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Country Music

DARRELL MCCALL MOVED TO NASHVILLE WITH HIS CHILDHOOD FRIEND JOHNNY PAYCHECK TO BECOME A DUO. IT FAILED. TWO YEARS LATER, MCCALL WAS SINGING ON A TOP-10 POP HIT — THEN WALKED AWAY FROM THAT ROAD AND WENT BACK TO HARD COUNTRY. Darrell McCall grew up in Ohio with Johnny Paycheck, then still known as Donny Young. McCall was already working as a radio disc jockey by age 15 and playing local dances. After his Army service, he and Paycheck headed for Nashville in 1958 hoping to record together. The duo went nowhere. Nashville still found uses for both men. McCall became a background singer and musician, working around Faron Young, George Jones and Ray Price. He learned the road and studio world from singers who were already defining modern honky-tonk. Then Buddy Killen offered him something completely different. McCall joined a studio pop group called the Little Dippers. Their record “Forever” became a Top 10 pop hit in 1960. For a young country singer who had arrived in Nashville chasing honky-tonk, the first real national success came wearing the wrong clothes. Capitol signed him as a solo artist the following year, but the singles failed. McCall eventually returned to country, recording “A Stranger Was Here” and continuing through a career that repeatedly placed him beside bigger stars without turning him into one himself. He later toured with Ray Price, Faron Young and Hank Williams Jr., and remained connected to the Texas traditional-country world that included Willie Nelson and Johnny Bush. He also wrote “Eleven Roses,” which became a major Hank Williams Jr. hit in 1972. By the outlaw era, McCall’s old-fashioned honky-tonk suddenly sounded less outdated than it had a few years earlier. He returned to stronger visibility without changing much about the music itself. Johnny Paycheck became a star identified with rebellion. Darrell McCall became something quieter. He spent decades proving that sometimes surviving country music means refusing to chase the version of success that found you first.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” DARRELL McCALL MOVED TO NASHVILLE WITH JOHNNY PAYCHECK…

Country Music

NORMA JEAN LEFT ONE OF COUNTRY TV’S BIGGEST JOBS TO GET MARRIED. WEEKS LATER, HER REPLACEMENT WALKED ONSTAGE TO BOOS AND CHANTS FOR NORMA JEAN. HER NAME WAS DOLLY PARTON. Before Dolly Parton became inseparable from Porter Wagoner, the woman beside him was Norma Jean Beasler. Raised on an Oklahoma farm, Norma Jean was performing on radio by age 12. She worked with Western swing bands, appeared on Ozark Jubilee, then joined The Porter Wagoner Show in the early 1960s. Television made “Pretty Miss Norma Jean” a familiar face across country America. She also had a recording career of her own. “Let’s Go All the Way” reached the country Top 15, “Go Cat Go” made the Top 10, and songs like “I Cried All the Way to the Bank” established her as more than Wagoner’s female vocalist. Then in 1967, Norma Jean decided to leave. She was engaged to H. D. “Jody” Taylor of Oklahoma City and planned to marry. She would continue recording for RCA and appearing at the Grand Ole Opry, but the television position she had occupied for years was suddenly open. Porter chose Dolly Parton. Dolly had already written songs for other artists and scored a hit with “Dumb Blonde,” but she was still far from the star she would become. The audience noticed immediately. At an early road appearance in Lebanon, Virginia, fans booed Dolly and called for Norma Jean. Wagoner kept her in the show and gradually worked more duets into the act until audiences accepted the new partnership. Within months, Porter and Dolly were recording together. Their collaboration produced a long run of hits and gave Parton a national platform that helped transform her career. Norma Jean kept recording after leaving the show and placed thirteen singles in Billboard’s country Top 40 between 1963 and 1968. She never became part of the mythology that grew around Porter and Dolly. But in the moment before that mythology began, country audiences still knew exactly whose voice was missing.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” NORMA JEAN LEFT ONE OF COUNTRY TELEVISION’S BIGGEST…

