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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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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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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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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…

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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…

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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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In June 1995, Bonnie Owens stood backstage in Bakersfield while Buck Owens and Merle Haggard prepared to share a bill for the first time in twenty-five years. Newspapers had arrived expecting an old feud. Bonnie had once been married to Buck, then to Merle; that night she was still singing in Merle’s company, helping both men wave the drama away. Her place between them had begun long before either became a country landmark. Bonnie Campbell met Buck in Arizona as a teenager, sang with him on local radio and married him in 1948. They moved to Bakersfield in 1951, carrying the migrant-country music that was gathering in California’s clubs. The marriage ended in 1953. Bonnie kept their two sons, worked as a cocktail waitress and continued singing while Buck’s career accelerated. She made small-label records of her own and became part of the community from which the Bakersfield Sound emerged. In the early 1960s she began recording duets with Merle Haggard for Tally Records. Their voices met closely on “Just Between the Two of Us,” before Capitol issued an album under both names in 1966. Bonnie married Merle in 1965. The arrangement joined music and household labor so completely that one became difficult to see without the other. She helped raise the four children from his first marriage, joined the Strangers as a harmony singer and spent years on the road while Merle’s records changed the shape of California country. He later said she had set down the torch of her own career to tend his. Their marriage ended in 1978, but the working relationship did not collapse with it. Bonnie remained close, stood as maid of honor when Merle married again, and continued appearing with his band before retiring from regular performance. So the 1995 backstage scene held more than two famous men making peace. Bonnie was the quiet continuity between them: a voice present before the Bakersfield Sound had a name, still standing near the microphone after both marriages had become history.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BONNIE OWENS STOOD INSIDE THE BAKERSFIELD SOUND Backstage…

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Lloyd Green knelt on a Nashville shoe-store floor while a customer rested her foot on the fitting stool. His musicians’ union card had expired. At home, the steel guitar that had already carried him through a George Jones session had remained inside its case for nearly two years. The customer was the widow of songwriter and publisher Fred Rose. During the fitting, she learned that the young salesman had once worked the Grand Ole Opry and toured with Faron Young. She paid to restore his union membership and helped return him to Opry work. Green had arrived in Nashville on December 26, 1956, and joined Faron Young’s band that same afternoon. Within three months he was playing on George Jones’s “Too Much Water” inside RCA’s newly opened Nashville studio. He knew immediately that he belonged behind microphones rather than on a touring bus. The road, however, paid what little money music offered. Green had recently married Dorothy “Dot” Edwards, and the instability eventually became too much. After one final month with Ferlin Husky, he left professional music and began selling shoes. Dot kept encouraging him even when the guitar case stayed closed. The shoe-store encounter did not create an instant career. Green still needed a desk job with SESAC, renewed contacts and a succession of demonstration sessions before producers began calling. In 1965, his sharp pedal-steel part on Warner Mack’s “The Bridge Washed Out” reached No. 1 and opened the studio doors fully. Soon Green was working fifteen to twenty sessions a week. His instrument entered records by Tammy Wynette, Charley Pride, Johnny Paycheck, the Byrds, Don Williams and Paul McCartney. The Sho-Bud model he later helped design was named the LDG; Green said the middle initial stood for Dot. Nashville remembers the records. Inside the initials was the woman who kept believing while the guitar remained unopened—and the shoe-store floor from which its second life began.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE YEARS LLOYD GREEN’S STEEL GUITAR STAYED IN…

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In June 1968, an autoharp position opened inside the Stoneman Family for the worst possible reason. Ernest “Pop” Stoneman was dead. The group had won the Country Music Association’s Vocal Group of the Year award only months earlier. His daughter Patsy stepped into the empty place. By then, family music had governed nearly every part of her life. Ernest and Hattie Stoneman had twenty-three children, thirteen of whom survived to adulthood. During the Depression, the family left Virginia for the Washington area and passed through years without stable food, shoes or housing. For a time, the roof of their Maryland home was partly canvas. The children did not own many toys. They had one another, babies to tend and musical instruments scarce enough to require guarding. A child who put down a banjo or fiddle might lose it to a sibling. Rehearsal, competition and household noise became the same environment. Patsy led bluegrass groups around Washington before the Stonemans reorganized as a national family act. In 1966 they moved to Nashville, secured a television series, worked a long nightclub engagement and recorded for MGM. Their mixture of old repertoire, comedy and polished family performance finally brought Pop the recognition that had disappeared during the Depression. Then cancer took him in 1968. Patsy did not imitate her father’s entire role. She assumed the autoharp and part of the vocal center, helping keep the act on the road while siblings entered and left. The family moved to RCA, absorbed further losses and gradually contracted until Patsy, Jimmy and Van were carrying much of the name. By 1979, reporters found them still traveling by bus. The childhood instruments had become professional equipment; the family competition had become tradition. Pop Stoneman helped open the commercial recording era of country music in the 1920s. Patsy’s quieter historical work began when that pioneer’s chair became empty and the oldest surviving music in the household still needed someone to carry it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” PATSY STONEMAN TOOK HER FATHER’S PLACE WITHOUT PRETENDING…

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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.