Country Music – Page 6 – Classic Country Music Hits

Chưa phân loại

A MOTORCYCLE CRASH NEARLY COST GENE VINCENT HIS LEG. WHILE RECOVERING, HE HELPED CREATE “BE-BOP-A-LULA” — AND WITHIN A YEAR, CAPITOL WAS RUSHING HIM INTO A NASHVILLE STUDIO AS ITS ANSWER TO ELVIS PRESLEY. Before Gene Vincent became one of rockabilly’s most recognizable figures, he was a young Navy man named Vincent Eugene Craddock whose future had suddenly narrowed to a hospital room. In 1955, a motorcycle accident badly injured his left leg and left him with lasting damage. During the long recovery, Vincent spent time writing and working on songs; one of them became “Be-Bop-A-Lula,” though the exact authorship remains disputed, with fellow hospital patient Donald Graves often credited as an important part of its creation. By early 1956, Vincent was singing around Norfolk, Virginia, when local radio personality Bill “Sheriff Tex” Davis helped get a demo into the hands of Capitol Records. Capitol was looking for a young rock ’n’ roll singer who could compete with the sudden rise of Elvis Presley, and Vincent’s voice immediately caught attention. In May, Vincent and the Blue Caps went to Nashville and recorded “Be-Bop-A-Lula.” The song was initially placed on the B-side of “Woman Love,” but disc jockeys began flipping the record over, and the supposed secondary track became the hit. “Be-Bop-A-Lula” reached the pop Top 10 and sold heavily, while guitarist Cliff Gallup’s sharp, economical playing helped give the record a sound that later rockabilly players would study closely. Vincent suddenly had the career that the motorcycle wreck seemed to have threatened before it had begun. But accidents would remain strangely close to his story. In April 1960, Vincent was traveling through England with fellow rocker Eddie Cochran when their taxi crashed near Chippenham. Vincent survived with a broken collarbone and further leg injuries; Cochran, only 21, died the next day from severe head injuries. By then Vincent’s biggest American moment had already passed, although his influence remained especially strong in Britain, where younger musicians absorbed both his look and the raw sound of the Blue Caps. The first crash had pushed Gene Vincent toward the song that made him famous. The second left him alive to watch another young rock ’n’ roll star fail to come home.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” A MOTORCYCLE CRASH NEARLY COST GENE VINCENT HIS…

Country Music

MILLIONS HEARD “EVERYTHING I OWN” AS A LOVE SONG. DAVID GATES HAD WRITTEN IT FOR HIS FATHER — A MAN WHO DIED NINE YEARS BEFORE BREAD BECAME ONE OF THE BIGGEST SOFT-ROCK BANDS IN AMERICA. By 1972, David Gates was finally living through the success his father had never gotten to see. Bread had already broken through with “Make It with You” and “Baby I’m-a Want You.” Their soft, melodic records were becoming fixtures on American radio, and Gates had emerged as the group’s principal songwriter and voice. But one song on Baby I’m-a Want You reached much farther back. Gates’ father had died in 1963. He had been a major musical influence on his son, teaching him to read and write music, introducing him to instruments and classical music, and living long enough to see only the earliest signs that David might build a career. He never saw Bread. Years later, Gates wrote “Everything I Own” in his memory. He deliberately avoided making that meaning obvious. The words could easily belong to someone mourning a lover, and Gates later said he shaped them that way intentionally. When he first played the song for his wife, however, she understood immediately who it was about. She cried. Even the title carried a piece of family history. Years earlier, when Gates had little money, he scraped together enough to send his mother an orchid for her birthday. His father wrote back saying she had been so touched that David could have had anything she owned in return. That memory stayed with him. Bread released “Everything I Own” in early 1972. It climbed to No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100, becoming another major hit in the band’s extraordinary early-’70s run. Gates did not immediately explain the real story behind it; he later recalled waiting roughly two years before beginning to tell audiences that the song was about his father. By then, the song no longer belonged only to Bread. Jamaican singer Ken Boothe turned it into a reggae recording and took it to No. 1 in Britain in 1974. More than a decade later, Boy George revived it again and also reached No. 1 in the UK. Gates would eventually say that no song he had written traveled farther. That gave “Everything I Own” an unusual afterlife. David Gates wrote it because one man was no longer there to hear what his son had become. But decades later, singers in completely different countries, genres and generations were still finding their own person inside the same words.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MILLIONS HEARD “EVERYTHING I OWN” AS A LOVE…