Country Music

GRAM PARSONS WANTED COUNTRY MUSIC TO WEAR A NEW FACE. SO HE PUT ON A WHITE NUDIE SUIT COVERED WITH PILLS, WEED, POPPIES, NAKED WOMEN, AND A CROSS. Before Nashville knew what to do with Gram Parsons, he was already trying to break its mirror. He did not want country music to stay locked inside clean rhinestone respectability. He heard something bigger in it — gospel ache, soul confession, rock-and-roll electricity, Bakersfield bite, and old hurt sung plainly enough for a barroom to understand. He called it Cosmic American Music. But ideas were not enough. Parsons wanted the image to fight too. After leaving The Byrds and helping pull Sweetheart of the Rodeo toward country-rock, he formed the Flying Burrito Brothers with Chris Hillman. Their 1969 debut, The Gilded Palace of Sin, became one of the key country-rock records, but it did not arrive dressed like a traditional country album. It arrived wearing provocation. Parsons took the band to Nudie Cohn, the famous cowboy tailor whose rhinestone suits had already helped shape country’s visual language. Then Parsons pushed the costume past decoration. His own white suit, designed by Manuel Cuevas, was covered with the things polite country was not supposed to show: marijuana leaves, pills, poppies, naked women, and a cross. It looked like a confession stitched into stagewear. The suit did not hide the danger around him. It advertised it. That was the strange brilliance of it. Parsons was not mocking country music from the outside. He loved the form deeply. But he also understood that the old cowboy image had always carried violence, sin, longing, loneliness, and death underneath the shine. He simply dragged those hidden things onto the fabric. The album itself was just as conflicted. The Gilded Palace of Sin mixed country, soul, rock, gospel feeling, and late-1960s looseness into something Nashville could not claim and rock radio could not fully sell. It earned respect, but not success. The record failed commercially in its first life, even as later listeners came to see it as a landmark of country-rock. That was Gram Parsons’ curse in miniature. He could see the bridge before the crowd could see the road. He dressed country music in its own secret sins, sang heartbreak like it belonged to both hippies and honky-tonks, and still watched the world mostly pass him by. Years later, the music survived the flop. The suit survived too. Today, that white Nudie suit feels less like a costume than evidence: a young man trying to force country music, rock music, and his own self-destruction into the same frame. The pills were there. The cross was there. The beauty was there. The warning was there. Gram Parsons did not just wear the future of country-rock. He wore the things that were going to kill him

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GRAM PARSONS WANTED COUNTRY MUSIC TO WEAR A…

Country Music

BOBBY BARE RECORDED A DEMO BEFORE LEAVING FOR THE ARMY. THE LABEL RELEASED HIS VOICE UNDER ANOTHER MAN’S NAME—AND IT WENT TO NO. 2. Bobby Bare was still trying to find a place in music when the draft interrupted him. He had already recorded unsuccessful sides for Capitol and Challenge when, back in Ohio awaiting induction, he met his friend Bill Parsons, who wanted a record deal. Bare suggested cutting some demos and joined him for a session at King Records in Cincinnati. Most of the studio time went to Parsons. With about fifteen minutes left, Bare quickly recorded a talking-blues song he had been writing about a young singer getting drafted just as fame arrived. He called it “The All-American Boy.” Bare considered it little more than something worth saving before he forgot it. Fraternity Records heard the tape and wanted to release it. There was a problem: Bare was still under contract to another label and was about to enter the Army. According to Bare, he agreed to the deal but specifically asked that his own name not be used. Fraternity released the unfinished demo credited to Bill Parsons as both performer and writer. Then Bare went through basic training at Fort Knox. The next time he heard “The All-American Boy,” it was already becoming one of the hottest records in America. The single climbed to No. 2 on the Billboard pop chart in 1959. Parsons appeared publicly as the singer and even lip-synced Bare’s voice during promotional appearances. Bare received no royalties from the hit. Strangely, he later believed the mistake helped him. “The All-American Boy” was a novelty record tied closely to the Elvis-era military draft. Bare felt that if his own name had been attached to it, the industry might have permanently categorized him as a novelty singer. Instead, after two years in the Army and another unsuccessful stretch with Fraternity, friends including Harlan Howard and Hank Cochran helped bring him to the attention of Chet Atkins. RCA signed him in 1962. “Shame on Me” followed, then “Detroit City,” which became Bare’s first Top 10 country hit and won a Grammy. “500 Miles Away from Home,” “Miller’s Cave,” “Four Strong Winds,” and “The Streets of Baltimore” established the career that the mislabeled single never could. Years later, Bare did not sound bitter about watching another man’s name sit on his first major hit. By then, the error on that Fraternity label had become an odd footnote rather than his identity—and the voice hidden behind it had gone on to build a career strong enough that nobody needed the wrong name anymore.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BOBBY BARE RECORDED A DEMO BEFORE LEAVING FOR…

