Country Music – Page 6 – Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

IN 1953, GOLDIE HILL BECAME ONE OF COUNTRY MUSIC’S FIRST WOMEN TO REACH NO. 1. FOUR YEARS LATER, SHE MARRIED CARL SMITH AND LARGELY WALKED AWAY FROM THE ROAD TO RAISE THEIR FAMILY. Goldie Hill came from a cotton farm outside Karnes City, Texas. Born Argolda Voncile Hill, she picked cotton with her brothers before the family began performing around San Antonio as the Texas Hillbillies. By her late teens, she was singing on radio and working with established country acts including Red River Dave and Big Bill Lister. In 1952, Decca Records signed her. Her first release failed, but the next one changed her place in country history. “I Let the Stars Get in My Eyes,” written by her brother Tommy Hill and Slim Willet, answered the hit “Don’t Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes.” Released late in 1952, Goldie’s record reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country jukebox chart in 1953. At a time when Kitty Wells had only recently broken country radio’s resistance to female solo performers, Goldie became one of the first women to reach the top of the country charts under her own name. She was soon known as the “Golden Hillbilly.” Goldie appeared on the Louisiana Hayride, the Grand Ole Opry and the Ozark Jubilee. She also recorded successful duets with Justin Tubb and Red Sovine. Alongside Kitty Wells and Jean Shepard, she was helping establish that women could carry country records without being attached to a male bandleader. Then, in 1957, she married Carl Smith. Smith was already one of country music’s biggest male stars, with a long string of Top 10 records. He had recently divorced June Carter. Goldie entered the marriage with her own hit career, her own stage name and a No. 1 record behind her. After the wedding, she virtually stopped touring. There were later recordings and occasional returns, including a brief comeback during the 1960s, but the momentum of her early career was gone. Goldie and Carl settled on a 500-acre Tennessee ranch, raised two sons and a daughter, and remained married for 47 years. The decision made her difficult to place in the usual country story. She was not a forgotten singer who had failed to break through. She had already broken through. Nor was she pushed aside before radio heard her. The record had reached No. 1, the major stages had opened, and the industry had given her a nickname built for stardom. She simply stopped organizing her life around it. Goldie occasionally returned to the microphone, but she never tried to reclaim the position she had held in 1953. By the time later generations of women became major country stars, one of the singers who had helped clear the path was living mostly outside Nashville’s public memory. Goldie Hill died of cancer in 2005. Carl remained on the ranch until his own death five years later. Inside the house were nearly five decades of marriage and a family that had grown during the years when Goldie might otherwise have been chasing another chart record. Her largest hit lasted two minutes and thirty-five seconds. The life she chose afterward lasted 47 years

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GOLDIE HILL REACHED NO. 1 WHEN COUNTRY RADIO…

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TOMMY COLLINS HELPED BUILD THE BAKERSFIELD SOUND, THEN WALKED AWAY TO BECOME A PREACHER. YEARS LATER, MERLE HAGGARD PUT HIS REAL NAME INTO A SONG AND BROUGHT HIM BACK INTO COUNTRY MUSIC. Before Buck Owens became the face of Bakersfield and before Merle Haggard carried its sound nationwide, Tommy Collins was already making records that sounded nothing like polished Nashville country. Born Leonard Raymond Sipes in Oklahoma, he moved to California in 1952 after leaving the Army. Ferlin Husky helped connect him with producer Cliffie Stone, and Capitol Records soon recognized both his voice and his songwriting. Collins broke through in 1954 with “You Better Not Do That.” His records were lean, funny and driven by the sharp guitar of a young Buck Owens. Songs such as “Whatcha Gonna Do Now” and “It Tickles” helped establish the hard, uncluttered style later known as the Bakersfield Sound. Other singers were already using his material. Faron Young turned “If You Ain’t Lovin’ (You Ain’t Livin’)” into a hit in 1954. Decades later, George Strait took the same song to No. 1. Then Collins stepped away. After a religious conversion, he began recording sacred music and enrolled at Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary in 1957. By the end of the decade, he was serving as a pastor while the California sound he helped create was becoming a national force. Buck Owens kept the songs alive. In 1963, he released Buck Owens Sings Tommy Collins. The album reached No. 1 on the country chart, even as Collins remained largely outside the business. Collins eventually returned and scored another hit with “If You Can’t Bite, Don’t Growl” in 1965, but his career never regained its earlier momentum. His larger second act came through Merle Haggard, who recorded Collins songs including “Carolyn” and “The Roots of My Raising.” Both reached No. 1. Then Merle wrote about the man himself. In 1980, Haggard recorded “Leonard,” a biographical song tracing Collins’s journey from Oklahoma to California, through success, religion and disappointment. He did not use the stage name printed on the old Capitol records. He used Leonard. The song became a hit in 1981 and brought Collins renewed attention. He moved to Nashville, worked with Mel Tillis’s publishing company and continued writing. Tillis later charted with Collins’s “New Patches.” Collins was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1999 and died the following year at 69. By then, Buck Owens, Merle Haggard, Faron Young and George Strait had all carried his songs into different eras. The records said Tommy Collins. Merle’s song preserved the man beneath them.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TOMMY COLLINS HELPED BUILD THE BAKERSFIELD SOUND, THEN…

