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Country Music

BUCK OWENS WAS SO SURE NEW YORK MIGHT NOT WANT HIM THAT HE INITIALLY TRIED TO TURN CARNEGIE HALL DOWN. ON MARCH 25, 1966, HE WALKED INTO A PACKED HOUSE — AND PROVED THAT BAKERSFIELD COUNTRY COULD TRAVEL FAR BEYOND CALIFORNIA. By the fall of 1965, Buck Owens was already country music’s dominant chart force. He was deep into an extraordinary run of No. 1 singles, and the Buckaroos had become one of the tightest road bands in America. Their sound was the opposite of much of what Nashville was polishing at the time: bright Telecaster guitar, pedal steel, hard drums, high harmony and almost no attempt to soften the edges for pop radio. Then Carnegie Hall called. For Buck, the invitation was flattering and frightening in equal measure. New York was not Bakersfield, Fresno or another western dance hall where he already knew the audience. According to a Library of Congress history of the concert, Owens was worried enough about whether Manhattan would turn out that he initially told manager Jack McFadden to decline. The fear turned out to be misplaced. The March 25, 1966 show played to a packed house. Carnegie Hall’s own history notes that although Buck was not the first country artist to appear there, he became the first to record a country album in the hall. And what he brought to New York was not a specially dressed-up version of country music. It was the Buckaroos. Don Rich handled lead guitar, fiddle and harmony vocals. Tom Brumley played steel. Doyle Holly was on bass and vocals, Willie Cantu on drums. These were the same road musicians Buck regularly used in the studio, a practice that gave his records a live, muscular precision unusual in Nashville at the time. They tore through “Act Naturally,” “Together Again,” “Love’s Gonna Live Here,” “Waitin’ in Your Welfare Line,” “Buckaroo” and “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail.” There was little room for correction. Tom Brumley later remembered that the album required no fixing afterward; years of working together had trained the band to get performances right while they were happening. That mattered historically. The resulting Carnegie Hall Concert was not simply proof that Buck Owens could sell tickets in New York. Contemporary trade coverage described the dates as helping break down country-music barriers in the city, while later critics treated the album as evidence that country had fully entered America’s urban popular-music mainstream. Bakersfield had often been discussed as Nashville’s outsider alternative. For one night in 1966, it did not sound like an alternative at all. It sounded completely at home on one of America’s most prestigious stages.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BUCK OWENS WAS SO SURE NEW YORK MIGHT…

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ONE PHONE CALL TO ENGLAND IN 1968 TOLD ROY ORBISON THAT HIS HOUSE WAS GONE — AND TWO OF HIS SONS WERE DEAD. IT CAME JUST TWO YEARS AFTER HE HAD ALREADY BURIED HIS WIFE. At the beginning of the 1960s, Roy Orbison seemed to be living inside one long ascent. “Only the Lonely,” “Crying,” “In Dreams” and “Oh, Pretty Woman” had made him an international star. His voice could move from a near-whisper to a full, aching crescendo without sounding like anyone else on radio. In 1963, he toured Britain with the Beatles. A year later, “Oh, Pretty Woman” became the biggest record of his career. Then the decade turned brutal. On June 6, 1966, Roy’s wife, Claudette, was killed in a motorcycle accident near Gallatin, Tennessee. She had been woven into his life and music for years — the woman behind “Claudette,” the mother of his three boys, and a central figure in the world he returned to after touring. Roy kept working. Two years later, in September 1968, he was in England finishing another tour when the telephone rang in the middle of the night. The news was almost impossible to absorb. His home in Hendersonville had burned. His two older sons, Roy DeWayne, 10, and Anthony, 6, had died in the fire. His youngest son, Wesley, survived. Orbison was thousands of miles away. There was no way to hurry back quickly enough to change anything. People around him later remembered how completely he withdrew into himself. Johnny Cash recalled that Roy did not want to talk much about what had happened. The public still knew the dark glasses, the still posture and the enormous voice, but the man behind them was carrying a private devastation that had arrived in two blows only 27 months apart. The timing made everything harder. By then, Orbison’s American chart run had already begun to cool. His move to MGM had not produced another stretch like the Monument years, and while overseas audiences remained loyal, the center of gravity in popular music was shifting fast around him. He continued touring. But the next major thing he built was not a comeback. In 1969, Orbison married Barbara Jakobs. They later had two sons together and created another home in Hendersonville. Friends and family would remember the 1970s less as a period when Roy was chasing the charts than as one in which he slowly rebuilt an ordinary life around the pieces that remained. The voice eventually came roaring back in the 1980s. Before that happened, though, Roy Orbison had already done something harder than making another hit. He had learned how to live inside a house that no longer contained the family he had once expected to grow old with.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” ONE PHONE CALL TO ENGLAND TOLD ROY ORBISON…

