Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

SHE MARRIED HIM ON MARCH 4, 1983. BY THAT FALL, GEORGE JONES WAS BACK IN A PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL — AND NANCY STILL DID NOT WALK AWAY. Nancy Sepulvado did not marry the safe version of George Jones. She married him when the nickname “No Show Jones” still followed him like a second name. She married him after the missed concerts, the cocaine years, the drinking, the bad company, the broken promises, and the kind of public wreckage most women would have been warned to run from. George was still the voice country music worshiped, but at home and on the road, he was a man barely holding himself together. They married on March 4, 1983. There was no clean honeymoon into sobriety. That same year, George was still fighting the old collapse. In the fall of 1983, after a drunken breakdown in Alabama, he was committed again to Hillcrest Psychiatric Hospital. He was physically worn down, emotionally wrecked, and sick enough that the legend around him no longer looked romantic. It looked dangerous. Nancy stayed. She did not save him in one dramatic scene. She started with the hard, unpretty work around the edges — cutting off the people feeding the chaos, getting control of the money, standing between George and the life that kept pulling him back under. Slowly, the shows became steadier. The cocaine stopped. The stage started seeing him more often than the headlines did. George later said love from Nancy did what doctors, friends, ministers, and therapists had not been able to do. The marriage did not begin after he was rescued. It began while he was still drowning — and Nancy chose to stay in the water long enough to pull him toward shore.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” NANCY MARRIED GEORGE JONES IN 1983 — BY…

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THEY OFFERED HIM $100 TO GO AWAY. BILLY JOE SHAVER SAID NO — THEN THREATENED TO FIGHT WAYLON JENNINGS UNTIL HE LISTENED TO HIS SONGS. The whole thing started in Texas. In 1972, at the Dripping Springs Reunion, Billy Joe Shaver was sitting in a songwriter circle, playing the rough little songs he had carried around like unpaid debts. Waylon Jennings was nearby, resting in a trailer, half-listening. Then he heard one. “Willy the Wandering Gypsy and Me.” Waylon asked if Billy Joe had any more of those old cowboy songs. Billy Joe said he did. Waylon told him he might record a whole album of them. Most people would have gone home smiling. Billy Joe went to Nashville. Then he waited. For months, Waylon dodged him. Billy Joe kept trying to find him. Finally, with help from a local DJ, he tracked Waylon down at an RCA session with Chet Atkins. That is where the story stopped being polite. Waylon offered him $100 to leave. Billy Joe refused. He told Waylon he would fight him right there if he did not listen to the songs he had promised to hear. Waylon finally made a deal: sing one. If he liked it, Billy Joe could sing another. If not, he had to go. Billy Joe sang. Then he sang another. Then another. In 1973, Waylon released Honky Tonk Heroes, built almost entirely from Billy Joe Shaver songs. Outlaw country did not walk into Nashville quietly. One part of it came through an RCA hallway, carried by a songwriter too broke and too stubborn to take the hundred dollars.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BILLY JOE SHAVER REFUSED WAYLON JENNINGS’ $100 —…

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HE SAW “TRAILERS FOR SALE OR RENT” ON A SIGN. MONTHS LATER, ROGER MILLER TURNED A BROKE DRIFTER INTO ONE OF THE BIGGEST COUNTRY HITS OF THE 1960S. Roger Miller did not come out of a clean Nashville story. He was born in Oklahoma, lost his father young, and grew up poor enough to understand how far a man could stretch a dollar. Before the big records, he had already been through Army life, odd jobs, songwriting rooms, and years of trying to make his strange mind fit inside a business that liked its singers easier to explain. The first real crack came with “Dang Me” in 1964. Suddenly, Nashville had to deal with him. He was funny, fast, loose, and sharp — the kind of writer who could make a joke sound like it had a bruise under it. Then he saw the sign. “Trailers for sale or rent.” That plain little line started “King of the Road.” Miller built a whole man out of it: no phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes — just a drifter counting rooms, pushing a broom, and acting like he owned the highway because he owned almost nothing else. In 1965, the song crossed far beyond country. It went to No. 1 on the country chart, climbed high on the pop chart, and helped Miller dominate the Grammys. A broke man in the song became a king. And Roger Miller proved that country music did not always need a death, a divorce, or a bar fight to hurt. Sometimes all it needed was a road sign and a man who knew what empty pockets sounded like.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” ROGER MILLER SAW “TRAILERS FOR SALE OR RENT”…

