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FAITH HILL PUT “STRONGER” ON AN ALBUM IN 2002, WHEN HER YOUNGEST DAUGHTER WAS STILL A BABY IN THE HOUSE. Twenty-four years later, that daughter sang it herself. Tim McGraw gave no warning at his July 24 show at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York. He brought Audrey out, stayed beside her, and let her take the room. Since Faith has stepped back from performing, for many fans that voice on that melody was something they had almost stopped expecting to hear live. Audrey posted a black-and-white clip the next day, writing about the honor she felt singing her mama’s song at her dad’s show, and calling it an infinite gift to be their daughter. Then Martina McBride left a comment, and she wasn’t talking about New York. She told Audrey she had always had “it” since she was about six, back when they were all doing karaoke together in the Bahamas. Eighteen years before a sold-out crowd on Long Island figured it out, a handful of people on vacation already knew.

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The Night Audrey McGraw Sang Faith Hill’s “Stronger” and Made the Song Feel New Again There are some songs that…

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HE WAS THE THIRD OF TWELVE PARTON CHILDREN, AND HE IS THE FIFTH OF THEM TO BE BURIED. Coy “Denver” Parton died on Thursday, July 23, at 82, in Sevierville, Tennessee, in the county where he was born in August of 1943. Dolly came next, about two and a half years behind him. She left for Nashville, and Stella and Randy eventually followed her onto stages. Denver never did. He ran a crane and spent years building bridges across East Tennessee. He kept a homestead. He hunted. Taste of Country once called him perhaps the most private of all the Partons, noted there was almost nothing on the record about him at all, and guessed that was how he preferred it. He had already buried his wife, Carolyn. The family had already buried Larry, Floyd, Randy, and David, and in March of last year Dolly buried her husband of nearly sixty years. Denver’s service was held privately. No cause of death was given. Then came the one public request. Instead of flowers, the family asked that people give to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the program that has mailed free books to small children since 1995, when it began right there in Sevier County. A man almost nothing was ever written about will now be remembered by strangers putting books into the hands of children in the county where he was born.

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Denver Parton’s Quiet Life, and the Family Memory He Leaves Behind When Coy “Denver” Parton died on Thursday, July 23,…

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HE MADE THE TOP 20 ON A TELEVISION SINGING SHOW, THEN SANG A COUNTRY SONG AND GOT SENT HOME. That was 2014. Morgan Wallen was a Southern Baptist pastor’s son from east Tennessee who had only ever sung in church, and he auditioned for The Voice with a Howie Day cover. He landed on Usher’s team, got stolen away by Adam Levine, and was cut in the playoffs before the live rounds began. Years later he gave his own account of why. “They wanted me to sing pop music,” he said, describing himself as a fish out of water who had never even been on an airplane before the show. Twelve years on, he walked into a building that had gone almost a century without hosting a concert at all. Michigan Stadium opened in 1927 and stayed a football field until Zach Bryan played there last September. On July 24 and 25, Wallen played the second and third shows in its history, an estimated 75,000 people a night, in the largest stadium in the United States. The kid they dressed up in pop clothes was finally too country to fit anywhere smaller.

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From Reality Show Elimination to Stadium Headliner: Morgan Wallen’s Long, Country Road In 2014, Morgan Wallen was still the son…

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IN JANUARY 2002, THE SONG VERN GOSDIN HAD SUNG A THOUSAND TIMES STOPPED BEING SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY. That month his youngest son, Marty, was murdered in Ellijay, Georgia. Vern was sixty-seven. For fourteen years he had been singing a song about a man who doesn’t understand loneliness until he reads a name cut into a cemetery stone, and for fourteen years he had been singing it from the outside. He never wrote that part from his own life. “Chiseled in Stone” was written with Max D. Barnes, who buried an eighteen-year-old son in 1975 and carried it quietly for more than a decade before it became a chorus. What Vern brought to the record was his own damage — a third marriage collapsing while he signed with Columbia. Afterward he joked, “I got 10 hits out of my last divorce.” The song took CMA Song of the Year in 1989, and Tammy Wynette had already named him the closest thing country music had to a second George Jones. Then 2002 handed him the verse he had only been borrowing. He kept working anyway. A stroke hit him in 1998 and he wrote through it, released a 101-song box set in December 2008, and was fixing up his tour bus for a CMA Fest appearance he never made. He died in Nashville on April 28, 2009.

