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“IF WE DON’T GET OUT OF LOS ANGELES, I’M GOING TO GO CRAZY.” SUSANNA CLARK TOLD GUY. THEY LEFT FOR NASHVILLE—AND HE TURNED HER WARNING INTO “L.A. FREEWAY.” Around 1970, Guy Clark moved to Los Angeles with Susanna, hoping to turn songwriting into a real career. The city never fit him. Clark found work at the Dopyera brothers’ Dobro factory and spent his off-hours trying publishers. He later remembered the yellow air, the traffic and the feeling that Los Angeles was something to endure rather than belong to. He stayed only eight months to a year. In 1971, Clark and Susanna left California for Nashville, where he had been offered a staff-writing job. Not long after the move, he turned the departure into “L.A. Freeway.” The song was built from the small debris of leaving: dishes, newspapers, a landlord, old food, concrete — the ordinary things that become vivid only when someone has decided not to come back. Clark did not record it first. Jerry Jeff Walker put “L.A. Freeway” on his self-titled 1972 album. His version reached the Billboard Hot 100 in 1973 and carried Clark’s name into the Texas progressive-country world before Clark had released an album of his own. Clark finally recorded the song for his 1975 debut, Old No. 1. By then, “L.A. Freeway” had already become part of the language surrounding the restless Texas writers moving between Nashville, Austin and the road. Clark’s version stripped the song back to the voice, guitar and details that had made the escape believable in the first place. Los Angeles had not given Guy Clark the career he went there looking for. Leaving it gave him one of the songs that would define the career he eventually built.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” “IF WE DON’T GET OUT OF LOS ANGELES,…

Country Music

BONNIE OWENS DIVORCED MERLE HAGGARD IN 1978. NINE YEARS LATER, HE CALLED AND ASKED HER TO COME BACK ON THE ROAD: “AS LONG AS I’M UP THERE ON A BANDSTAND, I WANT YOU TO BE WITH ME.” By the time Bonnie Owens left Merle Haggard, their marriage had carried almost everything a country partnership could hold: duets, children, touring, hits, infidelity, and years spent inside the same moving operation. They had married in 1965, just as Haggard’s career was breaking open. Bonnie increasingly stepped away from her own recording momentum to sing harmony with the Strangers, help raise his children, and keep life functioning around a man whose ambitions rarely allowed the road to stop. By the mid-1970s, she had had enough. Bonnie spent less time touring as Haggard’s affairs and constant movement strained the marriage. She filed for divorce in 1976; it became final in October 1978. Haggard immediately moved into another marriage, while Bonnie gradually disappeared from his road show. By 1981, she was no longer traveling with him. Then the phone rang. Bonnie later told The New Yorker that around June 1987, Haggard called and asked her to return. His explanation was simple: as long as he was standing on a bandstand, he wanted Bonnie there too. She went back. Not as his wife. Not as someone trying to revive the marriage. She returned as the harmony singer who knew his phrasing, his music, and the rhythms of a Haggard road band better than almost anyone. By 1989, Bonnie was again riding the bus with the Strangers. The scene was remarkably ordinary. She played poker with the musicians, helped find missing supplies, tidied the bus, ate breakfast in motel coffee shops, and walked onstage to put the familiar harmony behind songs she had helped carry decades earlier. She was also clear about what had changed. Bonnie said she and Merle were friends but no longer close in the way they once had been. She could still read his moods, recognize when he was restless, and understand the machinery surrounding him without pretending the old marriage had somehow returned. That made the arrangement stranger — and perhaps more durable — than reconciliation. Most divorced couples did not spend their later years crossing America together on a tour bus. Bonnie and Merle could not preserve the marriage, but they preserved a musical language built long before the divorce papers. For Bonnie, the road had changed meaning. Once she had ridden it as Haggard’s wife, helping hold together the family and career around him. Years later, she came back with nothing left to prove about the marriage. When the band counted off the song, she simply stepped to the microphone and knew exactly where the harmony belonged.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BONNIE OWENS DIVORCED MERLE HAGGARD IN 1978. NINE…