Country Music

AT NEWPORT IN 1964, JOHNNY CASH HANDED BOB DYLAN ONE OF HIS OWN MARTIN GUITARS. IT WAS MORE THAN A GIFT BETWEEN TWO STARS — IT WAS A COUNTRY MUSIC GIANT PUBLICLY TELLING THE FOLK WORLD, “I HEAR WHAT YOU’RE DOING.” By then, Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan had already been listening to each other from a distance. Dylan admired Cash’s Sun recordings from the 1950s. Cash, meanwhile, had become obsessed with The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, playing it repeatedly on the road until a correspondence began between the two men. They came from different corners of American music, but both were writing songs about outsiders, hard lives and people who rarely occupied the center of popular culture. Their friendship solidified at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. Cash was already a major country star, but instead of treating the folk revival as a separate world, he stepped directly into it. During his Newport set, he sang Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Dylan later described hearing Cash perform one of his songs as a tremendous thrill. Then came the quieter gesture. During a hotel-room jam, Cash gave Dylan a treasured Martin guitar. The Country Music Hall of Fame describes it as a symbol of respect and admiration, while photographer Jim Marshall’s archive identifies the exchange as an old country gesture between musicians. The relationship quickly moved beyond friendship. A few months later, Cash and June Carter recorded Dylan’s “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” taking one of his songs into the country market. Then, beginning in 1966, Dylan himself came to Nashville, where the city’s session musicians helped shape Blonde on Blonde. He returned for John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, helping change the way outsiders viewed Nashville as a recording center. By 1969, the connection had come full circle. When The Johnny Cash Show premiered nationally from Nashville, Dylan was among the first guests. Cash used the program to place country figures such as Bill Monroe alongside artists from folk and rock, creating one of the era’s most unusual musical meeting places on network television. The Martin guitar did not single-handedly create that exchange. But it captured the spirit of what was happening. Long before “country-rock” became an easy label, one of Nashville’s biggest stars had already reached across the boundary, put his own instrument into another songwriter’s hands, and treated the music on the other side as something worth carrying home.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” AT NEWPORT IN 1964, JOHNNY CASH HANDED BOB…

Country Music

RONNIE MILSAP WAS HEADED TOWARD LAW SCHOOL WHEN RAY CHARLES HEARD HIM PLAY AND TOLD HIM NOT TO WALK AWAY FROM THE MUSIC ALREADY INSIDE HIM. By then, Milsap had spent most of his childhood at North Carolina’s state school for the blind, where classical piano and violin were part of his education even as country, gospel, rhythm and blues slipped into his world through late-night radio. He later remembered counselors warning that trying to become a professional musician could leave him dependent on the state, advice that pushed practicality against the one thing he already knew how to do exceptionally well. After graduating in 1962, Milsap studied pre-law at Young Harris College and had a path toward continuing his education, but music kept pulling him elsewhere. While still a student, he met Ray Charles, his musical hero, and Charles encouraged him to trust that instinct rather than abandon it for a safer profession. Milsap’s own official biography remembers the advice simply: Charles could hear the music inside him. The decision did not deliver Nashville immediately. Milsap spent the next several years moving through Atlanta clubs, soul and R&B sessions, small labels and eventually Memphis, where he worked around Chips Moman’s American Studio and played piano on Elvis Presley’s “Kentucky Rain.” By the early 1970s he had already touched several corners of American popular music without yet finding the career that would define him. Charley Pride eventually urged him toward Nashville, and on December 26, 1972, Milsap arrived to headline the showroom at the King of the Road Hotel. The response was immediate enough that he had a manager within weeks and was recording for RCA within three months. What followed was not a narrow country career. Milsap carried soul phrasing, pop instincts and piano-driven arrangements into country radio, eventually scoring thirty-five Billboard No. 1 country hits while crossing repeatedly into pop and adult contemporary audiences. The safer path had once pointed toward law. The one he chose instead helped broaden what mainstream country could sound like in the 1970s and 1980s.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” RONNIE MILSAP WAS HEADED TOWARD LAW SCHOOL WHEN…