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THE PRODUCER RECORDED HIS OWN OFFICE DOOR CLOSING. THEN GEORGE JONES TURNED THAT SOUND INTO A NO. 1 COUNTRY RECORD. By 1974, George Jones was standing in one of the strangest hot streaks of his life. The drinking was already there. The missed shows were already following him. The marriage to Tammy Wynette had made him even more famous, but it had not made him easier to hold together. Still, when he stepped into the studio with Billy Sherrill, the voice could cut through anything Nashville put around it. That year, “The Grand Tour” had put him back at No. 1 as a solo artist for the first time in years. Then came “The Door.” Billy Sherrill and Norro Wilson wrote it like a heartbreak song, but the sound inside it was darker than a normal goodbye. The man in the lyric hears a door close after the woman leaves, and that single sound becomes louder than thunder, louder than a train, louder than war. Sherrill wanted the record to feel physical, not just sung. So he recorded an actual door closing — his own office door — and built the song around that hit. Jones did the rest. Released in October 1974, “The Door” went to No. 1. On the surface, it was another breakup record from the greatest heartbreak singer alive. Underneath, it carried something heavier: a man comparing one woman leaving to battlefield noise, as if the quiet after love could do more damage than the war itself. George Jones had sung plenty of heartbreak before. This time, country radio heard it shut behind him.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BILLY SHERRILL RECORDED HIS OWN OFFICE DOOR CLOSING…

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THE CMA NIGHT HE DIDN’T ATTEND THEY ASKED GEORGE JONES TO SING A SHORTENED VERSION OF “CHOICES.” HE STAYED HOME. THEN ALAN JACKSON STOPPED HIS OWN SONG AND SANG IT FOR HIM. By 1999, George Jones had already survived more than most country singers could put into one lifetime. The missed shows had become part of the legend. The drinking had nearly taken him more than once. In March of that year, a near-fatal car crash put him back in the headlines for reasons no singer wants. He was 67, still carrying the voice, still carrying the damage, and still trying to prove there was something left besides the wreckage people remembered. Then came “Choices.” The song did not need much explaining. A man looking back at what he had done. What he had lost. What he could not undo. When Jones sang it, the words sounded less like a lyric and more like a courtroom with nobody else in the room. The CMA nominated it for Single of the Year. Then producers asked him to perform a shortened version on the 1999 awards show. George refused. He did not go to the ceremony. He stayed home with Nancy and watched from the living room. That night, Alan Jackson walked onstage to sing “Pop a Top.” Halfway through, he stopped. The band shifted. Instead of finishing his own single, Alan sang the chorus of “Choices” for George Jones. Then he walked offstage. Jones later said it moved him and Nancy to tears. The man called “No Show Jones” had missed the show again. This time, the absence said more than the stage could.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GEORGE JONES STAYED HOME ON CMA NIGHT —…

Country Music

THE BIG BOPPER DIED SIX DAYS BEFORE “WHITE LIGHTNING” WAS RELEASED. TWO MONTHS LATER, GEORGE JONES HAD HIS FIRST NO. 1 RECORD. George Jones was not country royalty yet in 1959. He was still a hard-edged Texas singer trying to turn a wild voice into a career that would last longer than the next single. He had hits before. He had a name on the country chart. But he did not yet have the record that could kick the door open and make radio treat him like a force. Then came “White Lightning.” The song did not come from a Nashville ballad room. It came from J. P. Richardson — the Big Bopper — a larger-than-life Texas radio man and performer who knew how to make a record jump. He wrote it as a fast, comic, dangerous song about moonshine, the kind of thing that could have sounded like a joke in the wrong hands. Jones took it into the studio in 1958. The session was rough. The story goes that he needed take after take to get through it, with producer Pappy Daily trying to pull the performance out of him. What finally came out did not sound polished. It sounded half-crazy in the best way — hiccups, speed, country, rockabilly, and a young George Jones running like the law was already behind him. Then tragedy hit before the record did. On February 3, 1959, the Big Bopper died in the plane crash that also killed Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Six days later, “White Lightning” was released. By April, it was No. 1. George Jones got the first chart-topper of his career. The man who wrote it never got to hear the crowd catch up to it. A song about homemade firewater became the record that pushed Jones into the next room of country music, carrying the voice of one Texas wild man through another.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE BIG BOPPER DIED SIX DAYS BEFORE “WHITE…

Country Music

SHE HID EVERY CAR KEY IN THE HOUSE. GEORGE JONES FOUND THE KEY TO THE LAWNMOWER AND DROVE EIGHT MILES FOR A DRINK. George Jones was already famous before the lawnmower became part of the legend. He had come out of southeast Texas with a voice that could bend a word until it sounded broken in three different places. “Why Baby Why” had put him on the map. “White Lightning” had made him bigger. By the 1960s, he was one of the finest country singers alive — and one of the hardest men in country music to keep standing in the right place at the right time. The drinking was no small shadow. It wrecked shows. It wrecked marriages. It helped turn him into “No Show Jones,” the singer people loved too much to ignore and feared too much to trust. While he was married to Shirley Corley, the story goes, she tried to stop him from leaving the house drunk to buy liquor. She hid the keys to every car they owned. But she forgot the lawnmower. Jones later wrote that he saw the mower sitting outside with the key still in it. It was not built for a highway. It was not built for a grown man running from his own thirst. But it had an engine. That was enough. The liquor store was about eight miles away near Beaumont. At five miles an hour, the ride took more than an hour. George Jones got there anyway. People laugh at that story because it sounds impossible. A country star crawling down a Texas road on a riding mower, chasing a bottle like it was the only appointment he could still keep. But underneath the joke was the part that made his songs hurt. The voice was golden. The man was still looking for the keys to get home.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GEORGE JONES’ WIFE HID EVERY CAR KEY —…