Country Music

CAPITOL ORDERED TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD BACK INTO THE STUDIO BECAUSE HE OWED THEM RECORDINGS. ONE OF THE SONGS THEY DIDN’T EXPECT TO WIN — “SIXTEEN TONS” — SOLD MORE THAN FOUR MILLION COPIES. By 1955, Tennessee Ernie Ford was already successful enough to be exhausted by success. He was recording for Capitol, touring heavily and working national television. The schedule had become so crowded that he fell behind on the number of recordings he owed the label. Capitol finally gave him a blunt choice: get back into the studio or risk a breach-of-contract fight. So on September 20, Ford went into Capitol’s Hollywood studio needing material. He did not arrive with a carefully planned blockbuster. One of the songs he chose was “Sixteen Tons,” written years earlier by his friend Merle Travis about the debt and hard labor of coal miners. Travis had recorded it in the 1940s, but his version had attracted little attention at the time. Ford had already sung the song on television and noticed that audiences responded to it. Capitol was less certain. The company reportedly worried about the song’s bleak labor politics and appears to have expected the other side of the single, “You Don’t Have to Be a Baby to Cry,” to have the better commercial chance. Ford recorded “Sixteen Tons” anyway. The arrangement was spare and strange for a country record: a finger snap, a clarinet-led backing and Ford’s deep voice delivering the song almost like a man too tired to complain anymore. Capitol released the single on October 17. Within hours, radio stations began playing “Sixteen Tons.” Within weeks, it was No. 1. The record spent 10 weeks atop the country chart and eight weeks at No. 1 pop, then crossed the Atlantic and reached No. 1 in Britain as well. Within months, sales had passed four million copies. Ford later admitted that the scale of the response frightened him. The hit changed the shape of his career almost immediately. Ford Motor Company brought him into prime-time television with The Ford Show, and Capitol increasingly aimed his records at the much larger pop market. But Ford did not spend the rest of his life simply trying to reproduce “Sixteen Tons.” He moved heavily into gospel, eventually recording dozens of sacred albums. His 1956 Hymns became one of Capitol’s biggest-selling albums and helped establish another side of his career entirely. The session Capitol had demanded because Ford was behind on his contract ended up giving the label one of the biggest records in its history. And the song they were unsure about became the one audiences never stopped asking Tennessee Ernie Ford to sing.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” CAPITOL ORDERED TENNESSEE ERNIE FORD BACK INTO THE…

Chưa phân loại

EDDIE COCHRAN HAD ALREADY WRITTEN “SUMMERTIME BLUES,” STARRED IN A ROCK ’N’ ROLL MOVIE, AND BECOME A HERO TO YOUNG BRITISH GUITARISTS. THEN, AT 21, A TAXI RIDE TO LONDON ENDED HIS CAREER IN A DITCH. By the end of the 1950s, Eddie Cochran had become one of the clearest links between rockabilly and the louder guitar-driven rock that was coming next. He had started in Southern California playing with Hank Cochran as the Cochran Brothers, then broke away as a solo artist and signed with Liberty Records. His guitar-heavy records — especially “Summertime Blues,” “C’mon Everybody,” “Twenty Flight Rock” and “Somethin’ Else” — gave teenage frustration a harder edge than much of the polished pop surrounding it. Britain heard that edge especially clearly. Paul McCartney later remembered using “Twenty Flight Rock” to impress John Lennon when the two first met, and Cochran’s songs would eventually be covered by artists ranging from the Who to the Sex Pistols. His influence was already spreading far beyond the size of his own catalog. In early 1960, Cochran toured Britain with Gene Vincent. The shows drew the kind of young audience that saw American rock ’n’ roll not as a passing fad, but as a blueprint. Then came the final night. After a performance in Bristol, Cochran, Vincent, songwriter Sharon Sheeley and tour manager Patrick Thompkins got into a taxi bound toward London, where Cochran was preparing to fly home to the United States. Near Chippenham, the car crashed on the A4; Cochran was thrown from the vehicle and suffered severe head injuries, while Vincent survived with a broken collarbone and further damage to a leg already injured years earlier. Eddie Cochran died in a hospital in Bath on April 17, 1960. He was 21. At the time, his career still felt unfinished. He had released only one album during his lifetime, while his current single, “Three Steps to Heaven,” was still in circulation. The strange part is how much of his afterlife belonged to musicians who came next. The Beatles carried pieces of his guitar language. The Who turned “Summertime Blues” into something heavier. Later punk bands heard the same impatience and attack in songs Cochran had recorded before most of them were born. Cochran never got the long career that might have shown where that sound was heading. Other bands did that for him.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” EDDIE COCHRAN WAS ONLY 21, BUT HIS GUITAR…