Country Music

ROY NICHOLS WAS MAKING ABOUT $250 A WEEK WITH WYNN STEWART. IN 1965, HE LEFT FOR MERLE HAGGARD’S NEW BAND AT ROUGHLY HALF THE MONEY — WITH THREE CONDITIONS: “I DON’T DRIVE, I CARRY MY OWN AMP, AND I KNOW WHERE MY BED IS EVERY NIGHT.” Roy Nichols was already a Bakersfield name before Merle Haggard could afford him. He had played with the Maddox Brothers and Rose, worked for Lefty Frizzell, toured with Johnny Cash and eventually joined Wynn Stewart in Las Vegas. Haggard, then playing bass for Stewart, already knew exactly what Nichols could do with a Telecaster. In June 1965, Merle was putting together the Strangers and asked Nichols to join. Financially, it made little sense. Nichols had reportedly been earning about $250 a week with Stewart. Haggard could offer roughly $125. Nichols accepted anyway, flew to Phoenix to meet the new band and laid down three rules: he would not drive, he would carry his own amplifier, and he wanted to know where he was sleeping every night. What he brought was harder to put into a contract. Nichols could make a Fender Telecaster snap like honky-tonk rhythm, bend like a steel guitar and turn a few notes between Haggard’s vocal lines into part of the song itself. His playing became central to records such as “Mama Tried” and to the broader sound of the Strangers during Haggard’s strongest commercial period. Nichols stayed for twenty-two years. The Strangers became one of country music’s most respected road bands, winning repeated ACM honors while helping Haggard carry Bakersfield country far beyond California. Haggard later gave Nichols unusually direct credit. “Because of Roy, my career commenced,” he said, calling Nichols the stylist who set the pace for the records from his peak years. Roy Nichols had already worked for legends before Merle hired him. What changed in 1965 was that he stopped passing through other people’s bands and spent the next two decades helping one singer build a musical language of his own.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” ROY NICHOLS WAS MAKING ABOUT $250 A WEEK…

Country Music

GUY CLARK BROKE THE TIP OFF HIS FATHER’S PRIZED RANDALL KNIFE AS A BOY. YEARS LATER, AFTER HIS FATHER DIED, THAT SAME KNIFE BECAME THE ONE THING THAT FINALLY BROUGHT THE TEARS. Guy Clark’s father, Ellis, was an attorney and a World War II veteran. Before going to war, Ellis received a Randall knife from Guy’s mother. It became one of those objects a child understands is important long before he understands why. Guy eventually got his hands on it. As he later wrote, he tried to stick the knife into a tree and broke roughly half an inch from the tip. He hid what he had done for a while, but his father found out. Ellis did not explode. The damaged knife simply ended up stored away. Clark carried the guilt much longer than the punishment. When his father died, he tried to write about him and discovered he could not reach the emotion directly. Instead, his mind went back to the knife. “The Randall Knife” began as a poem, not a song. Clark later called it a cathartic piece and said its intensely personal nature still surprised him because audiences connected so strongly to it. He recorded it for Better Days in 1983, an album produced by Rodney Crowell. There was no conventional chorus and little attempt to make the story universal. It was simply a son remembering the object his father valued, the damage he had done to it, and the emotions that had remained unreachable until after the funeral. Listeners supplied their own versions. Clark later said people began telling him about things of their fathers they had broken. Some even gave him damaged Randall knives. Vince Gill related the song to breaking his own father’s seven iron. The reaction eventually became physical. Fans sent Clark so many Randall knives that he kept a box of them beneath his workbench. A song Clark had considered almost too private to share had given strangers a way to talk about their own fathers. Not through a grand eulogy. Through the things children break and remember long after the men who owned them are gone.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GUY CLARK BROKE THE TIP OFF HIS FATHER’S…