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How Vern Gosdin’s “Chiseled in Stone” Became Something He Could Finally Feel For years, Vern Gosdin sang “Chiseled in Stone”…

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THE WHOLE WILLIAMS FAMILY WAS ALREADY IN ONE PLACE THE WEEK KATHERINE DIED, AND NOT FOR A SHOW. On Thursday, June 11, 2020, they buried a great-aunt, Loretta Fleming, a sister of Hank Jr.’s mother Audrey Williams. Friday morning, Holly talked everyone into standing together for a picture. Saturday evening, Katherine Williams-Dunning was driving south on Highway 79 in Henry County, towing a boat with her husband Tyler beside her, when the SUV crossed the median and rolled. Tyler was airlifted and survived. Katherine was 27. She was the only one of Hank Williams Jr.’s five children who never went into music. While Hank III, Holly, Hilary and Sam built careers on stages, Katherine built a small clothing label out of West Tennessee called Weston Jane, where the shirts were handmade or printed by other mothers, because she thought moms deserved a place that built them up instead of picking them apart. She left behind Beau Weston, five, and Audrey Jane, two. Two weeks before the crash, she had posted a childhood photo of herself in her father’s arms for his birthday. She called him her hero, and wrote, “I have always been a daddy’s girl.”

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The Williams Family’s Quiet Weekend Before a Sudden Loss By the time Katherine Williams-Dunning died on Saturday, June 13, 2020,…

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SAM ELLIOTT AND WAYLON JENNINGS ARE GOING INTO THE SAME HOLLYWOOD CLASS. ONLY ONE OF THEM WILL BE THERE TO SEE IT. The Hollywood Chamber of Commerce named 32 honorees for its Class of 2027 on Thursday. Elliott was chosen in Motion Pictures, Jennings in Recording. Elliott is 81, and he has been at this since a bit part in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in 1969: Virgil Earp in Tombstone, Shea Brennan in 1883, and most recently Landman. The 1883 role won him a Screen Actors Guild Award at 78, and he called it the most meaningful acknowledgement of his 55-year career. Fifty-seven years in, the sidewalk finally has room for him. Jennings will not get a speech. He died in 2002, the year after he was voted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and he is the only person in this entire class being honored posthumously. For a lot of America, that voice arrived before the catalog did — he was the Balladeer on The Dukes of Hazzard, talking over car chases every week to people who had never owned an outlaw country record in their lives. Twenty-four years after they buried him, his name goes into that concrete.

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Sam Elliott and Waylon Jennings Enter the Same Hollywood Class, but Only One Can Be There to See It Hollywood…

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SHE LEARNED FROM A RADIO NEWSCAST THE NEXT MORNING THAT ONE CRASH HAD TAKEN BOTH HER FATHER AND HER HUSBAND — AND THE NO. 1 RECORD THAT SAVED HER FATHER’S CAREER HAD HER OWN HANDS ON IT. On the morning of March 3, 1963, Kathy Copas Hughes watched her father, Cowboy Copas, and Hawkshaw Hawkins play with a child’s gyroscope before they left for Kansas City. They were flying out to a benefit for the family of disc jockey “Cactus” Jack Call, killed in a car wreck a month earlier. Her husband, Randy Hughes, 34, was flying them. He had been a session guitarist in her father’s band before deciding he could do more than play guitar, and by 1959 he was managing Patsy Cline. Fog held them in Kansas City an extra day. On the evening of March 5, after a fuel stop in Dyersburg, the Piper Comanche went down in heavy woods near Camden, Tennessee. Copas, Cline, Hawkins and Hughes were killed instantly. She learned that her father and her husband were both dead from a newscast the following morning. Kathy was never only a manager’s wife. She had been on King Records since 1951, still a teenager, cutting duets with her father — “You’ll Never Ever See Me Cry,” “I Love You (My Darling).” When “Alabam” held No. 1 for twelve weeks in 1960 and stayed on the chart thirty-four, ending an eight-year drought and giving her father the only chart-topper of his twenty-year career, the tambourine on that record was hers. His final single was already pressed. “Goodbye Kisses,” a co-write with Lefty Frizzell, reached No. 12 in April 1963. She stayed in the business anyway. What she did with the publishing company her husband left behind, and whose gospel No. 1 ended up paying for it, is the part of that crash still filed under three other names.