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HE WROTE “SEVEN BRIDGES ROAD” FOR THE EAGLES AND GAVE WAYLON JENNINGS “LONESOME, ON’RY AND MEAN.” BUT STEVE YOUNG REMAINED FAR LESS FAMOUS THAN THE SONGS THAT HELPED DEFINE COUNTRY ROCK AND OUTLAW COUNTRY. Steve Young never fit comfortably inside one branch of American music. Born in Georgia and raised across the South, he absorbed gospel, country, blues, folk and rock. He later called the mixture “Southern music,” but record companies preferred categories they could place on a shelf. Young moved through the folk scenes in New York and California before joining the country-rock group Stone Country. By 1969, he had released his first solo album, Rock Salt & Nails. That record contained “Seven Bridges Road.” The song came from a road near Montgomery, Alabama, but Young turned the place into something half remembered and half imagined. Other artists began carrying it forward. Dolly Parton recorded it. Joan Baez recorded it. The Eagles eventually made it one of their best-known harmony performances. Young’s own name never traveled as far as the song. The same thing happened again with “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean.” Young wrote and recorded the song before Waylon Jennings used it as the title track of his 1973 album. Waylon was fighting RCA for control over his sessions, musicians and sound. With his own band finally allowed into the studio, he delivered Young’s song with the frustration of a man who had spent years being told how country music should be made. The album became a turning point in Waylon’s transformation from Nashville recording artist into outlaw-country figure. Young had supplied the words that named the new identity. Other songs followed similar paths. Hank Williams Jr. recorded “Montgomery in the Rain.” Willie Nelson charted with “It’s Not Supposed to Be That Way.” Young’s catalog moved through the voices of artists with larger audiences, while his own albums earned admiration without producing lasting commercial security. Part of the problem was Young himself. He resisted being reshaped into a conventional Nashville performer. His records moved too freely among country, folk, gospel and rock, and he repeatedly protected the music even when compromise might have brought a wider career. Admirers later described him as a country-rock pioneer and an early outlaw before the term became a profitable Nashville brand. Young continued recording through the 1970s, including Honky Tonk Man, Renegade Picker and No Place to Fall. Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark, Lucinda Williams and Steve Earle were among the songwriters and musicians who respected his work. But he remained a songwriter’s songwriter: influential inside the room, rarely recognized outside it. That distance widened as the songs took on lives detached from their author. “Seven Bridges Road” became associated with the Eagles’ stacked harmonies. “Lonesome, On’ry and Mean” became inseparable from Waylon’s beard, leather vest and newly liberated sound. Young kept performing them in smaller rooms. He died in Nashville on March 17, 2016, at 73, after suffering a head injury in a fall. The obituaries called him a pioneer, but the recognition arrived after decades in which audiences had often known his songs better than his voice. By then, one composition had become part of the Eagles’ live legacy, and another had helped give outlaw country its name. Steve Young left behind no single public image large enough to compete with either record. What remained was his handwriting beneath both titles