Country Music

THE ALBUM THAT ARRIVED AFTER THE FUNERAL HE WAS 34 WHEN THEY FOUND HIM IN HIS GOODLETTSVILLE HOME. THREE MONTHS LATER, THE ALBUM HE NEVER GOT TO HOLD WAS ON COUNTRY RADIO. Keith Whitley did not sound like a man chasing a trend. He came out of Kentucky bluegrass, singing as a teenager with Ricky Skaggs, then working through Ralph Stanley’s world before Nashville ever gave him a clean shot. His voice carried old mountain ache into a business that was already starting to polish its edges. The first years were not easy. He fought alcohol. He cut records. He waited for the room to catch up with the voice. Then it finally happened. “Don’t Close Your Eyes” went to No. 1 in 1988. “When You Say Nothing at All” followed. “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” gave him another hit and sounded almost too close to the life he was living. Whitley was no longer just respected by singers. He was becoming the man other country voices measured themselves against. On May 9, 1989, he died at his home in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, from acute alcohol poisoning. The record was not finished with him. Three months later, I Wonder Do You Think of Me was released. The title track went to No. 1 after he was gone. Fans heard that voice coming through the radio like he had only stepped out of the room. But there was no next tour to build. No long prime. No older Keith Whitley standing at the Opry with gray in his beard. Country music got the voice. It lost the years that were supposed to come with it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” KEITH WHITLEY WAS 34 WHEN THEY FOUND HIM…

Country Music

THE SAWMILL TOOK TWO FINGERS FROM HIS RIGHT HAND. THEN BILLY JOE SHAVER TAUGHT THE DAMAGED HAND TO PLAY GUITAR ANYWAY. Before Nashville knew his name, Billy Joe Shaver was not walking around like a man destined to write outlaw country. He was working. Rodeo jobs. Navy at seventeen. Hard labor. Then a sawmill job that changed the shape of his hand before it ever held a songwriter’s future. One day, his right hand got caught in the machinery. He lost most of two fingers. For a man who had not yet made it anywhere, that should have been the kind of injury that narrowed the rest of life down to pain, odd jobs, and whatever work a damaged hand could still do. Billy Joe did something else. He taught himself guitar around the missing fingers. Then he tried to leave Texas. He meant to hitchhike west toward Los Angeles. Couldn’t get a ride. So he crossed the road and started going the other way. Memphis came first. Then Nashville. There, he found a songwriting job for $50 a week. Years later, people heard “I Been to Georgia on a Fast Train” and thought it sounded like a man who had lived every line too hard. Before Billy Joe Shaver wrote outlaw country, the sawmill had already cut the softness out of his hand.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE SAWMILL TOOK TWO FINGERS FROM BILLY JOE…

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THE SONG THAT MADE HOMESICKNESS A HIT RECORD “DETROIT CITY” WAS NOT ABOUT WINNING. IT WAS ABOUT A SOUTHERN MAN TOO PROUD TO TELL HOME HE WAS LOSING. Bobby Bare had already been around the business before country music truly claimed him. He had tasted early pop success, worn the wrong kind of labels, toured, recorded, and tried to figure out where his voice actually belonged. Then Chet Atkins signed him to RCA in 1962, and Bare started moving into a space that was neither slick Nashville nor straight folk. It was something plainer. Story songs. Working men. Drifters. People caught between where they came from and where they had to live. Then came “Detroit City.” Mel Tillis and Danny Dill had written the bones of it. The story was simple enough to hurt: a man working up North tells everybody back home he is doing fine, while the truth is eating him alive. Detroit was not just a city in the song. It was a symbol for all the Southern men who had gone looking for wages and found loneliness instead. Bare recorded it in 1963. He did not sing it like a hero. He sang it like a man trying not to let his mother hear the break in his voice. The spoken recitation in the middle made the lie feel worse. He could say he was successful. The listener knew better. The record crossed over. It reached the country Top 10, climbed to No. 16 on the pop chart, and won a Grammy for Best Country & Western Recording. Bobby Bare did not need a bar fight or a death scene to make the song heavy. All he needed was a man far from home, pretending he was all right.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” “DETROIT CITY” MADE HOMESICKNESS A HIT — BUT…

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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.

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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.