Country Music

BY 1972, THE PROBLEM WASN’T JUST NASHVILLE. WAYLON JENNINGS WAS SICK WITH HEPATITIS, HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS IN DEBT, PAYING ALIMONY TO THREE EX-WIVES—AND SERIOUSLY THINKING ABOUT QUITTING MUSIC. Waylon had been successful enough to look established from the outside. He had RCA albums, Top 10 records, a Grammy, and years of touring behind him. But the economics underneath were ugly. His road operation was losing money, he owed large sums, the IRS was circling, and the harder he worked, the less control he seemed to have over the records carrying his name. Then his body stopped cooperating. In 1972, Waylon came down with hepatitis after a performance trip to New Mexico and ended up seriously ill. Lying there, unable to keep running from one show to the next, he began taking stock of what years of success had actually bought him. The answer was not much. His health was damaged. His personal life had already gone through three failed marriages. He was deep in debt, and RCA still largely dictated the machinery around his recordings. For a moment, quitting no longer sounded dramatic. It sounded practical. Instead, Waylon changed who was fighting for him. He fired longtime manager Lucky Moeller and brought in Neil Reshen, a New York manager with little interest in Nashville etiquette. Reshen began attacking the contracts and accounting arrangements that Waylon had spent years accepting. The result was the opening Waylon had been waiting for. RCA eventually granted him much greater control over his recordings—choice of songs, musicians, studios and production. In 1973, Lonesome, On’ry and Mean and Honky Tonk Heroes followed, with the latter built heavily around Billy Joe Shaver’s songs. The records sounded less like Nashville was arranging Waylon and more like Waylon was finally arranging himself. Within a few years, the same artist who had considered walking away was at the center of country music’s outlaw boom. The important turn did not happen under stage lights. It happened while Waylon was sick enough to stop moving—and finally had time to ask why being successful was still leaving him broke, exhausted, and making records he did not fully control.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BY 1972, WAYLON JENNINGS WAS SICK WITH HEPATITIS,…

Country Music

TAMMY WYNETTE SPENT YEARS SINGING ABOUT HEARTBREAK WHILE HER OWN BODY WAS BREAKING DOWN. SHE ENDURED ABOUT 20 OPERATIONS, REPEATED HOSPITAL STAYS AND CHRONIC PAIN — YET KEPT GOING BACK ONSTAGE. By the 1970s, Tammy Wynette had already become the “First Lady of Country Music.” “Stand by Your Man,” “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” and “I Don’t Wanna Play House” had made her one of the defining female voices of the era. She was also living through turbulent marriages, constant touring and a schedule that left little room for a body already beginning to fail her. The health problems were not minor. Over the years, Wynette underwent repeated abdominal operations and suffered from chronic intestinal and gallbladder problems. The Washington Post later summarized her medical history as roughly 20 operations, alongside repeated illness and hospitalizations. Pain became part of daily life. So did medication. What began as treatment for serious physical problems eventually contributed to a dependence on prescription painkillers, adding another private struggle to a life already being lived in public. And yet the career kept moving. Wynette continued recording, touring and appearing on television through much of the period. By the end of the 1980s, she had accumulated twenty No. 1 singles and sold more than 30 million records. That contrast became part of the way audiences saw her. Onstage, she remained polished, controlled and unmistakably Tammy Wynette. Offstage, there were surgeries, hospital rooms, pain and stretches when simply getting through another engagement required far more effort than the audience could see. The later years did not become easier. Wynette continued dealing with serious health issues until her death in 1998 at age 55 from a blood clot in her lungs. Her career is often remembered through songs about women surviving marriages, betrayal and disappointment. But by the final decades of her life, survival had become much more literal: not a theme in the lyric, but the practical work of getting through another operation, another recovery and another night under the lights.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TAMMY WYNETTE SPENT YEARS SINGING ABOUT HEARTBREAK WHILE…

