Country Music - Page 3 of 190 - Classic Country Music Hits

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ON JULY 16, 2012, A 92-YEAR-OLD WOMAN DIED IN A HOUSE IN MADISON, TENNESSEE — TEN MONTHS AFTER THE MAN SHE HAD BEEN MARRIED TO SINCE 1937. Bobby and Carol Sue survived her. Ruby did not. Eight grandchildren. Twelve great-grandchildren. Johnnie Wright had died thirty-three days short of their seventy-fourth anniversary. Kitty Wells was thirty-three, a mother of three, and planning to leave music for good. She took one more session because it paid $125. The song answered a hit by Hank Thompson that blamed women for wrecking homes. She sang back that married men who acted single had wrecked plenty themselves. NBC banned it as suggestive. So did the BBC. The Opry would not let her sing it on the network broadcast. It spent six weeks at number one — the first solo woman ever to top the country chart. They called her the Queen of Country Music for the next sixty years. She was banned for a song about husbands who stray. She stayed with one for seventy-three years, and lasted ten months without him.

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Kitty Wells and the Song That Changed Country Music On July 16, 2012, a 92-year-old woman died in a house…

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MERLE HAGGARD HAD A NO. 1 ALBUM AT 78 — THEN HE DIED ON HIS 79TH BIRTHDAY. In 2015, Merle Haggard was doing something almost nobody his age gets to do. His album with Willie Nelson, “Django and Jimmie,” went to No. 1 on the country chart. At 78, Merle was still touring. Still writing. Still booking dates into the next year. Then the pneumonia came back, and the shows started falling off the calendar. On April 6, 2016, Merle Haggard died at 79 — on his birthday. His family said he had told them, a week earlier, that this was the day he would go. His last recording, “Kern River Blues,” was about leaving a place behind for good. But how did Merle know?

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Merle Haggard Had a No. 1 Album at 78 — Then He Died on His 79th Birthday In 2015, Merle…

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WHEN ARKANSAS PUT A STATUE OF JOHNNY CASH IN THE U.S. CAPITOL, IT WASN’T JUST HONORING A MUSIC LEGEND. IT WAS HONORING THE BOY WHO ONCE PICKED COTTON IN DYESS. Johnny Cash grew up on Farm No. 266 in a Depression-era resettlement colony in Arkansas. His family worked the cotton fields to survive. In 1937, floodwaters devastated the community. Years later, Cash would still be writing and singing about the kind of hardship he first learned there. The church gave him music. Losing his older brother Jack gave him grief he carried for the rest of his life. Cash didn’t sing pretty. He sang true. He walked into prisons and sang to men society preferred not to see. He wore black for the poor, the prisoners, and the forgotten. And when addiction and darkness entered his own life, he never built a legend around pretending they hadn’t. Nashville gave him fame. The world gave him stages. But the weight in that voice came from somewhere much smaller. Dyess never became a famous town. Johnny Cash did. And nearly ninety years after a little boy worked those Arkansas cotton fields, his likeness was placed inside the U.S. Capitol — carrying a piece of Dyess, and the people he never stopped singing for, with him.

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When Arkansas Put Johnny Cash in the U.S. Capitol, It Was Honoring More Than a Music Legend When Arkansas chose…

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LORETTA LYNN BOUGHT HURRICANE MILLS WITH DOOLITTLE IN 1966. TWENTY-SIX YEARS AFTER HE DIED, SHE WAS STILL LIVING ON THE LAND THEY HAD BUILT TOGETHER. Hurricane Mills became more than a home. It was where Loretta raised her family, welcomed fans, built a ranch, and watched the life she had once dreamed about become real. Doolittle had been there from the beginning. He bought her first guitar, pushed her toward radio, and remained tied to both the best and hardest parts of her story. Then he died in 1996 after nearly 50 years of marriage. Loretta stayed. The ranch kept going. Fans still came. Children and grandchildren filled the grounds. And Loretta continued living on the same Tennessee land they had chosen together three decades earlier. On October 4, 2022, Loretta died at home in Hurricane Mills. Three days later, she was buried in the family cemetery beside Doolittle. She had spent 26 years living without him. In the end, she never had to leave the place they had built together.

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Loretta Lynn, Hurricane Mills, and the Home She Never Left In 1966, Loretta Lynn and Doolittle Lynn made a decision…

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JERRY JEFF WALKER MET HIM IN A NEW ORLEANS JAIL. THE OLD MAN WOULDN’T GIVE POLICE HIS REAL NAME — ONLY “BOJANGLES.” THREE YEARS LATER, MILLIONS OF PEOPLE KNEW THAT NAME. Jerry Jeff Walker had been arrested for public drunkenness when he found himself sharing a cell with an aging street performer. The old man called himself “Bojangles.” He told stories about traveling, dancing for tips and the little dog that had once performed beside him. When he spoke about the dog dying, the noisy jail cell suddenly went quiet. Someone asked him to lighten the mood. So the old man stood up and danced. Walker never forgot it. In 1968, he turned that night into “Mr. Bojangles” — a song about a worn-down entertainer who could still make strangers smile while carrying his own grief. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band later took it into the Top 10. Sammy Davis Jr., Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and countless others recorded it. Nobody ever learned the old man’s real name. But the name he gave police that night became immortal.