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” STEVE YOUNG WROTE SONGS THAT MADE THE EAGLES…

Country Music

HIS SONGS OUTLIVED HIM IN THE VOICES OF COUNTRY LEGENDS. BUT AFTER BLAZE FOLEY WAS SHOT DEAD IN AUSTIN, HIS FRIENDS HAD TO HOLD A BENEFIT JUST TO PAY FOR HIS BURIAL. His real name was Michael David Fuller. He grew up singing gospel with his family, survived childhood polio and eventually remade himself as Blaze Foley—a wandering Texas songwriter who repaired his clothes with silver duct tape, slept wherever friends would let him and wrote songs too tender for the life he was living. Foley moved through Georgia, Chicago, Houston and Austin without ever building the kind of career Nashville could measure. He played small clubs, drank heavily, lost relationships and sometimes slept beneath pool tables after the bars closed. He was close to Townes Van Zandt, another Texas songwriter who understood how a brilliant song could exist inside a life that refused to become stable. Yet Foley kept writing. One of those songs was “If I Could Only Fly.” Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard recorded it together in 1987, but their version did not become the kind of commercial event “Pancho and Lefty” had been. Foley remained mostly unknown outside the Texas songwriter circuit. He had written something two country giants considered worth singing, but he was still struggling to preserve his own recordings and pay his own way. Other songs waited even longer. John Prine would eventually record “Clay Pigeons.” Lucinda Williams would write “Drunken Angel” about Foley. Lyle Lovett, Gurf Morlix and generations of Texas musicians would help carry his name forward. But most of that recognition arrived after Foley was no longer there to receive it. On February 1, 1989, Foley was at the Austin home of his elderly friend Concho January. Foley believed Concho’s son, Carey January, had been taking his father’s pension and welfare money. The confrontation turned violent. Carey shot Foley in the chest with a small-caliber rifle. Blaze Foley was 39 years old. Carey January admitted firing the shot but argued that he had acted in self-defense. A jury later acquitted him. The people who knew Foley continued to dispute the picture of him presented at trial, but the legal verdict remained unchanged. Foley left behind almost none of the protections normally associated with a professional career. There was no major estate. No long catalog of successful albums. No money waiting to carry him home. Friends organized a benefit to cover the cost of his burial. A cassette recorded live at the Austin Outhouse was released only after his death. At the funeral, his friends reportedly covered his coffin with duct tape—the same cheap material Foley had used to hold together his boots and decorate his clothes. Even after that, the stories did not stop. Townes Van Zandt later told a wild tale about going to Foley’s grave because Foley had died carrying the pawn ticket for one of Townes’s guitars. Whether every part of that story happened exactly as told became less important than what it revealed: even among men who owned almost nothing, guitars, songs and debts still had to be recovered somehow. Blaze Foley never became a country star. He became something harder to manufacture: a songwriter whose work escaped the wreckage of his own life. Years after his friends needed to raise money to place him in the ground, singers who had outlived him were still standing on stages and singing the songs he had left behind.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BLAZE FOLEY WROTE SONGS THAT WILLIE, MERLE, JOHN…

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SHE CAME TO CALIFORNIA WITH $35, SLEPT IN OAKLAND’S “PIPE CITY” AND PICKED CROPS TO SURVIVE. YEARS LATER, ROSE MADDOX SHOCKED THE GRAND OLE OPRY, HELPED DEFINE WEST COAST COUNTRY AND RECORDED WHAT IS OFTEN CALLED THE FIRST BLUEGRASS ALBUM BY A WOMAN. By the time the Maddox Brothers and Rose reached the Grand Ole Opry, they had already built a major following far from Nashville. Their world was California dance halls, radio programs and honky-tonks filled with farmworkers, soldiers and factory hands. The band played fast. Fred Maddox slapped his bass like a drum. The brothers joked, shouted and drove country music into western swing and hillbilly boogie. Rose stood at the center. She was not treated as the quiet sister beside a group of men. She sang with more force than many male performers, moved across the stage and wore bright Western costumes designed to reach the back of a crowded room. The group’s rhinestones, embroidery and theatrical energy earned them the name “America’s Most Colorful Hillbilly Band.” The costumes were not decoration added after success. They were part of the sound. Rose became an early customer of Hollywood Western tailor Nathan Turk, whose elaborate designs helped country performers look larger beneath stage lights. In California, those clothes matched the noise and movement of the Maddox show. At the Grand Ole Opry, one costume crossed a line. Rose appeared with her midriff exposed, startling members of the Nashville audience. The reaction was about more than uncovered skin. Female country singers could perform songs about betrayal, drinking and poverty, but they were still expected to present themselves within narrow limits of respectability. Rose came from a different stage tradition. For years, she had performed beside brothers who treated every show like controlled chaos. The clothes, movement and humor were inseparable from the music. She was not standing at the microphone as someone’s supporting singer. She was helping lead the attack. The incident became one small part of a larger career, but it showed why Nashville never completely defined her. Rose moved between country, gospel, western swing and boogie before the industry had settled on clean labels for those sounds. The Maddox family’s rhythmic, high-energy style also helped prepare the ground for West Coast country, Bakersfield and early rockabilly. When the family band dissolved in 1956, Rose did not disappear with it. She continued recording solo country and gospel, cut duets with Buck Owens and later entered another field where women were rarely given central billing. In 1962, with guidance from Bill Monroe, she recorded Rose Maddox Sings Bluegrass, widely regarded as the first full bluegrass album by a female artist. The Grand Ole Opry had once been startled by how Rose Maddox dressed. A few years later, she was standing in a studio with the father of bluegrass, opening another part of country music that women had barely been allowed to claim.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” ROSE MADDOX WALKED ONTO THE GRAND OLE OPRY…