Country Music

CARL PERKINS WAS ON HIS WAY TO NEW YORK FOR HIS FIRST NATIONAL TELEVISION APPEARANCE WHEN HIS CAR CRASHED BEFORE DAWN. “BLUE SUEDE SHOES” WAS EXPLODING — BUT PERKINS WOKE UP IN A DELAWARE HOSPITAL WHILE THE MOMENT KEPT MOVING WITHOUT HIM. By March 1956, Carl Perkins had finally broken out of the Southern honky-tonk circuit. “Blue Suede Shoes,” recorded at Sun in December 1955, had become something almost unheard of: a hit on the country, pop and R&B charts at the same time. It was Sun Records’ first million-selling single, and Perkins suddenly had the kind of momentum that could turn a regional singer into a national star. The next step was television. After a show in Norfolk, Virginia, Perkins and his band headed north for New York, where he was scheduled to appear on The Perry Como Show on March 24. They never made it. Shortly before sunrise on March 22, on Route 13 near Dover, Delaware, their car struck the rear of a pickup truck and left the roadway. Perkins was thrown unconscious into shallow water beside the road. Drummer W.S. “Fluke” Holland pulled him clear. The injuries were severe. Perkins suffered fractured vertebrae in his neck, a broken collarbone, a serious concussion and cuts across his body. The driver of the pickup, Thomas Phillips, was killed. Carl’s brother Jay suffered a fractured neck and serious internal injuries from which he never fully recovered. Instead of stepping onto a national television stage, Carl spent the next stretch recovering in a hospital. And timing mattered. “Blue Suede Shoes” was still climbing. Elvis Presley had already recorded his own version, and Presley’s rapidly expanding television presence carried the song before an even larger national audience. Perkins remained the writer and the man whose Sun recording had broken first, but the crash had removed him from the road at exactly the moment visibility mattered most. Perkins eventually returned to Sun and made more enduring records — “Boppin’ the Blues,” “Matchbox,” “Dixie Fried” and others. But the trajectory never looked quite the same again. Years later, the Beatles would record his songs, Johnny Cash would take “Daddy Sang Bass” to No. 1, and Perkins would be recognized as one of rockabilly’s foundational figures. The missed Perry Como appearance became important for a different reason. It marked the point where Carl Perkins stopped being merely the man with the hottest new record in America and began becoming something harder to measure: the songwriter and guitarist whose fingerprints would keep turning up in other people’s music long after that first burst of fame had passed.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” CARL PERKINS WAS ON HIS WAY TO NEW…

Country Music

PATSY CLINE WAS LYING IN A NASHVILLE HOSPITAL AFTER A NEAR-FATAL CAR CRASH WHEN SHE HEARD AN UNKNOWN LORETTA LYNN SING “I FALL TO PIECES” FOR HER ON THE RADIO. PATSY SENT HER HUSBAND OUT TO FIND THE GIRL. In June 1961, Patsy Cline’s career was finally moving again. “I Fall to Pieces” was climbing the charts, but Patsy herself was in a hospital bed after a violent car crash that killed two people and left her with broken bones, a dislocated hip and a deep cut across her forehead. She would spend about a month recovering. Across Nashville, Loretta Lynn was still trying to become somebody. She had only recently arrived from the Pacific Northwest and was appearing on Ernest Tubb’s Midnite Jamboree. Knowing Patsy was hurt, Loretta sang “I Fall to Pieces” on the broadcast and dedicated it to her in the hospital. Patsy heard it. Then she turned to her husband, Charlie Dick, and told him to go find Loretta Lynn. Charlie later remembered that he did not even know who Loretta was. He went downtown, found her and delivered the message: Patsy Cline wanted to see her. Loretta went to the hospital the next day. That visit changed the relationship immediately. Patsy was already the established star. Loretta was shy, new to Nashville and still learning how the business worked. Patsy began helping her with stage presence, clothes, makeup and the small practical things nobody teaches a young singer simply because she has a good voice. She also helped Loretta financially when money was tight. Their friendship lasted less than two years. On March 5, 1963, Patsy Cline died in a plane crash near Camden, Tennessee. Loretta kept going. Within a few years she had become one of the biggest female stars in country music herself, but Patsy remained part of the way she understood those first Nashville years. When Loretta later had twin daughters, she named one of them Patsy. In 1977, she recorded the tribute album I Remember Patsy. The friendship had begun because Patsy Cline heard a stranger singing her song through a hospital radio. What Loretta carried forward was not just Patsy’s music, but the example of an established woman making room for the next one before anyone knew how far that next voice would go.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” PATSY CLINE WAS LYING IN A NASHVILLE HOSPITAL…

