Country Music – Page 2 – Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

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.

0 Comments

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

Country Music

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.

0 Comments

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

Country Music

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.

0 Comments

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

Country Music

In 1933, the Maddox family left Alabama with five children, roughly thirty-five dollars and no secure way to reach California. They rode freight trains, hitchhiked and depended on railroad workers for food. In Oakland, they briefly lived among other migrants inside sections of unused pipe. Later, they followed harvests through California, picking fruit and cotton wherever work appeared. Music entered the family economy almost as another survival job. In 1937, eighteen-year-old Fred Maddox approached a Modesto furniture dealer about sponsoring his brothers on local radio station KTRB. The dealer was interested but wanted a girl singer in the band. Fred claimed they had an excellent one. He meant his eleven-year-old sister Rose. Rose had sung around migrant campfires and along with performers she heard at the movies, but she had no professional experience. She joined because the sponsor required her. She also read the commercials on air because Fred struggled with them. The family received an extraordinary response. Fred later recalled thousands of letters arriving during their first week. People walked miles to the rural station to watch them perform through the windows. The radio work gave the Maddox family something field labor had not: a way for their personalities to become part of the product. After World War II interrupted the band, they returned wearing brilliant Western suits and dresses, eventually billing themselves as “The Most Colorful Hillbilly Band in America.” Rose stood at the center, no longer included merely to satisfy a furniture-store owner. Her forceful singing and physical stage presence helped the Maddox Brothers and Rose become one of the defining West Coast country acts of the 1940s and ’50s. She later built a solo career, recorded with Buck Owens and became an early woman to make a full bluegrass album. Decades after the freight trains, Rose titled a record $35 and a Dream. The family had arrived in California looking for work they could do with their hands. Their first dependable opening in music appeared because a sponsor asked for something the brothers had nearly overlooked. A girl’s voice.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE MADDOX FAMILY REACHED CALIFORNIA WITH THIRTY-FIVE DOLLARS…

Country Music

Charley Pride went to Montana believing baseball might still carry him to the major leagues. By 1960, the dream had already survived the Negro leagues, an Army draft, an elbow injury and repeated disappointments. Pride joined the Missoula Timberjacks, but the opportunity did not last. He eventually found steadier work at a lead smelter and pitched for the company’s semiprofessional team, the East Helena Smelterites. The arrangement kept baseball alive while giving his young family an income. It also placed Pride beside the heat and industrial noise of the smelter during the day. At night, he carried a guitar into Montana clubs and sang the country songs he had learned from Grand Ole Opry broadcasts on his father’s radio in Mississippi. Music was not initially the replacement plan. Pride still identified himself as a ballplayer. In 1962, country stars Red Foley and Red Sovine heard him perform in Montana and encouraged him to try Nashville. The first trip produced little. Pride returned to Helena, the smelter and baseball. Another opportunity came through manager Jack Johnson and producer Cowboy Jack Clement. In August 1965, Clement recorded Pride at RCA Studio B. Chet Atkins liked the demonstration and secured approval to sign him. The label initially withheld Pride’s photograph and racial identity from radio stations. RCA wanted disc jockeys to hear the voice before prejudice could decide what the voice was allowed to sound like. Pride’s third single, “Just Between You and Me,” reached the country Top Ten. By the time many listeners saw his face on his first album, the music had already entered their homes. He eventually accumulated twenty-nine No. 1 country hits and became the CMA’s 1971 Entertainer of the Year. Baseball never disappeared. Pride later became a part-owner of the Texas Rangers. He did not reach Cooperstown as the pitcher he had imagined. Instead, the man who once worked smelter shifts between ballgames entered the Country Music Hall of Fame. The first dream had not been wasted. It had carried him far enough to discover which part of himself could travel farther.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” CHARLEY PRIDE WENT TO MONTANA TO KEEP A…