Country Music

AN ARKANSAS SCHOOLTEACHER WROTE “THE BATTLE OF NEW ORLEANS” TO HELP HIS STUDENTS REMEMBER HISTORY. JOHNNY HORTON HEARD IT, CUT IT DOWN FOR RADIO—AND TURNED THE LESSON INTO AMERICA’S NO. 1 SONG OF 1959. Johnny Horton had already spent years recording country and rockabilly when “When It’s Springtime in Alaska” finally gave him his first No. 1 country hit in early 1959. Then he heard Jimmy Driftwood. Driftwood was an Arkansas schoolteacher who had written “The Battle of New Orleans” years earlier as a way to teach his students about the War of 1812. He set the story to the old fiddle tune “The Eighth of January,” filling it with soldiers, cannon fire, and humor instead of textbook language. His original recording was long and included words radio stations were reluctant to broadcast. Horton contacted Driftwood and created a shorter, cleaner version suitable for commercial radio. Columbia released Horton’s recording in April 1959. It exploded far beyond country music. “The Battle of New Orleans” reached No. 1 on both Billboard’s country chart and the Hot 100, remaining atop the pop chart for six weeks. Billboard later ranked it the No. 1 Hot 100 single of 1959. The record also earned Horton the Grammy for Best Country & Western Performance, while Driftwood received Song of the Year honors for the composition. Its success changed Horton’s career almost immediately. Instead of returning only to conventional honky-tonk material, he leaned deeper into narrative songs drawn from history and adventure. “Johnny Reb” followed. In 1960, 20th Century Fox commissioned “Sink the Bismarck” to help promote its film about the German battleship; Horton and manager Tillman Franks wrote the song, and it became another major crossover hit. Later that year came “North to Alaska,” connected to the John Wayne film of the same name. It would eventually reach No. 1 country and No. 4 pop. For a brief period, Horton had found a lane almost entirely his own: country records that sounded like campfire stories enlarged for jukeboxes and national radio. And the unlikely person who helped point him there was not a Nashville producer or record executive. It was a teacher trying to keep a classroom interested in history.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” AN ARKANSAS SCHOOLTEACHER WROTE “THE BATTLE OF NEW…

Country Music

WAYLON JENNINGS WENT INTO THE HOSPITAL SICK, BROKE AND READY TO QUIT. HE CAME OUT WITH A NEW MANAGER, A BIGGER RCA ADVANCE — AND THE CREATIVE CONTROL THAT BUILT HIS OUTLAW ERA. By 1972, Waylon Jennings had been with RCA for years, but success had not given him much freedom. Nashville producers still chose session players, shaped arrangements and controlled much of what went onto his records. Jennings had hits, but increasingly felt that the records did not sound like the band he heard onstage. Then his health gave out. Jennings contracted hepatitis and was hospitalized. Sick, frustrated and short of money, he considered walking away from the business. During his recovery, he asked RCA for a $25,000 royalty advance to cover expenses. Around the same time, drummer Richie Albright brought manager Neil Reshen into the picture. Reshen looked at Jennings’ RCA deal and told him not to accept business as usual. When the label offered a $5,000 bonus to renew under essentially the same royalty terms, Jennings turned it down and hired Reshen. The negotiations changed the balance. Jennings eventually received a much larger advance and, more importantly, artistic control over his recordings. He could choose songs, use his own road band and take greater command of how the finished records sounded. The results came quickly. In 1973, Lonesome, On’ry and Mean and Honky Tonk Heroes arrived under the new arrangement. The latter leaned heavily on Billy Joe Shaver’s songs and sounded far closer to the hard, stripped-down music Jennings had been trying to make. The albums opened the strongest period of his career. This Time, The Ramblin’ Man and Dreaming My Dreams followed, and Jennings finally began making records that matched the identity his audience already knew from the road. The beard, the leather and the word “outlaw” came later as symbols. The more important change was contractual. Waylon did not leave that hospital as a new man. He left with the power to make the records he had been arguing for all along.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” WAYLON JENNINGS WENT INTO THE HOSPITAL SICK, BROKE,…