Country Music

TWELVE YEARS AFTER WALKING OUT OF SAN QUENTIN, THE FORMER INMATE HAD BECOME ONE OF THE BIGGEST COUNTRY STARS IN AMERICA. THEN CALIFORNIA’S GOVERNOR SIGNED THE PAPER THAT FINALLY REMOVED THE OLD CONVICTIONS HANGING OVER MERLE HAGGARD’S LIFE. Merle Haggard left San Quentin in 1960, but prison did not simply disappear when the gate closed behind him. He had been convicted in Kern County of second-degree burglary and escape without force after years of arrests, reform schools and failed attempts to straighten himself out. California’s official clemency record shows that Haggard served two years and nine months in prison, followed by more than two years on parole. He was discharged from his sentence in 1963. By then, his second life had already begun. Haggard worked labor jobs, played bass for Wynn Stewart and slowly built a recording career in Bakersfield. By the end of the 1960s, “Mama Tried,” “Sing Me Back Home,” “Workin’ Man Blues” and “Okie from Muskogee” had made the former prisoner one of country music’s dominant stars. Success, however, did not erase the conviction. In July 1971, California’s Adult Authority formally recommended a pardon on the grounds of rehabilitation. Because Haggard had more than one felony conviction, the matter also went before the California Supreme Court. The justices recommended clemency that October. On March 1, 1972, Governor Ronald Reagan granted the full pardon. That date comes directly from Reagan’s official report to the California legislature. For Haggard, the meaning went beyond public relations. He later spoke of the pardon as a genuine second chance—relief from having to carry the legal status of an ex-convict into parts of his adult life even after years of proving that the young man sent to San Quentin no longer existed in the same form. There was one more scene waiting. Ten years later, Reagan was president. In March 1982, Haggard performed for him at a private concert in California. Before singing, Merle joked that he hoped Reagan would be as pleased with the performance as he had been with the pardon. Then he added another line: he had come to “beg your pardon one more time.” Reagan laughed. By then, the prison number A-45200 belonged to an old government file. The man attached to it was standing in front of the president with a guitar.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TWELVE YEARS AFTER MERLE HAGGARD WALKED OUT OF…

Country Music

HANK WILLIAMS ONCE LEFT THE GRAND OLE OPRY STAGE TO SIX ENCORES. THREE YEARS LATER, THE OPRY FIRED HIM FOR MISSED SHOWS AND DRUNKENNESS — WHILE HIS RECORDS WERE STILL HITTING No. 1. In 1949, Hank Williams walked onto the Grand Ole Opry stage and became an instant sensation. “Lovesick Blues” had already broken through, but the Opry appearance made the scale of his arrival unmistakable. The audience called him back for six encores. At 25, Williams had reached the institution every country singer wanted to reach. Then the road underneath him began to give way. Williams had lived with severe back pain for years, and alcohol had already caused trouble before Nashville made him a star. By 1951 and 1952, pain, drinking and prescription drugs were becoming increasingly difficult to separate from his work. His marriage to Audrey collapsed, his band broke apart, and his appearances became less reliable. By June 1952, he had largely stopped working. The Grand Ole Opry had tolerated missed dates before, but in August it finally dismissed him from the cast. The problem was not record sales. Hank Williams was still making hits. “Jambalaya (On the Bayou)” went to No. 1 while his live career was shrinking around him. Country Music Hall of Fame historian Colin Escott described the contradiction plainly: as Williams’s bookings diminished, the records seemed to get bigger. After losing the Opry, Hank returned to the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport. The stages were smaller now. Some bookings were in beer halls across East Texas. His drinking remained severe, complicated further by medication supplied by a questionable doctor. But when Williams entered a recording studio, the collapse outside it was not yet audible in the results. In September 1952, only about a month after the Opry dismissal, he recorded one of the songs that would define him forever. “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” The song came from a remark Williams made while driving with Billie Jean Jones, the woman he would soon marry. He recognized the phrase as a song idea, and she wrote down the words while he dictated them. There was almost no time left. On December 30, Williams left Montgomery for shows in West Virginia and Ohio. Somewhere during the overnight drive, in the back seat of his Cadillac, he died. He was pronounced dead in Oak Hill, West Virginia, early on January 1, 1953. He was 29. “Your Cheatin’ Heart” was released after his death and became another No. 1. By then, the Opry stage Hank Williams had lost was no longer the measure of what survived him. The songs recorded during his final collapse were only beginning their own run.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” HANK WILLIAMS ONCE LEFT THE GRAND OLE OPRY…