Country Music

Every week, Porter Wagoner walked onto a television set in a rhinestone suit and introduced country music as if he were welcoming neighbors through the front door. The format was simple: Porter sang, Speck Rhodes told jokes, a female vocalist took a turn, the band played, and guests moved through the half-hour without much ceremony. What made The Porter Wagoner Show unusual was not its complexity but its reach. Launched in 1960 with backing from the Chattanooga Medicine Company, the program eventually spread to nearly one hundred television markets and drew more than three million viewers. Wagoner understood that television required more than standing at a microphone. He built a complete traveling cast around the show, adding Norma Jean, Rhodes, fiddler Mack Magaha, guitarist George McCormick and banjo player Buck Trent. The same people viewers saw on television also traveled together for personal appearances, allowing the television audience and the road audience to reinforce each other. That structure created opportunities far beyond Porter himself. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings appeared as young guests, while Norma Jean became nationally familiar through the program before leaving in 1967. Her departure opened the place Dolly Parton would fill, turning a supporting slot on a syndicated country show into one of the most important launching points of her career. Porter never softened the program into generic television variety. The rhinestone suits stayed, as did the fiddle, banjo, gospel numbers and rural humor. During a decade when country music was becoming more polished in Nashville studios, his show kept a distinctly traditional version of the genre visible in living rooms far beyond the South. The program finally ended in 1981 after roughly twenty years on the air. By then, its importance could be measured in more than ratings. For a generation of viewers who lived nowhere near Nashville, The Porter Wagoner Show had supplied a weekly doorway into the Grand Ole Opry world—and for dozens of young performers, one television camera had become the first place a national audience learned their names.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” PORTER WAGONER DID NOT NEED A COMPLICATED TELEVISION…

Country Music

Luther Perkins could make a Johnny Cash record recognizable with only a few notes. He was not a flashy guitarist, and that was part of the point. When Cash, Perkins and Marshall Grant began rehearsing together in Memphis in the mid-1950s, none of them considered themselves highly accomplished musicians. Grant later remembered that their limitations forced them into something simpler: bass and guitar hitting the same basic movement, Cash adding rhythm, and the three men gradually finding the dry, repetitive pulse that became the Tennessee Two’s signature sound. Perkins’s muted picking sat at the center of it. He played with so much restraint that the empty space between notes became part of the arrangement. That approach followed Cash from the first Sun records through “I Walk the Line,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Ring of Fire” and into the period when the Tennessee Two became the Tennessee Three. The Country Music Hall of Fame still preserves one of Perkins’s Fender Jaguars, noting that he used it on “Ring of Fire.” By January 1968, Luther was still there when Cash walked into Folsom Prison and recorded the album that revived his career. Three months later, the same band played San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom, with Perkins still supplying the spare guitar figure beneath Cash’s voice. He did not make it to the next chapter. Later that year, Perkins died after a fire at his Tennessee home. When The Johnny Cash Show premiered on ABC in June 1969, Carl Perkins was filling the guitar chair temporarily, and Bob Wootton soon became the permanent replacement. The television audience saw Cash entering the largest period of his career with a new guitarist beside him. The sound continued because it had to. Wootton learned the parts, the Tennessee Three carried on, and Cash’s career widened far beyond anything the original Memphis trio could have imagined. But the economy of those early records never disappeared. Decades later, guitarists such as Duane Eddy still singled out Luther Perkins as one of the players who had shown how much could be done on the low strings without filling every space. Perkins left behind no need for virtuoso mythology. A few muted notes were enough.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” LUTHER PERKINS DID NOT HAVE TO PLAY FAST…

Country Music

At Fox Hollow, young bluegrass musicians could walk into a professional studio without being handed a bill at the end. Tom T. Hall and his wife, Dixie, had built the studio on their farm outside Nashville after Tom’s years of touring had begun to slow. By then he had already written “Harper Valley P.T.A.,” “The Year Clayton Delaney Died,” and dozens of songs that established him as one of country music’s great storytellers. Dixie had her own history inside Nashville—journalist, publicist, songwriter and one of the early editors of Music City News. Their marriage had begun in 1968, but the most unusual part of their creative partnership arrived much later. When Tom stepped back from full-time touring in the 1990s, Dixie returned seriously to songwriting, and the two began writing bluegrass material together at an extraordinary pace. Over the final eighteen years of her life, Dixie was involved in an estimated three thousand songs. Fox Hollow became part home, part writing room and part refuge for musicians who did not have much money. The Halls opened their studio to bluegrass artists without charging them, created Good Home Grown Music to publish songs, and later launched Blue Circle Records. Dixie was especially determined to make younger performers feel that they belonged, sometimes helping with studio time, groceries or simply conversation. The work also gave Tom a different kind of second act. Instead of chasing another country-radio cycle, he returned to the bluegrass language he had learned as a Kentucky teenager. He and Dixie became regular figures at bluegrass gatherings, wrote for performers across the community and eventually received the IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award together. In 2018, three years after Dixie’s death, they were inducted jointly into the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame. One of Dixie’s largest projects came near the end of her life: Pickin’ Like a Girl, a four-CD collection involving 134 female singers and musicians, built from sixty-nine songs she had written or co-written. By then, Fox Hollow was no longer simply the farm where Tom T. Hall went after leaving the road. It had become a place where two songwriters used the quiet years of a marriage to make room for other people’s music.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TOM T. HALL LEFT THE ROAD AND BUILT…