Country Music

HE ALREADY HAD COUNTRY HITS. THEN JIM REEVES STOPPED SINGING LIKE HE HAD TO FILL A DANCE HALL—AND “FOUR WALLS” TURNED A QUIETER VOICE INTO ONE OF THE SOUNDS THAT REMADE NASHVILLE. When Jim Reeves signed with RCA Victor in 1955, he sang much like many country performers of the period: strong, bright, and built to carry across noisy rooms. He already had hits, including “Mexican Joe” and “Bimbo,” and joined the Grand Ole Opry that same year. But the style that would make “Gentleman Jim” internationally recognizable had not fully appeared yet. The change came with “Four Walls” in 1957. Instead of projecting hard, Reeves dropped into the lower part of his baritone and sang intimately, close to the microphone. The quieter approach changed the emotional scale of the record. Rather than sounding like a performer reaching across a dance hall, Reeves sounded like a man speaking to one person in a nearly empty room. “Four Walls” reached No. 1 on the country chart and No. 11 pop. More importantly, Reeves had found the voice that would define the rest of his career. He moved increasingly toward smooth ballads and restrained arrangements, becoming one of the central artists in the emerging Nashville Sound and helping demonstrate that country records could cross into pop without abandoning their emotional core. “He’ll Have to Go” pushed that approach even further in 1959. Reeves delivered the song almost conversationally, and it became another massive crossover success. Records such as “Welcome to My World,” “Adios Amigo,” and “Am I Losing You?” followed the same path. By then, the cowboy clothes were giving way to tailored jackets, and the hard-country singer from East Texas had become “Gentleman Jim.” The important breakthrough was not that Reeves learned to sing louder or reach higher. It was discovering how much authority he could create by doing almost the opposite—letting the microphone carry the voice while he concentrated on what happened inside the words.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JIM REEVES ALREADY HAD COUNTRY HITS. THEN HE…

Country Music

“DESPERADOS WAITING FOR A TRAIN” SOUNDED LIKE A WESTERN MYTH. IT WAS REALLY GUY CLARK SAYING GOODBYE TO THE OLD OIL DRILLER WHO HAD TAUGHT HIM HOW TEXAS MEN LIVED, DRANK, AGED—AND DISAPPEARED. Guy Clark grew up in Monahans, Texas, where his grandmother ran the Clark Hotel. One of the men living there was Jack Prigg, an oilfield worker and wildcatter who became a grandfather figure while Clark’s father was away during World War II. Clark later said Prigg was the main male presence around him during those years. Prigg took him into a world children were not usually invited to see. There were oil fields, domino games, pool halls and the Green Frog Cafe. He taught Clark to drive and let him trail behind older men telling stories about jobs, women, drinking and whatever version of the truth sounded best that night. Clark watched him grow old. The powerful driller became an elderly man with tobacco stains on his chin, sitting around playing games with other retirees. To Clark, the change was difficult to understand. A childhood hero had started looking like just another old man. Near the end of Prigg’s life, Clark visited him. That relationship became “Desperados Waiting for a Train,” which Clark later described as being as close to the truth as he could make it. Jerry Jeff Walker recorded the song first on Viva Terlingua in 1973. David Allan Coe, Rita Coolidge and Tom Rush followed before Clark finally put his own version on Old No. 1 in 1975. Then the story traveled even farther. In 1985, Willie Nelson, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson recorded it as the Highwaymen, taking the song to No. 15 on the country chart. By then, Jack Prigg had been dead for years. But the world he showed one Texas boy — oil wells, back rooms, old men and fading heroes — had become part of the vocabulary Guy Clark passed to everyone who came after him.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” “DESPERADOS WAITING FOR A TRAIN” SOUNDED LIKE A…

