Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

WILLIE NELSON DIDN’T JUST TELL JOHNNY BUSH HE SHOULD BE A STAR—HE PAID FOR THE ALBUM THAT MOVED HIM FROM BEHIND THE DRUMS TO THE FRONT OF TEXAS HONKY-TONK. Raised in Houston and San Antonio, he worked dance halls and clubs before joining Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys in 1963. The band placed him inside one of country music’s finest schools: Ray Price at the microphone, Willie Nelson writing and playing nearby, and musicians learning how to make hard country move with precision. Bush could sing, but the regular paycheck came from being a touring musician. He later played drums in Willie’s band, the Record Men. Willie understood the problem because he was fighting a similar battle himself. Nashville already valued Nelson’s songs more readily than his unconventional singing voice. Bush also possessed talent that the industry could use without necessarily placing his name on the record cover. Willie decided to change that. In 1967, Nelson financed Bush’s first full album, The Sound of a Heartache, released on the small Stop label. It was not a major-label launch with a large promotional budget. It was one working Texas musician using his own money to move another out from behind the bandstand. Willie also supplied material. The album included “You Ought to Hear Me Cry,” written by Nelson. The single gave Bush his first national chart appearance, while the record itself showed the scale of the voice that Texas musicians had already known for years. Bush did not sing with Willie’s conversational looseness. His voice climbed higher, held notes longer and carried the influence of Ray Price and Lefty Frizzell. He sounded less like a songwriter presenting his own thoughts than a honky-tonk vocalist forcing every regret into the open. The first album did not make Bush an immediate national star, but it gave him an identity separate from the famous men whose bands he had served. More Stop Records sessions followed. Bush recorded Willie Nelson and Hank Cochran’s “Undo the Right,” reaching the country Top 10 in 1968. His versions of “What a Way to Live” and Marty Robbins’s “You Gave Me a Mountain” also reached national listeners, establishing him as more than a regional drummer who happened to sing. The relationship did not end when Bush stepped forward. Willie and Johnny remained bound by the Texas road circuit, the Ray Price years and the songs they passed between one another. Bush later co-wrote and first recorded “Whiskey River.” Willie placed it on Shotgun Willie, then turned it into the song that opened his concerts for generations. That later success can obscure what happened first. Before Willie carried one of Bush’s songs around the world, he had already invested in Bush’s voice when no major company had done so. He did not offer advice from a safe distance or wait until the singer had proven himself commercially. He paid for the proof. Johnny Bush eventually reached RCA, earned the nickname “Country Caruso” and built a catalog that survived long beyond the Stop label. But the first real separation between Johnny Bush the sideman and Johnny Bush the recording artist began with a small-label album financed by a friend who understood how easily Nashville could use a man’s talent without ever giving him the microphone. Years later, Willie stood beside Bush again when he entered the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame in 2003. By then, neither man needed the other’s name to establish his place in country music. The deeper legacy was the habit they had formed much earlier: when one Texas musician found a door beginning to open, he reached back and pulled another through.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” WILLIE NELSON DID NOT JUST TELL JOHNNY BUSH…