Country Music

One of the last things anyone expected from Waylon Jennings in the early 1990s was an album about little boys, dirt, sisters and the small disasters of childhood. For most of his adult life, the public had known him through another vocabulary: outlaw country, pills, long nights, creative battles and a road schedule that rarely made family life simple. By the late 1980s, after finally getting clean, Jennings was speaking more openly about what those years had cost at home. He admitted that drugs had shortened his patience with his young son and that he could see the worry they had placed on Jessi Colter’s face. Shooter had arrived late in Waylon’s life. Jennings already had older children from previous marriages, but fatherhood in his forties felt different. In a 1993 interview, he said plainly that when children come early, “you miss too much” and are not always ready for what they need; with Shooter, he found himself paying closer attention. That attention gradually turned into songs. Cowboys, Sisters, Rascals & Dirt grew from things Waylon remembered doing as a boy and things he heard from children around him. One song came from a young nephew complaining that all his sisters were girls. Another drew on childhood mischief such as putting dirt in his grandfather’s tobacco. The closing track, “Shooter, You Are a Friend of Mine,” was written directly for his son. The project was deliberately small in scale. Jennings said he wanted to make music for children without talking down to them, and when a label suggested altering one song because of concerns about its lyrics, he simply took the album elsewhere. Even in a children’s record, the instinct that had made him fight Nashville producers decades earlier was still intact. Shooter did not grow up trying to copy his father. He gravitated toward rock bands such as Guns N’ Roses and Nine Inch Nails, and Waylon gave him room to find that path. Years later, Shooter would become a musician and producer in his own right. The children’s album never became one of Waylon Jennings’s defining commercial records. Its value sits somewhere else: it preserved a period when a man who had spent decades perfecting life on the road was finally paying close attention to what childhood looked like from the other side of the room.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” WAYLON JENNINGS HAD SPENT DECADES SINGING LIKE A…

Country Music

For years, Ernest Tubb wanted nothing more than to sound like Jimmie Rodgers. He had grown up studying Rodgers’s records, copying the phrasing, the guitar approach and especially the blue yodel that had made his hero famous. Carrie Rodgers, Jimmie’s widow, even encouraged the young Texan and helped him find songs, stage clothes and a recording opportunity with RCA. But the resemblance that gave Tubb direction also kept him from developing much identity of his own. That changed in 1939 after a tonsillectomy altered his voice. The surgery lowered his range and made the high yodeling style he had relied on much harder to use. Tubb could no longer lean on the sound that had connected him most closely to Rodgers. He adjusted by writing more of his own material and singing in the rougher, lower register that eventually became unmistakable. Decca gave him another chance in 1940, and “Blue Eyed Elaine” brought the first real sign that the new approach could work. A year later, “Walking the Floor Over You” broke through on a much larger scale. Tubb’s voice was never smooth in the conventional sense, and he knew it. What listeners heard instead was something direct and unvarnished, a plain baritone that fit naturally with electric guitar and the harder edges of honky-tonk. By the 1940s, the style he had been forced into was becoming part of the language younger country singers would inherit. Tubb never stopped honoring Jimmie Rodgers, but his best records no longer sounded like tribute. They sounded like the moment a singer who had spent years copying someone else finally became impossible to mistake for anyone but himself.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” ERNEST TUBB SPENT YEARS TRYING TO SOUND LIKE…

You Missed