Country Music

FERLIN HUSKY WAS STILL WORKING THE ROAD WHEN HIS HEART STARTED FAILING IN PUBLIC. HE COLLAPSED ONSTAGE, ENDED UP WITH A PACEMAKER — AND THEN KEPT SINGING FOR YEARS AFTER DOCTORS HAD TO REWIRE THE RHYTHM INSIDE HIS CHEST. By the 1960s, Ferlin Husky had already spent years as one of country music’s most recognizable entertainers. “Gone” and “Wings of a Dove” had made him a major star. He could sing straight country, work comedy through his Simon Crum character and move easily between records, television and live shows. His career depended on the road, and he stayed on it heavily. Then his body began interrupting the schedule. Husky suffered from recurring heart trouble and, during one performance, collapsed onstage. Doctors eventually diagnosed a cardiac problem serious enough that he needed a pacemaker. Over the years, he underwent multiple heart procedures as the condition continued to require treatment. For a touring singer, the implications were obvious. The stage was no longer just where Husky earned a living. It was also where there was a real chance his heart could fail in front of an audience. He kept going anyway. After receiving the pacemaker, Husky returned to performing and continued making appearances for years. Even as his chart run slowed, he remained a familiar figure on the country circuit and at the Grand Ole Opry. The heart problems never fully disappeared. He suffered additional complications later in life, including congestive heart failure, and eventually had to reduce his schedule. But the medical setbacks did not produce a clean retirement the first time they arrived. By then, Husky had already outlasted several different eras of country music. He had begun in the honky-tonk world of the early 1950s, crossed into the Nashville Sound years and remained visible long after the radio hits stopped coming as frequently. His final chapter did not hinge on another No. 1. It hinged on something more basic: whether the man whose career had been built around keeping time with a band could keep enough rhythm inside his own body to make it back to the microphone.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” FERLIN HUSKY WAS STILL WORKING THE ROAD WHEN…

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BOB DYLAN’S ELECTRIC TOUR WAS BEING BOOED NIGHT AFTER NIGHT. LEVON HELM WALKED AWAY AND ENDED UP WORKING ON AN OIL RIG IN THE GULF OF MEXICO. WHEN HE CAME BACK, THE MUSICIANS HE HAD LEFT WERE ABOUT TO BECOME THE BAND. Levon Helm had already spent years on the road before Bob Dylan called. The Arkansas-born drummer had come up with Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks, a hard-working group built on rockabilly, R&B and country roots. By 1965, Helm, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson had left Hawkins and were trying to establish themselves on their own. Then Dylan went electric. After the controversy surrounding his move away from acoustic folk, Dylan hired the Hawks as his backing band. The opportunity was enormous, but so was the hostility. Night after night, parts of the audience booed the amplified music, directing their anger at Dylan and the musicians behind him. Helm had enough. Late in 1965, he left the tour and returned south. For a period he drifted through places including Florida and New Orleans before taking work connected to an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico — about as far from the international rock circuit as a drummer could get. The rest of the Hawks stayed with Dylan through the turbulent 1966 tour. Then Dylan himself disappeared from the road after his motorcycle accident and settled near Woodstock, New York. The Hawks followed, and without the pressure of nightly concerts they began playing and recording informally with him in a large pink house in West Saugerties. Those sessions became associated with The Basement Tapes. Eventually Helm was called back. He returned to the group as they were moving away from being somebody else’s backing band and toward something of their own. Soon they settled on the simplest possible name: The Band. In 1968, Music from Big Pink arrived, followed by The Band in 1969. Helm’s drumming and unmistakable Southern voice became central to songs such as “The Weight,” “Up on Cripple Creek” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” Their blend of country, blues, gospel, folk and early rock would become one of the foundations of what later generations called roots rock or Americana. What makes Helm’s exit from Dylan’s tour so revealing is that he did not leave music because nobody wanted him. He walked away while standing beside one of the most important artists in the world. By the time he returned, the same musicians were finally becoming the thing Helm had wanted them to be from the beginning: a band of their own.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BOB DYLAN’S ELECTRIC TOUR WAS BEING BOOED NIGHT…

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