Country Music

SHE AND JOE MAPHIS BECAME “MR. AND MRS. COUNTRY MUSIC” ON THE WEST COAST. AFTER HIS DEATH, ROSE LEE LEFT THE STAGE FOR OPRYLAND’S COSTUME ROOM—THEN SPENT HER FINAL YEARS WELCOMING VISITORS TO COUNTRY MUSIC’S HALL OF FAME. Rose Lee Maphis was already performing before she met Joe Maphis. Raised near Hagerstown, Maryland, she sang on local radio as a teenager, played guitar and worked with the all-female Saddle Sweethearts. At the Old Dominion Barn Dance, she met Joe, a fast, theatrical multi-instrumentalist later known as the “King of the Strings.” They married in the early 1950s and joined the growing West Coast country scene. On Los Angeles television’s Town Hall Party, Joe attacked a custom double-neck Mosrite guitar while Rose supplied rhythm, bass, lead vocals and harmony. Their sound mixed traditional country, western swing, bluegrass and the harder California style that helped prepare the ground for Bakersfield. They became known as “Mr. and Mrs. Country Music.” Their most enduring song was “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music),” a honky-tonk warning that later became a standard across country and bluegrass. Joe drew the immediate attention with his height, bright clothes and high-speed guitar work. Rose was the steadier half: a working musician whose rhythm and harmony held the performance together. Their partnership lasted more than three decades. As television country changed, Rose stepped farther from the spotlight. Joe continued performing until lung cancer took his life in 1986. Rose then entered a quieter chapter. She worked in Opryland’s costume department, helping prepare clothing for artists including Brenda Lee and Barbara Mandrell. Later, she became a greeter at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Visitors saw an elderly woman welcoming them through the doors. Many did not know she had appeared on major radio and television programs, helped carry West Coast country into American homes and stood beside one of the most distinctive guitarists of her era. Her guitar, Joe’s double-neck Mosrite and material connected to “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke” later became part of a Bakersfield display inside the museum. Rose Lee Maphis died in 2021 at 98. By then, the television stages were decades behind her. But each day at the museum had placed her within a few steps of the instruments and songs from her former life. The visitors came looking for country music history. For years, history had been the woman holding the door open.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” ROSE LEE MAPHIS HELPED MAKE WEST COAST COUNTRY…

Country Music

IN AUGUST 1973, THE LOST GONZO BAND HELPED TURN A TINY TEXAS DANCE HALL INTO A RECORDING STUDIO. THE ALBUM THAT CAME OUT OF IT DID MORE THAN CAPTURE JERRY JEFF WALKER — IT GAVE A NEW TEXAS MUSIC SCENE ITS SOUND. Before settling on a name, the musicians were sometimes called the Austin Interchangeable Band. Gary P. Nunn, Bob Livingston and the changing lineup around them backed Michael Martin Murphey, Jerry Jeff Walker, Ray Wylie Hubbard and others in Austin’s emerging progressive-country scene. They moved easily between folk, honky-tonk, rock, blues and border music. That flexibility became essential when Walker chose Luckenbach, Texas, for his next album. Luckenbach was barely a town. Hondo Crouch had revived its old dance hall as a gathering place for musicians and audiences looking beyond Nashville polish. In August 1973, Walker and the band arrived with a remote recording truck and turned the wooden hall into a temporary studio. Most of ¡Viva Terlingua! was recorded without an audience. The band worked through the Texas heat, loose arrangements and the natural sound of the room. A crowd was then brought in for the final performance on August 18. Two defining tracks captured that night: Ray Wylie Hubbard’s “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother” and Gary P. Nunn’s “London Homesick Blues.” The latter’s armadillo chorus later became closely associated with Austin City Limits. The album gathered several Texas writers into one frame. Walker recorded Guy Clark’s “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” Michael Martin Murphey’s “Backslider’s Wine” and Hubbard’s rowdy anthem. Nunn stepped out from behind the keyboard to sing his own song. The Lost Gonzo Band did more than accompany Walker. Pedal steel, electric piano, fiddle, harmonica and rock rhythm shared the same space. The musicians could support a quiet ballad, then turn the hall into a shouting room without losing the song. Released in November 1973, ¡Viva Terlingua! became a foundational Texas progressive-country album. It helped define an Austin alternative to Nashville and fixed Luckenbach in country mythology years before Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson carried the town’s name onto national radio. The Gonzos later made records under their own name, but their largest influence remained inside other artists’ work. They connected Murphey’s cosmic cowboy sound, Walker’s loose folk-country and the wider Texas movement that followed. The album left behind more than a famous room or a rowdy crowd. It showed that a band without a permanent lineup could still create a shared musical language—and that the musicians surrounding the singer could define a movement as powerfully as the name printed on the cover.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE LOST GONZO BAND HELPED TURN A TINY…