Country Music

RCA WAS CLOSE TO GIVING UP ON HANK SNOW IN AMERICA. THEN “I’M MOVING ON” SPENT 21 WEEKS AT No. 1 — AND THE SINGER WHO HAD BEEN TOLD HE WASN’T SELLING ENOUGH BECAME ONE OF COUNTRY MUSIC’S BIGGEST STARS. Hank Snow had already spent years proving himself before Nashville really listened. Born in Nova Scotia, he had worked as a deckhand, endured a difficult childhood and built a successful career in Canada long before American audiences knew his name. RCA Victor signed him in the mid-1930s, but breaking into the United States proved much harder. By the late 1940s, Snow was trying to establish himself south of the border while country music was changing quickly around him. The early American releases did not do enough. RCA executives reportedly began questioning whether Snow could sell records in the U.S. market at all. For an artist who had already invested years in the move, the possibility of being dropped was real. Then came “I’m Moving On.” Snow had written the song himself, building it around the rhythm and imagery of a train leaving someone behind. He recorded it in 1950, and the response was immediate. The record climbed to No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart and stayed there for 21 weeks. It became one of the defining country records of the decade and turned Snow from a Canadian import Nashville was still evaluating into a major American star. (countrymusichalloffame.org) The breakthrough changed more than his chart position. Snow became a Grand Ole Opry regular, launched long national tours and eventually accumulated more than 80 charting country singles. Songs such as “The Golden Rocket,” “I Don’t Hurt Anymore” and “I’ve Been Everywhere” followed. (countrymusichalloffame.org) But his influence also began showing up in the people he helped. In the mid-1950s, Snow took a young Elvis Presley onto package tours through his management partnership with Colonel Tom Parker. For a time, “Hank Snow Enterprises” was literally part of the machinery moving Elvis from regional sensation toward national fame. That relationship would later become complicated as Parker concentrated almost entirely on Presley, but Snow had already played a role in putting the young singer in front of country audiences across the South. By then, the man RCA once doubted was no longer trying to prove he belonged in America. He had become one of the people deciding who got invited onto the road next.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” RCA WAS CLOSE TO GIVING UP ON HANK…

Country Music

JIM REEVES TOOK OFF FOR NASHVILLE IN HIS OWN PLANE ON JULY 31, 1964. A VIOLENT STORM SWALLOWED THE FLIGHT — AND BY NIGHTFALL, ONE OF COUNTRY MUSIC’S SMOOTHEST VOICES HAD VANISHED FROM THE SKY. By 1964, Jim Reeves had already become something larger than a Nashville star. “He’ll Have to Go” had reached No. 1 country and No. 2 pop. His warm baritone had carried him through Europe, South Africa, England and Ireland, helping turn the polished Nashville Sound into something international. He was also a pilot. On July 31, Reeves was flying a small plane back toward Nashville with his business partner and pianist Dean Manuel aboard. Weather around the city had deteriorated badly, with heavy rain and thunderstorms moving through the area. The plane never arrived. Reeves was 40 years old. A search began across the countryside south of Nashville, but the storm, heavy woods and difficult terrain made the aircraft hard to locate. The crash site was eventually found near Brentwood. Both Reeves and Manuel had been killed. For Nashville, the loss was sudden enough to feel unfinished. Reeves had not been fading from public view. He was still recording, still touring internationally and still developing the smooth vocal style that producer Chet Atkins had helped shape into one of RCA’s most reliable sounds. The Country Music Hall of Fame describes Reeves as one of the central voices of the Nashville Sound and one of the most successful country singers of the 1950s and early 1960s. Then something unusual happened. His career kept producing hits without him. RCA had unreleased recordings in its vaults, and Reeves had built such a large audience that new singles and albums continued appearing after his death. Posthumous records helped carry him into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1967. They did not stop there. Jim Reeves continued placing songs on the country charts for years, eventually charting as late as 1983 — nearly two decades after the crash. His reach also remained unusually international. Records continued selling strongly overseas, particularly in places where Reeves had already toured and established an audience before 1964. So the plane crash ended Jim Reeves’s life at the moment his career still seemed to have somewhere else to go. What followed was stranger: RCA kept opening the vault, radio kept finding room for the voice, and a singer who never saw the 1970s was still turning up on country charts in the 1980s.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JIM REEVES TOOK OFF FOR NASHVILLE IN HIS…