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When One News Broadcast Changed Everything for Kathy Copas Hughes On the morning of March 3, 1963, Kathy Copas Hughes…

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HER ACCOUNTANTS WERE ONLY LET NEAR PART OF THE BOOKS. THAT PART ALONE WAS OFF BY MORE THAN $236,000 IN HER FAVOR. That figure came from the New York firm Prager & Fenton, and it is why Brenda Lee walked into a Nashville courthouse in August 1988. She asked MCA Records for $20 million — half compensatory, half punitive — plus a full accounting of every royalty she was owed. Her filing accused the label of failing to account for record sales, licensing her recordings without her permission, neglecting foreign licensing, and blocking her attempts to audit the company at all. The contract underneath all of it was signed in 1962, when she was 17 and already an international hit. She had been recording for the same company since she was 11. MCA kept her until 1986, then let her go. Its lawyers argued that the clock on her claims had expired long before she ever filed. It never reached a verdict. In August 1989, almost exactly one year in, the two sides settled, and the judge ordered the terms sealed at the request of both Lee and MCA. Whatever those books finally showed, the woman who signed at 17 and the company that held her catalog agreed on one last thing: nobody else was going to read it.

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Brenda Lee, MCA Records, and the Accounting Battle That Stayed Hidden In August 1988, Brenda Lee walked into a Nashville…

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THEY HONORED HIM BEHIND CLOSED DOORS INSIDE THE COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME. NO PUBLIC CROWD. NO GRAND FAREWELL. FOR DON WILLIAMS, QUIET WAS NEVER AN ACT. Seventeen No. 1 singles. Forty-five Top 10 hits. At least one major hit every year from 1974 through 1991. His voice reached listeners around the world, yet the man called the Gentle Giant spent his career avoiding the noise that usually followed fame. In March 2016, he ended six decades in music with one simple sentence: “It’s time to hang my hat up and enjoy some quiet time at home.” There was no farewell tour. Eighteen months later, on September 8, 2017, Don died at 78 after a short illness. That same day, Troy Gentry was killed in a helicopter crash. Country music suddenly had two deaths to mourn, and Don’s quiet passing became the quieter headline. Nineteen days later, his family, friends, and members of the music industry gathered inside the CMA Theater for a private memorial service. The public was not invited. No packed arena. No televised spectacle. Don Williams spent a lifetime proving that a man did not have to be loud to be unforgettable. Even his goodbye made the same point.

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Don Williams and the Power of Quiet Inside the Country Music Hall of Fame, the goodbye for Don Williams was…

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THE REID BLOODLINE: WHEN MUSIC RUNS DEEPER THAN TALENT — IT RUNS IN THE FAMILY. Some bands are built by contracts. Some by coincidence. And then there are The Statler Brothers — built by blood. In 1959, Don Reid was just 14 years old when he joined his older brother Harold’s music group. Not for fame. Not for money — back then, they often paid ten dollars for the privilege of performing. Simply because Harold needed a voice, and Don had exactly that voice. Harold sang bass. Don sang lead. Two brothers — two voices — forming the backbone of a group that would reshape country music for nearly half a century. But the Reid legacy didn’t stop at that generation. Wil and Langdon Reid — sons of Harold and Don respectively — followed the same musical path, forming a duo of their own in the 1990s. Music wasn’t a career choice in this family. It was the mother tongue. After the group retired, Don Reid built a second career as an author — eleven books, from intimate Statler memoirs to original fiction. Harold carried that legendary bass voice until 2020. The man is gone. The sound never left. One family. One bloodline. One legacy country music will never stop singing about. Between Harold and Don Reid — whose contribution moves you more, and why?