Country Music

ON JULY 17, 1974, DON RICH LEFT BUCK OWENS’S BAKERSFIELD STUDIO ON A MOTORCYCLE TO JOIN HIS FAMILY FOR VACATION. HOURS LATER, HE WAS DEAD AT 32 — AND BUCK SAID THE JOY WENT OUT OF HIS MUSIC WITH HIM. Before the red, white, and blue guitars, before *Hee Haw*, and before Buck Owens became one of country music’s most recognizable men, there was a young fiddle player from Washington named Don Ulrich. Buck first heard him in Tacoma near the end of the 1950s. Don was considering college and a career teaching music, but Buck saw a musician who could anticipate every turn in a song and make two voices sound as if they had been raised together. Don shortened his name to Don Rich and followed Buck south. Together, they built a country sound far removed from the polished records coming out of Nashville: Fender Telecasters, hard drums, sharp fiddle breaks, and harmonies strong enough to cut through crowded dance halls. Buck sang the lead. Don answered from just over his shoulder. When “Act Naturally” reached No. 1 in 1963, Don was there. He remained beside Buck through “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” “Together Again,” “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail,” “Buckaroo,” and the run of records that turned Bakersfield into Nashville’s loudest rival. Don led the Buckaroos, played guitar and fiddle, arranged harmonies, and supplied the high tenor voice behind many of Buck’s biggest records. Even listeners who did not know his name knew the sound he made possible. Their partnership also extended beyond the stage. They hunted together, worked side by side in the studio, and became close to one another’s families. Buck later described Don as a brother, a son, and a best friend. But there was one part of Don’s life Buck feared. Motorcycles. Don loved riding them. Buck had reportedly spent years asking him to stop. On July 17, 1974, Don finished working at Buck’s Bakersfield studio and prepared to ride north toward the Central Coast, where his wife and children were waiting for him to join a fishing vacation. Buck reportedly urged him not to take the motorcycle. Don left anyway. That evening, while traveling north on Highway 1 near Morro Bay, his motorcycle struck the center divider at Yerba Buena Street. Investigators reportedly found no skid marks and no clear mechanical failure explaining the crash. Don was taken to Sierra Vista Hospital in San Luis Obispo and pronounced dead at 10:55 p.m. He was thirty-two. Buck continued recording, appearing on television, and performing with new versions of the Buckaroos. From the outside, the career kept moving. But the voice and guitar that had answered him through his greatest years were gone. For years, Buck spoke little publicly about Don’s death. When he finally opened up in the late 1990s, he admitted that although he had continued working, his musical life had largely ended the night Don died. The records made after July 1974 still carried Buck Owens’s name. What they could no longer carry was Don’s high harmony, the bright Telecaster beside Buck’s own, and the man who had helped turn a California oil town into one of the capitals of country music.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” DON RICH LEFT BUCK OWENS’S STUDIO ON A…

Country Music

IN 1965, THE BUCKAROOS TOOK AN INSTRUMENTAL TO NO. 1 ON THE COUNTRY CHART. THE MEN BEHIND BUCK OWENS HAD BECOME SUCCESSFUL ENOUGH TO MAKE A HIT WITHOUT HIS VOICE. The Buckaroos were built to do more than stand behind a star. Buck Owens wanted a permanent road band that could reproduce the hard California sound of his records every night. Led by Don Rich, the core lineup included bassist Doyle Holly, steel guitarist Tom Brumley and drummer Willie Cantu. Merle Haggard, who had briefly played with Buck, was credited with suggesting the name. Their work helped separate Bakersfield from Nashville. Rich supplied sharp Telecaster lines, fiddle and high harmony. Brumley brought the pedal-steel sound heard on “Together Again.” Holly and Cantu gave the records a firm rhythm designed to cut through car radios and noisy dance halls. Buck remained the lead singer, but the Buckaroos gave the voice its frame. Then the band began recording material of its own. In 1965, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos released “Buckaroo,” an instrumental written by Bob Morris. Without a lyric or lead vocal, the record reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart and remained there for two weeks. It also crossed onto the pop chart. The success changed what a country backing band could be. The Buckaroos were no longer only the musicians heard beneath Buck’s hits. Their name appeared on instrumental albums, television performances and live recordings. Between 1967 and 1970, they released a run of albums that placed Don Rich, Tom Brumley and the rest of the group closer to the front of the cover. Their musicians became identifiable figures. Rich recorded guitar and fiddle features. Brumley fronted Steelin’ the Show. Doyle Holly later left for a solo career. Instead of remaining interchangeable sidemen, the Buckaroos developed sounds and identities listeners could recognize individually. The band’s reputation also moved beyond Bakersfield. In 1966, Buck Owens and the Buckaroos performed at Carnegie Hall, capturing a California honky-tonk band at full force before a New York audience. The group later appeared on live records made in Las Vegas, London, Australia and other locations as Buck’s touring operation expanded internationally. Industry recognition followed. The Academy of Country Music nominated the Buckaroos eight times as an instrumental group and gave them four wins. They also received consecutive major honors during the period when Nashville backing musicians were usually known only inside studios or printed in small type on album sleeves. That success did not separate them from Buck Owens. It made the partnership larger. When Buck’s records reached radio, listeners heard a singer and a band functioning as one machine. When the Buckaroos recorded alone, the same drive remained even after the lead vocal disappeared. Years later, reissues placed Don Rich, Tom Brumley and the Buckaroos’ instrumental work back into circulation under their own names. The old records revealed that Bakersfield Sound had never been created by one man standing at a microphone. It had been built by a group whose members became recognizable before country music had fully learned to treat a backing band as artists.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE BUCKAROOS WERE SUPPOSED TO BACK BUCK OWENS.…