Country Music

RODNEY CROWELL PRODUCED ROSANNE CASH’S BREAKTHROUGH RECORDS, WROTE WITH HER, RAISED A FAMILY WITH HER — THEN SANG A NO. 1 DUET WITH HER WHILE THEIR MARRIAGE WAS ALREADY BEGINNING TO COME APART. Rodney Crowell and Rosanne Cash married in 1979, just as both were trying to establish careers of their own. Crowell had recently left Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band; Cash was still emerging from the shadow of her father’s name. Their marriage quickly became a working partnership. Crowell produced Cash’s early Columbia records, including Seven Year Ache in 1981. The title song went to No. 1 on the country chart and crossed into the pop Top 40. “My Baby Thinks He’s a Train” and “Blue Moon with Heartache” also reached No. 1, helping establish Cash as one of the strongest new voices in country music. The two built a family while their careers accelerated. They had three daughters together, and Cash also helped raise Crowell’s daughter from an earlier marriage. Touring was often limited by family life, but the music kept moving. By the late 1980s, both were near commercial peaks. Cash’s King’s Record Shop produced four No. 1 singles in 1987. The following year, she joined Crowell on “It’s Such a Small World,” a duet from his Diamonds & Dirt album. It went to No. 1. The timing carried an irony the record itself could not show. Their marriage was already under strain. Cash later poured much of that tension into Interiors, the stark 1990 album she produced herself. The songs dealt openly with relationships coming apart and marked a turn away from the polished Nashville sound that had made her a star. Crowell and Cash divorced in 1992. By then, their creative partnership had already left fingerprints across some of the most important country records of the 1980s. What survived was not simply a catalog of love songs. It was the sound of two ambitious writers learning, for more than a decade, how to make each other better even when they could no longer make the marriage work.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” RODNEY CROWELL PRODUCED ROSANNE CASH’S BREAKTHROUGH RECORDS, WROTE…

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BY 41, RAY WYLIE HUBBARD HAD OUTLASTED A BROKEN MARRIAGE, COCAINE, ALCOHOL AND A CAREER THAT HAD NEARLY RUN INTO THE GROUND. THEN STEVIE RAY VAUGHAN TOOK HIM TO HIS FIRST AA MEETING. Ray Wylie Hubbard had already written “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” watched Jerry Jeff Walker turn it into a Texas anthem, and spent years moving through the same outlaw-country world as Willie Nelson and the Austin crowd. But by the late 1980s, the life behind the songs was collapsing. His first marriage had failed. Both of his parents had died. Alcohol and cocaine had become part of the routine, and Hubbard later described himself as depressed, delusional and drifting through increasingly small gigs. At one point, he was opening for lingerie models at a club near Dallas Love Field. Then Stevie Ray Vaughan showed him another way. Vaughan had recently gotten sober himself. Hubbard remembered him as the first musician he knew who had cleaned up without becoming dull or losing the fire in his playing. Hubbard asked what it was like to perform without drinking or drugs. Vaughan told him sobriety had made him play better, not worse. He eventually took Hubbard to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Hubbard was 41. The change did not instantly turn him into a star. It did something more useful. He began listening again. Without alcohol and cocaine between himself and the instrument, Hubbard started rebuilding his guitar playing, writing more seriously and stripping away the parts of his career that had never fit him. The slicker Nashville ambitions faded. The darker Texas blues, folk and country underneath them came forward. The second half of his career became far stronger than the first. Albums such as Loco Gringo’s Lament, Dangerous Spirits and Growl gradually rebuilt his reputation. Younger Texas writers began treating Hubbard not as the man behind one novelty outlaw anthem, but as an elder whose late work kept getting sharper. He also met Judy through the recovery community; they married in 1989 and later built a family and working life around the music. Stevie Ray Vaughan died in 1990. Hubbard kept going. Decades later, the most important thing Vaughan had given him was not a guitar lick, a tour slot or a famous introduction. It was proof that getting sober did not mean losing the music.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BY 41, RAY WYLIE HUBBARD HAD OUTLASTED A…

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