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How Jerry Jeff Walker Turned a Jail Cell Story Into “Mr. Bojangles” Sometimes a song begins in the strangest place…

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MERLE HAGGARD HAD 38 NUMBER-ONE HITS. THE SONG THAT DEFINED HIM WASN’T ONE OF THEM. IT NEVER CHARTED AT ALL. Everyone knows “Okie from Muskogee.” Many know “Mama Tried.” But the song other artists have recorded more than anything else Haggard ever wrote was buried on the back of a 45 nobody was supposed to flip over. In 1967, Haggard was falling out of love with his wife, Bonnie Owens, and planning to leave her. She knew. They were walking through an airport when he looked over at her and said he thought he’d started loving her again today. She told him to turn the line around. He wrote the rest a few days later, alone in a motel room in Dallas. On February 1, 1968 — the day after cutting his next No. 1 — he recorded it in a single session and stuck it on the B-side. It wasn’t a love song. It was a man telling his wife to her face that he’d been packed and ready to go, and had changed his mind. Some songs are pushed to No. 1. This one never charted — and outlived every song that did. Have you heard Merle’s own version — or only somebody else’s?

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Merle Haggard’s Song That Never Needed a Hit Parade Merle Haggard had plenty of songs that filled jukeboxes, radio playlists,…

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HE DIDN’T RECORD A COVER. HE RECORDED HIS OWN EULOGY — AND EVERYONE INVOLVED KNEW IT. “Hurt” isn’t a song about addiction. It’s a man reading his own ledger out loud. Trent Reznor wrote it in his twenties, from inside the wreck. Cash sang it at seventy, from the far side of it — the same words, but one man was predicting and the other was confirming. Watch the video again. The House of Cash museum, shuttered. The dust. A banquet table set with more food than anyone could eat, and nobody sitting at it. His hands, too unsteady now to be certain of the strings. And June, on the staircase, watching him. This is for anyone who has ever looked at everything they built and seen the invoice instead of the achievement. That’s the part that breaks you. Not that he was dying. That she was standing right there — and she would go first. Four months later, she did. He followed in four more. Sometimes a man doesn’t get to apologize. He only gets to be heard. When was the last time you sat all the way through it — and what were you going through when you did?

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Hurt Was Never Just a Cover Johnny Cash did not walk into the recording of “Hurt” as if he were…

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TO A STADIUM FULL OF FANS, HE WAS ALAN JACKSON. TO THREE WOMEN IN THE CROWD, HE WAS STILL DADO. At Alan Jackson’s final concert in Nashville, the world came to say goodbye to a country music icon. But in one family box sat the people who had known him before the white hat became history. His wife, Denise. His daughters, Mattie, Ali, and Dani. The family that watched the road take him away night after night — and watched the songs bring him home again. After the show, Mattie Jackson Smith called the night “surreal,” “humbling,” and unforgettable. She wrote that his music had crossed generations because he always sang the truth. That is the part fans felt too. For more than three decades, Alan Jackson gave strangers songs for weddings, funerals, backroads, heartbreaks, and Sunday memories. But before he belonged to country music, he belonged to them. And maybe that is what made the final bow so powerful. The icon stood in front of the world. The father stood in front of his girls.

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Alan Jackson’s Final Night in Nashville Felt Like a Family Goodbye To a stadium full of fans, he was Alan…

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HE WROTE “ME AND BOBBY McGEE,” “HELP ME MAKE IT THROUGH THE NIGHT,” AND “SUNDAY MORNIN’ COMIN’ DOWN.” THEN A RECORD LABEL ASKED KRIS KRISTOFFERSON TO SING HIS OWN SONGS — AND HE TOLD THEM, “I CAN’T SING. I SOUND LIKE A FROG!” Before Nashville, Kris Kristofferson had already been a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a Golden Gloves boxer, an Army Ranger and a helicopter pilot. The Army planned to send him to West Point to teach English, but in 1965 he left the service and chose songwriting instead. In Nashville, he worked as a janitor at Columbia’s studio while artists including Bob Dylan recorded there. He tried getting songs to Johnny Cash through June Carter, but the tapes disappeared into the mountain of material Cash received. Then came the story Nashville never forgot. Kris really did land a helicopter on Cash’s property — but Cash wasn’t home. Kristofferson later laughed at the embellished version involving a beer and “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down.” Cash eventually became one of his greatest champions. And when Fred Foster signed Kris to Monument as a recording artist, Kristofferson could hardly believe it. “I can’t sing,” he told him. “I sound like a frog!” That rough voice became part of the point. Nashville already had plenty of beautiful singers. What it didn’t have was another Kris Kristofferson.

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When Kris Kristofferson Said He Couldn’t Sing, Nashville Heard Something Else Before Kris Kristofferson became one of country music’s most…

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SHE CAME TO NASHVILLE FROM CANADA AT 18. IN 2004, TERRI CLARK BECAME THE FIRST — AND STILL ONLY — CANADIAN WOMAN TO JOIN THE GRAND OLE OPRY. Terri Clark grew up in Medicine Hat, Alberta, with country music already in the family. Her grandparents, Ray and Betty Gauthier, had performed with stars like Johnny Cash and George Jones. But Nashville did not hand Terri anything. At 18, she left Canada and headed south, playing places like Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge for tips while trying to convince somebody that her voice belonged on country radio. Years later, that journey came full circle on the Grand Ole Opry stage. In 2004, Steve Wariner told Terri he had a surprise. Then her mother walked out carrying a sign with four words and a date: “Grand Ole Opry — June 12.” That was the night Terri learned she was becoming an Opry member. The Canadian girl who once played Nashville bars for tips had made it to country music’s most famous stage — and her mother got to tell her.

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Terri Clark’s Long Road from Canada to the Grand Ole Opry Terri Clark’s story has the kind of beginning that…

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