Country Music

KRIS KRISTOFFERSON NAMED “FUNKY DONNIE FRITTS” AT THE OPENING OF “THE PILGRIM, CHAPTER 33.” FRITTS THEN SPENT MORE THAN FORTY YEARS AT HIS KEYBOARD — WHILE HIS SONGS TRAVELED THROUGH WAYLON JENNINGS, DOLLY PARTON AND DUSTY SPRINGFIELD. Donnie Fritts came from Florence, Alabama, before Muscle Shoals became one of America’s most famous recording centers. He played drums in local bands as a teenager, then moved to keyboards and joined the circle shaping the region’s mixture of country, gospel, R&B and Southern soul. Arthur Alexander, Dan Penn, Spooner Oldham and Rick Hall ignored genre boundaries. Fritts did the same. By the mid-1960s, he was writing in Nashville. With Eddie Hinton, he wrote “Breakfast in Bed,” recorded by Dusty Springfield during the Dusty in Memphis sessions. He later co-wrote “We Had It All,” which Waylon Jennings placed on Honky Tonk Heroes in 1973 and Dolly Parton revived in 1986. Fritts might have remained entirely behind other singers. Instead, he joined Kris Kristofferson’s road band. They had met while Kristofferson was still struggling as a Nashville songwriter. When he formed a touring group, he hired Fritts on keyboards. The partnership lasted more than four decades through albums, world tours and films including Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and A Star Is Born. Kristofferson also placed him inside “The Pilgrim, Chapter 33.” Before the song, he named several real men who embodied its contradictions—Johnny Cash, Jerry Jeff Walker, Billy Swan and “Funky Donnie Fritts.” The nickname stayed, but Fritts was more than a colorful sideman. His weathered voice and loose keyboard style carried the Muscle Shoals belief that emotional feel mattered more than technical perfection. Kristofferson and Jerry Wexler produced his 1974 debut, Prone to Lean, but a large solo career never followed. Fritts remained at the keyboard while his friends became symbols of outlaw country. Their loyalty returned when he released Everybody’s Got a Song in the late 1990s. Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, John Prine, Tony Joe White, Delbert McClinton and Kristofferson all appeared on the album. Around the same period, Fritts received a kidney transplant and largely abandoned the hard living of his earlier years. He continued recording and released Oh My Goodness in 2015, already in his seventies. His final major project looked backward. In 2018, Fritts released June, a tribute to Arthur Alexander, whose songs had helped establish the emotional language of Muscle Shoals. After decades supporting Kristofferson and supplying material to famous voices, Fritts used one of his last records to preserve the work of an older friend. He died from complications following heart surgery in 2019 at 76. Kristofferson had once placed Fritts’s name at the entrance to a song about complicated men. By the end, Fritts had left something quieter behind: a line connecting Alabama soul, Nashville songwriting and outlaw country that remained intact even after the men who built it were gone.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” KRIS KRISTOFFERSON PUT “FUNKY DONNIE FRITTS” INTO “THE…