Country Music

JOE ELY WENT TO LONDON PLAYING WEST TEXAS HONKY-TONK. THE CLASH CAME TO SEE HIM, PULLED HIM INTO THE LONDON CALLING SESSIONS — THEN FOLLOWED HIM BACK TO LUBBOCK TO SEE WHERE THAT MUSIC CAME FROM. By 1979, Joe Ely had already lived several musical lives. He grew up in Lubbock, Texas, played with Butch Hancock and Jimmie Dale Gilmore in the Flatlanders, watched their first recordings nearly disappear, then built a solo band around accordion, steel guitar, rockabilly and hard West Texas country. His 1978 album Honky Tonk Masquerade began attracting attention beyond Texas and helped take him to England. While Ely was playing the Venue in London, members of the Clash came to see him. Their worlds looked completely different. Ely came from Texas dance halls. The Clash came out of London punk. But Joe Strummer knew far more American roots music than Ely expected, even songs by Texas writers such as Guy Clark. The groups became friends. The Clash invited Ely and his band into the studio while they were working on London Calling. They spent several days together, talking about country, blues, rockabilly and the music underneath the labels. Later that year, when the Clash toured America, Ely joined them for several dates. Then he brought them to Lubbock. For the British band, West Texas was unfamiliar territory: flat land, cowboy culture and the hometown of Buddy Holly. They spent several days there before returning to the road. The relationship continued. The Clash later brought Ely back to England during the London Calling period, and recordings from that tour became his album Live Shots. Ely also contributed backing vocals during the sessions that produced “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” He never became a punk singer, and the Clash never became a country band. Years later, Ely would continue moving freely between honky-tonks, rock clubs and songwriter circles without treating those rooms as separate careers. The Flatlanders’ first record had once struggled even to reach stores. One of its members eventually discovered that his West Texas music did not need Nashville’s permission to travel.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOE ELY TOOK WEST TEXAS HONKY-TONK TO LONDON.…

Country Music

THE MAN TOM T. HALL IMMORTALIZED AS “CLAYTON DELANEY” WAS NOT A FICTIONAL COUNTRY HERO. HIS REAL NAME WAS LONNIE EASTERLY — A LOCAL GUITAR PICKER WHO TAUGHT A BAREFOOT KENTUCKY BOY HOW TO PLAY, THEN DIED BEFORE THAT BOY EVER REACHED NASHVILLE. Tom Hall grew up in Olive Hill, Kentucky, far from the professional country world he would eventually enter. One of the musicians he followed was Lonnie Easterly, an older local guitar player who had worked with a five-piece band in Ohio and returned home without becoming famous. To young Tom, none of that mattered. Easterly was the best picker around. Hall followed him, watched him play and learned from him. The Country Music Hall of Fame later credited Easterly as an important early mentor who helped shape Hall’s musical beginnings. But Easterly also represented the life country music could fail to deliver. He drank heavily, never made the move to Tennessee and reportedly warned Tom that there was no money in music and that the guitar would only make him old early. Hall listened to the lessons. He ignored the warning. Easterly died while Tom was still young, probably after a long illness. Hall later remembered going into the woods alone and crying for the man he had treated as a hero. Years passed before he turned that memory into a song. When Hall finally wrote it, he changed the name. “Clayton” came from Clayton Hill, where Easterly had lived. “Delaney” came from a neighboring family. Hall said he deliberately kept the invented name rooted in the same geography because he did not want to lose the reality of the place. “The Year That Clayton Delaney Died” was released in 1971. It reached No. 1 on the country chart for two weeks and crossed onto the pop chart. Hall later considered it one of his highest artistic achievements. The song worked because Hall did not turn Easterly into a flawless saint. Clayton drank. He failed to reach Nashville. He warned the boy following him that music could ruin a life. Yet none of those contradictions erased what he gave Tom: a first model of what a musician could be. By the time the record reached No. 1, Hall had become everything Easterly never managed to become — Nashville songwriter, recording artist, Grand Ole Opry member and eventually “The Storyteller.” But the song did something more interesting than rewrite the ending. It gave a local Kentucky picker who never escaped his own town a place inside country music history anyway. Lonnie Easterly never made it to Tennessee. His name did not need to.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TOM T. HALL TURNED “CLAYTON DELANEY” INTO A…

