AT 72, AFTER A KIDNEY TRANSPLANT AND HEART TROUBLE, DONNIE FRITTS ASSUMED HIS RECORD-MAKING DAYS WERE OVER. “SEVENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD MEN DON’T GET RECORD DEALS,” HE SAID. THEN JOHN PAUL WHITE HEARD HIM SINGING ALONE AT AN OLD WURLITZER. Fritts had spent most of his life standing beside other people. He had helped shape the early Muscle Shoals scene, written songs recorded by Waylon Jennings, Dusty Springfield, Ray Charles and others, and spent decades playing keyboards behind Kris Kristofferson. Yet by 2015, he had released only three solo albums in more than forty years. His health had also taken a toll. A kidney transplant and heart problems had slowed him, and Fritts did not expect another label to come looking. Still, he believed he had one good record left in him. John Paul White heard it almost by accident. White, formerly of the Civil Wars, had become friendly with Fritts around the 2013 premiere of the Muscle Shoals documentary. During a visit to Fritts’ home, he listened as the older musician sat at his weathered Wurlitzer and played songs he loved. Some were not even Fritts compositions. It did not matter. White heard something in the bare combination of that worn voice and electric piano that decades of sideman work had never fully exposed. He told Fritts that if they made a record, he wanted to start with exactly that sound. The project became Oh My Goodness. White and Ben Tanner produced it, keeping Fritts and the Wurlitzer at the center while friends and admirers including John Prine, Jason Isbell, Brittany Howard, Spooner Oldham and Reggie Young gathered around him. Fritts revisited songs connected to Arthur Alexander, John Prine and Dan Penn, but also recorded newer material such as “Tuscaloosa 1962.” He later said something surprising about the result. After more than half a century around studios, he felt he had finally found his own voice. Oh My Goodness arrived in October 2015. For decades, Donnie Fritts had been the man whose keyboard, songs and friendships helped other records become part of American music. This time, the younger musicians came into the room for him. And instead of asking the old Muscle Shoals veteran to sound young again, they built the record around everything age had put into his voice.

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

DONNIE FRITTS THOUGHT HIS RECORD-MAKING DAYS WERE OVER AT SEVENTY-TWO. THEN JOHN PAUL WHITE HEARD HIM SINGING ALONE AT AN OLD WURLITZER — AND BUILT A WHOLE ALBUM AROUND THAT WORN VOICE.

Donnie Fritts had spent most of his life standing beside other people.

He helped shape the early Muscle Shoals scene, wrote songs recorded by Waylon Jennings, Dusty Springfield, Ray Charles, and others, and spent decades playing keyboards behind Kris Kristofferson. His fingerprints were all over American music, even when his own name was not the one printed largest on the cover.

That was the strange part of his career.

Fritts had been close to everything.

But by 2015, after more than forty years, he had released only three solo albums.

The Body Had Started Saying No

By then, age had become more than a number.

Fritts had survived a kidney transplant. Heart trouble had slowed him too. The road, the studios, the late nights, and the years of being everybody’s favorite sideman had left their mark.

He did not expect the business to come looking again.

As he put it, seventy-two-year-old men did not get record deals.

Still, something in him had not gone quiet.

Fritts believed he had one good record left.

Not a comeback built on pretending to be young again.

A record that sounded like the man who had lived long enough to sing it.

John Paul White Heard The Record Before It Existed

John Paul White heard it almost by accident.

White, formerly of the Civil Wars, had become friendly with Fritts around the 2013 premiere of the Muscle Shoals documentary. During a visit to Fritts’ home, he listened as the older musician sat at his weathered Wurlitzer and played songs he loved.

Some of them were not even Fritts compositions.

It did not matter.

White heard something in that bare room that decades of sideman work had never fully exposed — the sound of Donnie Fritts alone with an electric piano, his voice carrying age, humor, tenderness, loss, and the kind of soul that cannot be manufactured in a session plan.

White told him that if they made a record, he wanted to start right there.

Fritts and the Wurlitzer.

Nothing to hide behind.

The Younger Musicians Came To Him

The project became Oh My Goodness.

John Paul White and Ben Tanner produced it, keeping Fritts at the center instead of surrounding him with distractions. The point was not to modernize him. The point was to let people finally hear what had been sitting inside the room all along.

Friends and admirers gathered around him.

John Prine.

Jason Isbell.

Brittany Howard.

Spooner Oldham.

Reggie Young.

They did not come to rescue an old musician from the past.

They came because he had helped build the ground they were standing on.

This time, the room was forming around Donnie Fritts.

The Songs Carried A Whole Life Through Them

Fritts revisited songs connected to Arthur Alexander, John Prine, and Dan Penn. He also recorded newer material, including “Tuscaloosa 1962.”

That mixture mattered.

The album did not treat Fritts as a museum piece. It let the old songs, the friendships, the memories, and the newer reflections sit together like people gathered around a kitchen table after midnight.

The Wurlitzer stayed close.

So did the voice.

It was not polished smooth.

It was weathered in the right way — the sound of a man who had known studios, grief, laughter, back roads, famous friends, and quiet rooms where the real song sometimes arrives after everybody else has left.

He Finally Heard Himself

After more than half a century around records, Fritts said something surprising about Oh My Goodness.

He felt he had finally found his own voice.

That line carries weight because he had never been absent from music. He had been there all along — behind Kristofferson, inside Muscle Shoals, in songs other people cut, on keyboards that helped other singers sound more complete.

But being essential is not the same as being heard.

On Oh My Goodness, the spotlight did not ask him to become larger than life.

It simply moved close enough for listeners to hear the life that was already there.

What Oh My Goodness Really Leaves Behind

The deepest part of this story is not only that Donnie Fritts made a record at seventy-two.

It is that the record happened because someone listened carefully to what age had not taken.

A Muscle Shoals veteran.

A kidney transplant.

Heart trouble.

Decades beside Kris Kristofferson.

Songs carried by Waylon Jennings, Dusty Springfield, Ray Charles, and others.

Then John Paul White in a quiet room, hearing an old Wurlitzer and a worn voice that still had one more truth to give.

For years, Donnie Fritts helped other people’s records become part of American music.

On Oh My Goodness, the younger musicians came into the room for him.

And instead of asking him to sound young again, they finally let the record sound like everything it had taken seventy-two years to become.

Video

Chưa phân loại

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.

Chưa phân loại

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.

Chưa phân loại

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.

Related Post

You Missed