Country Music

THE SESSION WAS ALMOST OVER. THE MUSICIANS DID NOT KNOW THE SONG, AND GENE WATSON HAD ONLY ENOUGH TIME TO SHOW THEM THE CHORDS. FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER, “FAREWELL PARTY” WAS FINISHED. Before Nashville knew him, Gene Watson spent his days repairing wrecked automobiles in Houston and his nights singing in Texas clubs. He recorded for small regional labels and built a local following without leaving the body shop. Even after “Love in the Hot Afternoon” became a national Top Five hit in 1975, Watson remained closer to working musicians than to the polished machinery of Music Row. In 1978, he entered the studio to make the album Reflections. Near the end of one session, there was time left for one more song. Watson chose “Farewell Party,” a death-haunted ballad written and first recorded by Lawton Williams. Little Jimmy Dickens, Johnny Bush and Waylon Jennings had also recorded it, but none had made it permanently their own. The studio band did not know the arrangement. Watson got down on one knee with his guitar and showed the musicians and backing singers the chords. There was no time to build the performance piece by piece. They ran through it once. According to Watson, the recording took about 15 minutes. What listeners hear is that single take, without overdubs. The song appeared on Reflections in 1978 and was released as a single the following year. It reached No. 5 on Billboard’s country chart and became more closely identified with Watson than several songs that had placed higher. “Farewell Party” demanded nearly everything his voice could do. The melody began low and controlled, then climbed toward notes that sounded as though the singer were trying to remain dignified while imagining his own funeral. Watson did not oversing it. The power came from how long he delayed the break. Audiences began requesting the song at nearly every appearance. Watson eventually named his road group the Farewell Party Band, turning the title into the public identity of the musicians who traveled with him. The song also changed how other singers regarded him. Watson became known as a “singer’s singer,” admired for the range, control and restraint required to deliver hard country without smoothing away its pain. His career produced dozens of charted records, but “Farewell Party” became something larger than a signature hit. It became a test. For decades afterward, younger singers could learn the melody, reach for the high notes and copy the phrasing. But the song still exposed who could carry heartbreak without turning it into spectacle. That became Gene Watson’s lasting place in country music. Not simply the man who recorded “Farewell Party,” but the singer other singers used to measure themselves.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GENE WATSON HAD FIFTEEN MINUTES LEFT IN THE…

Country Music

THE ALBUM WAS SUPPOSED TO BE RECORDED IN A STUDIO. JERRY JEFF WALKER TOOK THE BAND TO LUCKENBACH INSTEAD. By 1973, Jerry Jeff Walker could have tried to become a normal Nashville success story. “Mr. Bojangles” had already carried his name far beyond Texas. MCA wanted another album. He had moved to Austin, fallen in with the musicians who would become the Lost Gonzo Band, and found a scene that did not care much for polished edges. The songs were loose. The nights were long. The line between the stage and the audience was never very clean. Then came Luckenbach. Jerry Jeff and the band did not go there to make a careful studio record. They set up in the old dance hall in August 1973, with people in the room, beer in the air, and the kind of Texas noise that would have been edited out anywhere else. Gary P. Nunn was there. Bob Livingston was there. Hondo Crouch’s little town was there too, half real place, half running joke, and just strange enough to hold the whole thing. They recorded ¡Viva Terlingua! live. The album did not sound like a man trying to behave for a label. “London Homesick Blues” came out of it. “Gettin’ By” came out of it. So did the rough, communal feeling that made Austin’s progressive-country scene sound less like an industry plan and more like a room nobody wanted to leave. It became Jerry Jeff’s signature record. It also helped turn Luckenbach from a tiny Hill Country town into one of the holy places of Texas music. Four years later, Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson would make the name even bigger with “Luckenbach, Texas,” but Jerry Jeff had already put the room on tape. Some records are made to clean up a singer. ¡Viva Terlingua! caught Jerry Jeff Walker before anybody could.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JERRY JEFF WALKER WAS SUPPOSED TO MAKE ANOTHER…