Country Music

FOR TEN YEARS, JESSE WINCHESTER COULD RELEASE RECORDS IN AMERICA BUT COULD NOT SAFELY STAND ON AN AMERICAN STAGE. ON APRIL 21, 1977, FOUR MONTHS AFTER JIMMY CARTER’S AMNESTY, HE FINALLY WALKED ONSTAGE IN BURLINGTON, VERMONT. Winchester had left the United States for Canada in 1967 rather than serve in Vietnam. The decision shaped everything that followed. From Montreal, he made acclaimed records, toured Canada and Europe, and wrote songs steeped in Memphis, Mississippi and Tennessee. But the country occupying so much of his music remained the one place he could not perform it. That changed on January 21, 1977. President Jimmy Carter issued a pardon for many Vietnam-era draft resisters. Winchester had become a Canadian citizen in 1973, creating complications, but he was ultimately included and could legally return. His first U.S. concert in roughly a decade came April 21 at Burlington Municipal Auditorium in Vermont, only about 40 miles from the Canadian border. The location carried its own tension. A few months earlier, crossing that border could have meant arrest. Now Winchester stood onstage with his Canadian band before an American audience that had known his records but had never been able to see him tour behind them. Early in the show, he acknowledged Carter while performing “Why Do You Like Roosevelt?,” a song he had rewritten to explain his refusal to fight. When Winchester reached the line about refusing the call to war, the audience erupted. It was not simply applause for an old song. For the first time, the political decision that had kept Winchester away from American stages was being sung about openly by the man who had lived its consequences. A month later, he played Philadelphia’s Bijou Cafe. That performance was recorded and later released, capturing an artist who had suddenly gained access to an audience he had spent most of the 1970s reaching only through records and other singers. The timing, however, was cruel. By 1977, the singer-songwriter boom that might have carried Winchester into wider American fame had already begun to fade. His return did not produce the commercial breakthrough that years of critical praise had once suggested was possible. He kept his home in Canada and continued recording and touring. Only decades later, in 2002, did he move back permanently to the United States. The Burlington concert did not give Jesse Winchester back the career he might have had. It gave him something smaller and perhaps more important. From that night forward, the geography inside his songs was no longer a place he was forbidden to enter.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JESSE WINCHESTER COULD RELEASE RECORDS IN AMERICA, BUT…

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THE FLATLANDERS HAD ALREADY WATCHED ONE RECORDING PROJECT DISAPPEAR BEFORE IT COULD BECOME A REAL ALBUM. A FEW YEARS LATER, BUTCH HANCOCK STOPPED WAITING FOR SOMEONE ELSE TO RELEASE HIS MUSIC — AND STARTED HIS OWN LABEL. Hancock came out of Lubbock, Texas, alongside Joe Ely and Jimmie Dale Gilmore. The three recorded together in the early 1970s as The Flatlanders, but their first album was effectively buried. The single went nowhere, the planned LP was canceled, and only a small run of 8-track tapes escaped into circulation. The group soon scattered. Ely built a touring career. Gilmore eventually left Texas for a period. Hancock kept writing. But instead of moving permanently into Nashville’s publishing system, he stayed close to the independent Texas world that had formed him. In 1978, Hancock created Rainlight Records. The first release was West Texas Waltzes and Dust-Blown Tractor Tunes, an album whose title sounded almost like a map of the country around Lubbock. Hancock wrote the songs, sang them and released the record largely outside the machinery that normally decided which country artists reached stores and radio. It was not a major commercial breakthrough. That was partly the point. Rainlight allowed Hancock to keep recording without reshaping himself for a label looking for the next radio single. Over the following years, he used the imprint for albums including The Wind’s Dominion and Diamond Hill, gradually building a catalog that circulated through Texas, folk and songwriter communities. Meanwhile, songs from that catalog traveled farther than the records themselves. Joe Ely recorded Hancock compositions such as “She Never Spoke Spanish to Me” and “Boxcars.” Emmylou Harris, Jerry Jeff Walker and others also carried his writing into larger rooms. The strange reversal came later. The Flatlanders recordings that had failed in the early 1970s were rediscovered and reissued, eventually becoming regarded as an important piece of Texas country history. Hancock, Ely and Gilmore reunited and began recording again decades after the industry had first failed to find a place for them. By then, Hancock no longer needed that old rejection corrected. He had already spent years proving there was another way to build a body of work. Long before independent country became a marketable identity, he had treated independence as something much simpler: the ability to keep making the next record.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE FLATLANDERS WATCHED THEIR FIRST ALBUM DISAPPEAR BEFORE…