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CHARLEY PRIDE HEARD RONNIE MILSAP PLAYING A LOS ANGELES CLUB. THEN HE TOLD HIM TO STOP CHASING ROCK ’N’ ROLL AND COME TO NASHVILLE. In 1972, Ronnie Milsap was still playing whatever room would have him. He had spent years in Memphis, working around the same city that had given him Elvis, soul music, gospel, and late-night clubs. He had made records. He had played piano for J.J. Cale. He had worked with Elvis Presley. But none of it had turned him into a country star yet. Then Charley Pride came into the Whiskey A Go Go. Pride was already one of the biggest names in country music. Milsap was the nearly blind piano player onstage, mixing country, R&B, rock, and whatever else the room would let him play. Charley heard him and told him something simple: Nashville needed that voice. Milsap moved in 1972. He started playing at the King of the Road, an industry hangout where writers, producers, label men, and singers could sit in the dark and decide whether a stranger had a future. Tom Collins heard him there. RCA signed him in 1973. The first single, “I Hate You,” made the Top 10. Then came “Pure Love.” No. 1. Then “Please Don’t Tell Me How the Story Ends.” “Daydreams About Night Things.” “It Was Almost Like a Song.” The man who had been playing Los Angeles clubs became one of the biggest country voices of the 1970s and 1980s. Ronnie Milsap did not get to Nashville because a label executive found a demo on a desk. Charley Pride heard him in a club and told him to get in the car.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” CHARLEY PRIDE HEARD RONNIE MILSAP IN A LOS…

Country Music

TOWNES VAN ZANDT FINISHED THE RECORD THAT COULD HAVE CHANGED HIS LIFE. THEN THE STUDIO KEPT THE TAPES FOR TWENTY YEARS. By 1974, Townes Van Zandt had already made six albums in five years. “Pancho and Lefty” was out. “If I Needed You” was out. Songwriters in Texas and Nashville knew what he could do, even if country radio had not figured out where to put him. He went into Jack Clement’s studio in Nashville to make what was supposed to be his seventh album. The working title was Seven Come Eleven. The sessions had songs like “Rex’s Blues,” “No Place to Fall,” “Loretta,” “Two Girls,” and “Buckskin Stallion Blues.” Townes was still young enough to believe this could be the record that pushed him past the small rooms, the cult following, and the people who only knew him as the strange Texas writer with the dark songs. Then the money trouble started. Kevin Eggers, the man handling Townes’ label and business, did not pay the studio bill. Jack Clement held the tapes. The album was never released. The songs sat there while Townes kept moving through the 1970s with less money, less structure, and more drinking. Some of the material was rescued later. Six songs reappeared on Flyin’ Shoes in 1978. But the original record was gone from the moment it mattered most. Seven Come Eleven finally came out in 1993 under another name: The Nashville Sessions. By then, Townes Van Zandt was no longer a young singer waiting for a breakthrough. He was a cult figure. Other people had made his songs famous. Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard had taken “Pancho and Lefty” to No. 1 ten years earlier. The record that might have changed his life arrived after the life had already gone another way.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TOWNES VAN ZANDT FINISHED THE RECORD THAT COULD…