Country Music

IN 1953, GOLDIE HILL BECAME ONE OF COUNTRY MUSIC’S FIRST WOMEN TO REACH NO. 1. FOUR YEARS LATER, SHE MARRIED CARL SMITH AND LARGELY WALKED AWAY FROM THE ROAD TO RAISE THEIR FAMILY. Goldie Hill came from a cotton farm outside Karnes City, Texas. Born Argolda Voncile Hill, she picked cotton with her brothers before the family began performing around San Antonio as the Texas Hillbillies. By her late teens, she was singing on radio and working with established country acts including Red River Dave and Big Bill Lister. In 1952, Decca Records signed her. Her first release failed, but the next one changed her place in country history. “I Let the Stars Get in My Eyes,” written by her brother Tommy Hill and Slim Willet, answered the hit “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.” Released late in 1952, Goldie’s record reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country jukebox chart in 1953. At a time when Kitty Wells had only recently broken country radio’s resistance to female solo performers, Goldie became one of the first women to reach the top of the country charts under her own name. She was soon known as the “Golden Hillbilly.” Goldie appeared on the Louisiana Hayride, the Grand Ole Opry and the Ozark Jubilee. She also recorded successful duets with Justin Tubb and Red Sovine. Alongside Kitty Wells and Jean Shepard, she was helping establish that women could carry country records without being attached to a male bandleader. Then, in 1957, she married Carl Smith. Smith was already one of country music’s biggest male stars, with a long string of Top 10 records. He had recently divorced June Carter. Goldie entered the marriage with her own hit career, her own stage name and a No. 1 record behind her. After the wedding, she virtually stopped touring. There were later recordings and occasional returns, including a brief comeback during the 1960s, but the momentum of her early career was gone. Goldie and Carl settled on a 500-acre Tennessee ranch, raised two sons and a daughter, and remained married for 47 years. The decision made her difficult to place in the usual country story. She was not a forgotten singer who had failed to break through. She had already broken through. Nor was she pushed aside before radio heard her. The record had reached No. 1, the major stages had opened, and the industry had given her a nickname built for stardom. She simply stopped organizing her life around it. Goldie occasionally returned to the microphone, but she never tried to reclaim the position she had held in 1953. By the time later generations of women became major country stars, one of the singers who had helped clear the path was living mostly outside Nashville’s public memory. Goldie Hill died of cancer in 2005. Carl remained on the ranch until his own death five years later. Inside the house were nearly five decades of marriage and a family that had grown during the years when Goldie might otherwise have been chasing another chart record. Her largest hit lasted two minutes and thirty-five seconds. The life she chose afterward lasted 47 years

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GOLDIE HILL REACHED NO. 1 WHEN COUNTRY RADIO…

Country Music

HIS SONGS OUTLIVED HIM IN THE VOICES OF COUNTRY LEGENDS. BUT AFTER BLAZE FOLEY WAS SHOT DEAD IN AUSTIN, HIS FRIENDS HAD TO HOLD A BENEFIT JUST TO PAY FOR HIS BURIAL. His real name was Michael David Fuller. He grew up singing gospel with his family, survived childhood polio and eventually remade himself as Blaze Foley—a wandering Texas songwriter who repaired his clothes with silver duct tape, slept wherever friends would let him and wrote songs too tender for the life he was living. Foley moved through Georgia, Chicago, Houston and Austin without ever building the kind of career Nashville could measure. He played small clubs, drank heavily, lost relationships and sometimes slept beneath pool tables after the bars closed. He was close to Townes Van Zandt, another Texas songwriter who understood how a brilliant song could exist inside a life that refused to become stable. Yet Foley kept writing. One of those songs was “If I Could Only Fly.” Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard recorded it together in 1987, but their version did not become the kind of commercial event “Pancho and Lefty” had been. Foley remained mostly unknown outside the Texas songwriter circuit. He had written something two country giants considered worth singing, but he was still struggling to preserve his own recordings and pay his own way. Other songs waited even longer. John Prine would eventually record “Clay Pigeons.” Lucinda Williams would write “Drunken Angel” about Foley. Lyle Lovett, Gurf Morlix and generations of Texas musicians would help carry his name forward. But most of that recognition arrived after Foley was no longer there to receive it. On February 1, 1989, Foley was at the Austin home of his elderly friend Concho January. Foley believed Concho’s son, Carey January, had been taking his father’s pension and welfare money. The confrontation turned violent. Carey shot Foley in the chest with a small-caliber rifle. Blaze Foley was 39 years old. Carey January admitted firing the shot but argued that he had acted in self-defense. A jury later acquitted him. The people who knew Foley continued to dispute the picture of him presented at trial, but the legal verdict remained unchanged. Foley left behind almost none of the protections normally associated with a professional career. There was no major estate. No long catalog of successful albums. No money waiting to carry him home. Friends organized a benefit to cover the cost of his burial. A cassette recorded live at the Austin Outhouse was released only after his death. At the funeral, his friends reportedly covered his coffin with duct tape—the same cheap material Foley had used to hold together his boots and decorate his clothes. Even after that, the stories did not stop. Townes Van Zandt later told a wild tale about going to Foley’s grave because Foley had died carrying the pawn ticket for one of Townes’s guitars. Whether every part of that story happened exactly as told became less important than what it revealed: even among men who owned almost nothing, guitars, songs and debts still had to be recovered somehow. Blaze Foley never became a country star. He became something harder to manufacture: a songwriter whose work escaped the wreckage of his own life. Years after his friends needed to raise money to place him in the ground, singers who had outlived him were still standing on stages and singing the songs he had left behind.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BLAZE FOLEY WROTE SONGS THAT WILLIE, MERLE, JOHN…