Country Music

MARTY STUART PAID $1,450 FOR CLARENCE WHITE’S ONE-OF-A-KIND TELECASTER. HE TOLD WHITE’S WIDOW IT WAS WORTH FAR MORE. SHE REFUSED: “YOU NEED TO HAVE THAT GUITAR.” Marty Stuart had admired Clarence White long before he owned anything that belonged to him. White had moved from bluegrass with the Kentucky Colonels into the Byrds, helping push country guitar into rock. With Gene Parsons, he also developed an early B-Bender system inside a Fender Telecaster, allowing the B string to rise like a pedal steel. White died in 1973 after being struck by a drunk driver while loading equipment after a show. Seven years later, Stuart visited White’s widow, Susie. Marty had recently joined Johnny Cash’s band and finally had a steady paycheck. Among Clarence’s equipment was the heavily modified Telecaster carrying the original B-Bender. Stuart put his checkbook on the kitchen table and asked Susie to name a price. She wrote down $1,450. Marty protested that the guitar was worth far more. Susie knew. She told him Clarence would have wanted him to own it because he would take care of it and honor what it represented. Stuart left with the Telecaster. He did not put it behind glass. One of the first times he used it publicly was while playing behind Johnny Cash on Saturday Night Live. Over the following decades, it traveled through Stuart’s solo career, recording sessions and performances with the Fabulous Superlatives. He also refused to erase its history. The worn finish, stickers, modifications and B-Bender remained. The instrument still looked like something that had already lived another musician’s life before entering his. Eventually Stuart wrote “Hummingbyrd” for Clarence White. Rather than copy White note for note, the instrumental drew from the country-rock guitar language he had helped create. In 2011, “Hummingbyrd” won the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance. For Stuart, the award carried unusual weight. He later said it made him feel that he had finally earned his stripes with the instrument entrusted to him decades earlier. By then, Clarence White had been gone nearly forty years. Yet the sound he helped invent had moved through the Byrds into country rock, into Marty Stuart’s hands, and then into another Grammy-winning record. The player was gone. The musical vocabulary was still expanding.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MARTY STUART OFFERED CLARENCE WHITE’S WIDOW A BLANK…

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THE FIRST TIME FANS THREW MONEY AT JOHN CONLEE DURING “BUSTED,” THE TOTAL WAS ONLY $57. HE SENT IT TO FEED THE CHILDREN. YEARS LATER, THE SAME SONG HAD RAISED HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. “Busted” already fit John Conlee unusually well. Written by Harlan Howard, the song follows a man buried under bills, failed crops and family needs. Conlee recorded it for his 1982 album of the same name, and his version reached No. 6 on Billboard’s country chart. Then something unexpected happened at a fair in California. While Conlee was singing about being broke, members of the audience began walking toward the stage and handing him dollar bills as a joke. They kept coming. By the end of the song, Conlee had collected about $57. Instead of dividing the money among the band or treating it as a strange night on the road, he held onto it and eventually sent it to Feed the Children. The joke became part of the show. Whenever Conlee performed “Busted,” audiences learned that dollar bills tossed toward the stage would be collected for charity. A red bucket eventually traveled with him specifically for the donations. The amounts accumulated slowly. One dollar. Five dollars. Another handful at the next show. By 2009, Conlee said the ritual had raised more than $235,000 for Feed the Children. Other official and biographical accounts have documented earlier totals above $140,000. The connection made sense beyond the lyric. Conlee had grown up working on a Kentucky farm, raising hogs, tending tobacco and doing the kind of physical work that later populated many of his records. His biggest songs rarely belonged to glamorous characters. “Common Man,” “Friday Night Blues” and “Busted” lived closer to paychecks, bills and people trying to keep ordinary lives together. That concern later pulled him toward another cause. When Willie Nelson and John Mellencamp announced Farm Aid in 1985, Conlee contacted them and offered to help. He went on to participate in multiple Farm Aid events supporting struggling family farmers. Eventually, the money collected during “Busted” was redirected toward causes assisting wounded military veterans. The ritual survived even as the beneficiary changed. By then, “Busted” had become something Harlan Howard could not have planned when he wrote it. A song about having nothing left had created a small economy of giving—built not from wealthy donors or corporate checks, but from ordinary people walking toward a stage with crumpled bills in their hands. The lyric described a man who could not make ends meet. The audience kept answering him one dollar at a time.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOHN CONLEE SANG “BUSTED,” AND FANS STARTED THROWING…

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