Country Music

MAX D. BARNES LOST HIS 18-YEAR-OLD SON IN A CAR ACCIDENT. YEARS LATER, VERN GOSDIN SANG THE GRIEF SO HARD IT WON SONG OF THE YEAR. “Chiseled in Stone” did not begin as just another barroom song. Max D. Barnes had already been through the part of life most people do not know how to put into a chorus. His son Duane was eighteen when he was killed in a car accident. After that, grief was not an idea for Barnes. It was a name, an age, and an empty place that did not close. Years later, Barnes wrote with Vern Gosdin. Vern was already the kind of singer people called “The Voice.” He did not need to oversell pain. He could stand still inside a song and make it sound like somebody had just stopped talking in the next room. Together, they wrote “Chiseled in Stone.” On the surface, the song was about a man leaving after a fight and ending up in a bar. Then an old man sits down beside him and tells him he does not know lonely yet. Not until the name he loves is carved into stone. That line did not come from a clean Nashville trick. It came from a songwriter who knew what a grave marker could do to a life. Vern released “Chiseled in Stone” in 1988. It only reached No. 6 on the country chart, but the song kept moving after radio was done with it. In 1989, the CMA named it Song of the Year. Country music did not give that award to a happy ending. It gave it to a song that started with a fight in a bar and ended at a stone with a name on it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MAX D. BARNES KNEW WHAT A GRAVE MARKER…

Country Music

TOMPALL GLASER DID NOT NEED TO OUTSING WAYLON JENNINGS. HE GAVE WAYLON A STUDIO WHERE RCA COULD NOT TELL HIM HOW TO MAKE A RECORD. By the early 1970s, Tompall Glaser was already tired of watching Nashville decide what country singers could sound like. He and his brothers had made money in publishing. They had written songs, cut records, worked sessions, and watched the same system over and over: the label owned the room, the producer ran the session, the artist showed up and sang what everybody else had already decided. So in 1970, the Glaser brothers opened Glaser Sound Studios on 16th Avenue. It did not look like a revolution from the outside. It was just another building in Nashville. But musicians started calling it Hillbilly Central. Songwriters could keep more control of their work there. Singers could bring in their own bands. The room belonged to people who had spent too long being told that country music had to be cleaned up before it could sell. Waylon Jennings was one of them. By 1973, Waylon was fighting RCA over how and where he could record. He had spent years making polished Nashville records with studio musicians and label rules around him. Then he moved sessions for This Time out of RCA’s own studio and into Tompall’s place. RCA did not like it. The label had an agreement with the engineers’ union: RCA artists were supposed to record in RCA rooms with RCA engineers. Waylon had gone around the whole arrangement. For a while, the record was held up. Then RCA gave in. Waylon stayed at Glaser Sound for Dreaming My Dreams. That was where he cut “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way.” The record went to No. 1. The album became the first country LP certified gold, and Waylon won CMA Male Vocalist of the Year. Waylon did not break Nashville’s rules by himself. Tompall had already built him a room where the rules could be ignored.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TOMPALL GLASER BUILT A ROOM ON MUSIC ROW…

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JERRY JEFF WALKER GOT LOCKED IN A NEW ORLEANS JAIL FOR THE NIGHT. THE OLD MAN IN THE CELL WOULD NOT GIVE THE POLICE HIS NAME — SO JERRY JEFF GAVE HIM ONE THAT LASTED FOREVER. In 1965, Jerry Jeff Walker was still drifting more than building a career. He had left home in New York, gone AWOL from the National Guard, changed his name, played wherever somebody would let him, and spent enough time on buses and street corners to know how quickly a night could go wrong. Then one night in New Orleans, he got picked up for public intoxication and landed in the First Precinct jail. Inside the cell was an older Black man with silver hair, worn-out shoes, and a ragged shirt. The man had been arrested in a police sweep after a murder case nearby. When the officers asked his name, he would not give them one. He only said people called him “Bojangles.” The men in the cell started talking. The old man told stories. He talked about dancing in minstrel shows, about travelling, about the dog he had lost. At some point, the jailer told him to dance for the room. He did. Jerry Jeff remembered the soft shoe. He remembered the old man jumping high in a cell full of drunks and strangers. Then he remembered him sitting back down and talking about the dog, the one part of the story that made the whole room go quiet. A few years later, Walker turned that night into “Mr. Bojangles.” The song came out in 1968. Then the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band recorded it and took it into the Top 10. Nina Simone sang it. Sammy Davis Jr. sang it. Bob Dylan sang it. More than a hundred artists eventually recorded some version of a man who may never have known his name had left that jail.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JERRY JEFF WALKER SPENT ONE NIGHT IN A…

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