You Missed

Country Music

Ernest Tubb Put a Stage Behind the Record Bins The question followed Ernest Tubb from town to town: where could people buy the country records they heard on the radio? Local stores did not always stock them. Even Tubb’s own records could be difficult to find outside larger markets. In 1947, he answered by opening the Ernest Tubb Record Shop in downtown Nashville, carrying his competitors’ releases alongside his own and shipping records to customers who might live hundreds of miles from a country-music retailer. The shop soon acquired another purpose. After performing at the Grand Ole Opry on Saturday night, Tubb could sing only a few numbers before the broadcast moved to the next artist. At the store, he could stay longer. He began presenting the Midnite Jamboree, a free, informal radio show transmitted over WSM after the Opry ended. Customers stood between the record racks while performers worked from a small stage. Tubb used the program to sell records, but the commercial arrangement created something larger than an advertisement. Established artists brought younger singers with them. Musicians who had received only a few minutes on the Opry could play a fuller set. Listeners across WSM’s powerful signal heard performers whose records were available immediately by mail. When the store moved to 417 Broadway in 1951, the program moved with it. The address became a late-night passage through Nashville: leave the Ryman, walk downhill and keep listening. Loretta Lynn appeared there during the uncertain beginning of her career. A nineteen-year-old Elvis Presley came through in 1954 after an Opry appearance, spoke with Tubb and performed on the broadcast. Generations of lesser-known musicians stood in the same room without becoming legends, but for one night their names traveled far beyond the store. Tubb had begun with a retail problem. Country audiences wanted records their local shops did not carry. His solution connected a cash register, a radio transmitter and a stage. Long after midnight, while downtown Nashville was closing, the Ernest Tubb Record Shop was still sending new voices out through the dark.

Country Music

Jackie Gleason Built Ralph Kramden From the Brooklyn Rooms He Had Escaped Jackie Gleason was nine when his father left the family. His mother supported them by working in a Brooklyn subway booth. When she died a decade later, Gleason was nineteen and effectively alone. Years afterward, he returned to the kind of apartment he had known and placed Ralph and Alice Kramden inside it. Ralph drove a bus, counted every dollar and imagined one enormous idea after another carrying him out of the same worn rooms. Alice usually knew where the plan would end. Their arguments were exaggerated for television, but the pressure underneath them—rent, pride, disappointment and married people trying again the following morning—came from recognizable life. Gleason’s own escape had taken him through neighborhood theaters, pool rooms, nightclubs and jobs as a carnival barker and master of ceremonies. On live television, his size and appetite made him seem capable of filling every corner of the screen. The Jackie Gleason Show turned him into “The Great One.” He could be bombastic as Ralph, silent as the Poor Soul, gentle as Joe the Bartender and elegant as Reginald Van Gleason III. Outside comedy, he recorded bestselling mood-music albums, won a Tony on Broadway and received an Academy Award nomination for playing Minnesota Fats in The Hustler. The filmed version of The Honeymooners lasted only thirty-nine episodes in 1955–56. They ran so continuously in syndication that generations assumed thirty-nine was the entire history. Gleason knew otherwise. Earlier live sketches had been preserved as kinescopes, and he kept his contractual copies in a vault. In 1985, he released those missing years to cable television and home video. The man who had once been left with almost nothing possessed appetites large enough to become legend. He wanted the grand house, the orchestra, the tailored clothes and a stage big enough for his entrance. But his most enduring creation kept returning to one kitchen in Brooklyn, where a bus driver had very little and was always certain that the next idea would change everything.