Country Music

GLEN CAMPBELL HAD BEEN ONE OF THE BIGGEST STARS IN COUNTRY-POP. BY THE EARLY 1980s, COCAINE, ALCOHOL AND A TABLOID ROMANCE WITH TANYA TUCKER WERE PULLING HIS CAREER APART IN PUBLIC. At the end of the 1970s, Glen Campbell still had the résumé of a superstar. “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Southern Nights” had crossed far beyond country radio. He had hosted national television, starred in films and spent years as one of the most recognizable faces in American music. Then the decade changed, and so did his life. Campbell’s marriage was unraveling. Cocaine and alcohol had become serious problems. At the same time, he entered a highly publicized relationship with Tanya Tucker, who was 22 years younger. Their on-again, off-again romance quickly became tabloid material, with arguments, reconciliations and substance abuse becoming almost as visible as the records either of them was making. The damage showed up professionally too. Campbell continued recording and occasionally reached the country Top 10, but he no longer occupied the position he had held in the 1970s. The Country Music Hall of Fame describes his commercial standing as slipping during those turbulent years. The personal turn began after he met Kim Woollen in 1981. They married the following year. Kim later recalled drawing a hard line on drugs, and Campbell quit cocaine. Alcohol proved harder to leave behind, but over time his home life became more stable and the chaotic relationship with Tucker ended. Then came a professional opening. In 1987, producer Jimmy Bowen — someone Campbell had known from West Coast recording sessions decades earlier — signed him to MCA’s country division. The records began working again. “The Hand That Rocks the Cradle,” recorded with Steve Wariner, reached the Top 10. So did “Still Within the Sound of My Voice” and “She’s Gone, Gone, Gone.” For the first time in years, Campbell was again being heard as a current country singer rather than simply as a star from another era. The comeback did not erase what had happened in the early 1980s. But it changed the shape of the decade. Campbell entered it as a superstar losing control of both his private life and his place in the business. He left it with a steadier marriage, a new label chapter and country hits on the board again.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GLEN CAMPBELL ENTERED THE 1980s AS A COUNTRY-POP…

Country Music

IN JUNE 1965, JOHNNY CASH WENT INTO CALIFORNIA’S LOS PADRES NATIONAL FOREST IN A CAMPER. HOURS LATER, 508 ACRES WERE BURNING, CASH HAD TO BE AIRLIFTED OUT, AND THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WAS EVENTUALLY COMING AFTER HIM FOR THE DAMAGE. By 1965, Johnny Cash was successful enough to fill theaters and unstable enough to frighten the people closest to him. His amphetamine use had become severe, his marriage to Vivian Liberto was deteriorating, and long stretches away from home were increasingly common. That June, after another argument at home in Casitas Springs, California, Cash left with his nephew Damon Fielder and headed toward the Sespe Creek area of Los Padres National Forest. The trip quickly went wrong. Fielder later recalled Cash drinking whiskey and taking pills as they drove. After the two separated to fish, Fielder smelled smoke and returned to find a fire spreading near Cash’s camper. Fielder believed Cash had tried to build a small fire and lost control of it; Cash later maintained that sparks from a defective exhaust system had ignited the brush. Whatever the exact ignition, the result was not disputed. The blaze tore through 508 acres of national forest watershed. Cash ended up in a creek while flames spread around the area, and a helicopter crew eventually evacuated him. Then came the government. Federal authorities sought more than $125,000 in damages. Records later released from Cash’s FBI file show that the case centered on the 1965 fire, and Cash ultimately paid an $82,000 settlement. The episode became even uglier because the burned area was important habitat for the already endangered California condor. Later accounts connected the fire with the disappearance of most of the condors then using that part of the refuge, though claims about exactly what happened to individual birds should be treated cautiously. For Cash, the forest fire was only one disaster in a year full of them. His drug use kept producing arrests, accidents and family damage. The polished man in black audiences saw under stage lights was becoming harder to reconcile with the man his family saw when he came home. A few years later, Cash would rebuild much of his life and career around discipline, faith and an unusually public willingness to talk about where he had gone wrong. Los Padres belonged to the period before that rebuilding. Not the mythic outlaw standing safely outside the rules—but a man whose private chaos had finally burned far beyond himself.

0 Comments

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” IN JUNE 1965, JOHNNY CASH WENT INTO CALIFORNIA’S…

You Missed