquired his own voice. His father had helped preserve the years in which he was allowed to find it.