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The Reid Bloodline: When Music Ran Deeper Than Talent Some music stories begin with a record deal. The Reid story…

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FAITH HILL PUT “STRONGER” ON AN ALBUM IN 2002, WHEN HER YOUNGEST DAUGHTER WAS STILL A BABY IN THE HOUSE. Twenty-four years later, that daughter sang it herself. Tim McGraw gave no warning at his July 24 show at Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, New York. He brought Audrey out, stayed beside her, and let her take the room. Since Faith has stepped back from performing, for many fans that voice on that melody was something they had almost stopped expecting to hear live. Audrey posted a black-and-white clip the next day, writing about the honor she felt singing her mama’s song at her dad’s show, and calling it an infinite gift to be their daughter. Then Martina McBride left a comment, and she wasn’t talking about New York. She told Audrey she had always had “it” since she was about six, back when they were all doing karaoke together in the Bahamas. Eighteen years before a sold-out crowd on Long Island figured it out, a handful of people on vacation already knew.

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HE WAS THE THIRD OF TWELVE PARTON CHILDREN, AND HE IS THE FIFTH OF THEM TO BE BURIED. Coy “Denver” Parton died on Thursday, July 23, at 82, in Sevierville, Tennessee, in the county where he was born in August of 1943. Dolly came next, about two and a half years behind him. She left for Nashville, and Stella and Randy eventually followed her onto stages. Denver never did. He ran a crane and spent years building bridges across East Tennessee. He kept a homestead. He hunted. Taste of Country once called him perhaps the most private of all the Partons, noted there was almost nothing on the record about him at all, and guessed that was how he preferred it. He had already buried his wife, Carolyn. The family had already buried Larry, Floyd, Randy, and David, and in March of last year Dolly buried her husband of nearly sixty years. Denver’s service was held privately. No cause of death was given. Then came the one public request. Instead of flowers, the family asked that people give to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the program that has mailed free books to small children since 1995, when it began right there in Sevier County. A man almost nothing was ever written about will now be remembered by strangers putting books into the hands of children in the county where he was born.

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HE MADE THE TOP 20 ON A TELEVISION SINGING SHOW, THEN SANG A COUNTRY SONG AND GOT SENT HOME. That was 2014. Morgan Wallen was a Southern Baptist pastor’s son from east Tennessee who had only ever sung in church, and he auditioned for The Voice with a Howie Day cover. He landed on Usher’s team, got stolen away by Adam Levine, and was cut in the playoffs before the live rounds began. Years later he gave his own account of why. “They wanted me to sing pop music,” he said, describing himself as a fish out of water who had never even been on an airplane before the show. Twelve years on, he walked into a building that had gone almost a century without hosting a concert at all. Michigan Stadium opened in 1927 and stayed a football field until Zach Bryan played there last September. On July 24 and 25, Wallen played the second and third shows in its history, an estimated 75,000 people a night, in the largest stadium in the United States. The kid they dressed up in pop clothes was finally too country to fit anywhere smaller.

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IN JANUARY 2002, THE SONG VERN GOSDIN HAD SUNG A THOUSAND TIMES STOPPED BEING SOMEONE ELSE’S STORY. That month his youngest son, Marty, was murdered in Ellijay, Georgia. Vern was sixty-seven. For fourteen years he had been singing a song about a man who doesn’t understand loneliness until he reads a name cut into a cemetery stone, and for fourteen years he had been singing it from the outside. He never wrote that part from his own life. “Chiseled in Stone” was written with Max D. Barnes, who buried an eighteen-year-old son in 1975 and carried it quietly for more than a decade before it became a chorus. What Vern brought to the record was his own damage — a third marriage collapsing while he signed with Columbia. Afterward he joked, “I got 10 hits out of my last divorce.” The song took CMA Song of the Year in 1989, and Tammy Wynette had already named him the closest thing country music had to a second George Jones. Then 2002 handed him the verse he had only been borrowing. He kept working anyway. A stroke hit him in 1998 and he wrote through it, released a 101-song box set in December 2008, and was fixing up his tour bus for a CMA Fest appearance he never made. He died in Nashville on April 28, 2009.