Chưa phân loại

Richard Kimble Was Almost Left Running Forever When David Janssen told ABC he would not return for a fifth season of The Fugitive, the network prepared to let the series end without clearing Richard Kimble’s name. For four years, viewers had watched Kimble move from town to town under borrowed identities. He had been convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death, escaped custody and devoted his life to finding the One-Armed Man he had seen leaving the crime scene. Lieutenant Philip Gerard remained behind him, certain that duty required bringing Kimble back. The weekly episodes usually told complete stories. Kimble entered another person’s trouble, helped where he could and left before Gerard arrived. But the larger promise remained open: someday, the running would have to lead somewhere. That was not how television normally worked. Series were expected to preserve their basic conditions for reruns. Resolving Kimble’s case could make earlier episodes appear less urgent in syndication. When production ended in 1967, ABC initially intended to broadcast the final regular episode and stop. Network executive Leonard Goldberg objected. Friends kept asking him whether Kimble would find the One-Armed Man. Goldberg argued that a television network claiming the medium could command viewers’ loyalty could not then behave as though that loyalty meant nothing. ABC approved a two-part conclusion. In “The Judgment,” Gerard finally captures Kimble but gives him time to pursue new evidence. The chase ends at an abandoned amusement park, where Gerard shoots the One-Armed Man before he can kill Kimble. A surviving witness confirms the truth, and Kimble is exonerated. The second part aired on August 29, 1967. More than 78 million people watched, representing 72 percent of the television sets in use that night—a record at the time. The final moment was quiet. Gerard passed Kimble outside the courthouse, hesitated and offered his hand. Then Kimble walked away beside Jean Carlisle without checking the street behind him. For 118 episodes, the series had been built around one man’s inability to stop. Its most important decision was allowing him to.

Country Music

Before Bobbie Nelson boarded her first airplane, she found another pianist to cover her job at the Lakeway Resort outside Austin. Willie had called from New York and asked whether she would help him make a gospel record. Bobbie arranged the substitution, packed her clothes and left behind the piano work that had kept her life steady. She and Willie had not built their adult careers together. They had begun that way as children in Abbott, Texas, singing hymns beside the grandparents who raised them. Bobbie learned to read four-part harmony and played the church organ; Willie sat beside her on the piano bench, absorbing what she knew. Marriage separated their paths. Bobbie wed bandleader Bud Fletcher at sixteen, had three sons and spent her nights playing with the family’s Western swing group. In 1955, her in-laws used those honky-tonk jobs to challenge her fitness as a mother. She temporarily lost custody of her boys, left the bandstand and took work demonstrating Hammond organs. She eventually regained her children, then spent years teaching music and playing restaurants, churches and hotel lounges. Willie went to Nashville. Bobbie stayed close to her sons. The New York invitation arrived after they had lived through separate marriages, jobs and disappointments. Bobbie recorded the gospel sessions that became The Troublemaker, then joined Willie on Shotgun Willie. Her piano supplied something his Nashville records had often lacked: the musical language of home, loose enough for him to move and solid enough to receive him when he returned to the beat. When the sessions ended, Willie told his sister he had missed playing with her. She said she had missed it too. They decided there was no reason to stop again. The Lakeway engagement Bobbie had treated as a temporary absence became the last small job she needed someone else to cover. For nearly five decades afterward, her regular place was beside Willie in the Family band—the road she had once been forced to leave, reopened by the brother who had first learned music at her shoulder.