Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

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GEORGE JONES THOUGHT CONWAY TWITTY WAS THE BIG SURPRISE AT THE OPENING OF HIS MUSIC PARK. TAMMY WYNETTE HAD SECRETLY BROUGHT IN ONE MORE MAN — HIS OLD FRIEND CHARLEY PRIDE. On April 4, 1971, George Jones and Tammy Wynette opened Old Plantation Music Park beside their home in Lakeland, Florida. More than 10,000 people packed the grounds. Conway Twitty was advertised as the headliner, and George and Tammy were there to perform at the place they had built together. But Tammy had kept one part of the day from George. Without telling him, she arranged for Charley Pride, one of George’s old friends, to come down from Nashville. Then Charley walked out and played a surprise set. At the time, Pride was already in the middle of one of country music’s great runs of No. 1 records. Yet that afternoon, he was not there because his name was on the marquee. Tammy had brought him there for George. On a day filled with thousands of fans and country stars, her best surprise was simply an old friend showing up.

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George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and the Surprise That Meant the Most On April 4, 1971, George Jones and Tammy Wynette…

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JOHNNY RUSSELL CANCELLED A DATE AND JOKED THAT HOLLYWOOD WAS GOING TO MAKE HIM A STAR. TWO YEARS LATER, BUCK OWENS TURNED THAT JOKE INTO HIS FIRST NO. 1 HIT. Johnny Russell was supposed to go out with his girlfriend when musician friends called and asked him to come to Los Angeles for a recording session. When she asked why he was leaving, Russell jokingly told her they were going to put him in the movies and make him a big star. They both laughed. But Russell couldn’t forget the line. He turned the joke into “Act Naturally,” a song about a brokenhearted man who figures he would be perfect for a sad movie because he wouldn’t even have to act. Then almost nothing happened. For roughly two years, Russell couldn’t get anyone to record it. Eventually songwriter Voni Morrison brought it to Buck Owens. Buck recorded the song at Capitol Studios on February 12, 1963. “Act Naturally” became Buck’s first No. 1 country hit and spent four weeks at the top. Two years later, the Beatles recorded it with Ringo Starr singing lead. A joke used to explain one cancelled date had traveled all the way from a girlfriend to Buck Owens — and then to the Beatles.

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How a Cancelled Date Helped Create Buck Owens’ First No. 1 Hit Some songs begin with a studio, a deadline,…

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MEL TILLIS WAITED FIFTY-TWO YEARS TO JOIN THE GRAND OLE OPRY. HIS DAUGHTER GOT THERE FIRST. Pam Tillis became an Opry member in 2000. She had first sung on that stage at eight years old, standing beside her father at the Ryman. He was still waiting. A childhood bout of malaria had left him with a stutter he didn’t know he had until first grade, and when he reached Nashville in the fifties, a record man told him to forget singing and sell his songs instead. He sold more than a thousand of them, six hundred recorded by other artists. “Detroit City,” written with Danny Dill, won Bobby Bare a Grammy in 1963. “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” came out of the house next door in Pahokee, where a paralyzed World War II veteran and the English nurse he had married argued through the window beside young Mel’s bed. Johnny Darrell had the hit first. Kenny Rogers made it a standard two years later. The stutter never followed him into a song. On June 9, 2007, Pam stood on that stage and told her father the best part of getting inducted first was that she got to induct him. He was seventy-four. “It took me 52 years,” he said, “and I do appreciate this.” Two months later the Country Music Hall of Fame elected him. He would have turned 94 this weekend.

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Mel Tillis Waited Fifty-Two Years to Join the Grand Ole Opry. His Daughter Got There First. In country music, some…

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RAY PRICE KNEW HE WAS RUNNING OUT OF TIME. HE CALLED FRED FOSTER AND SAID, “I THINK I HAVE ONE ALBUM LEFT IN ME.” HE WAS RIGHT. Ray Price was battling pancreatic cancer when he called his longtime friend and producer Fred Foster in 2012. “I think I have one album left in me,” the 86-year-old told him. He wanted Foster to produce it. Despite the cancer and repeated health problems, Ray kept recording. The songs were mostly love ballads, many chosen with his wife Janie in mind — the woman who had been beside him since 1970. By October 2013, Ray had finished his studio work. Less than two months later, on December 16, he died at his Texas home at 87. He never saw the album released. On April 15, 2014, “Beauty Is… The Final Sessions” finally arrived, including duets with Vince Gill and Martina McBride. Ray had been right. He had one album left in him — and he used it to leave behind the kind of songs he loved most.

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Ray Price Knew He Was Running Out of Time. He Called Fred Foster and Said, “I Think I Have One…

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A FATHER AND HIS SON WROTE A SONG CALLED “LIVE FOREVER.” SEVEN YEARS LATER, THE SON WAS DEAD AT 38. MỘT NGƯỜI CHA VÀ CON TRAI VIẾT CHUNG BÀI HÁT TÊN “LIVE FOREVER.” BẢY NĂM SAU, NGƯỜI CON CHẾT Ở TUỔI 38. In 1993, Billy Joe Shaver and his son Eddy recorded “Live Forever” for the album Tramp on Your Street. Eddy, the guitar player, came up with the melody first and handed it to his father. Billy Joe carried it around for months before the words came — a song about a man who knows he is going to die, and knows the songs he leaves behind will keep him here anyway. Then the family started disappearing. In 1999, Billy Joe’s wife Brenda and his own mother both died of cancer, one month apart. Soon after, Eddy admitted to his father that he was addicted to heroin. On December 30, 2000, Eddy was found unconscious in a Waco hotel room. He was pronounced dead at 2:58 the next morning, age 38, and buried beside his mother. The son who wrote the song about living forever went first. His father was 61, and now had to sing it alone. He sang it for twenty more years. The last thing Billy Joe ever posted online, on April 24, 2019, was a video of that song. He died in Waco on October 28, 2020, at 81. Both men who wrote “Live Forever” were gone. On February 5, 2023, Willie Nelson won a Grammy for singing it.

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A Song Called “Live Forever” and the Family That Could Not Outrun Loss In country music, some songs feel bigger…

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JOHNNY CASH WROTE HIS LAST SONG ABOUT DEATH. THREE YEARS LATER, THE WORLD HEARD IT WITHOUT HIM. Near the end of his life, Johnny Cash was struggling with poor health and chronic asthma. After one hospital stay, he came home and went straight back to the studio at Cash Cabin. There, he recorded “Like the 309” — the last song he ever wrote. Cash had spent his career singing about trains. But this time, the train was carrying him away. He sang about “Doctor Death,” struggling to catch his breath, and being placed in his box aboard the 309. Johnny died on September 12, 2003, at 71. The song remained unreleased. Then, on July 4, 2006, it appeared on *American V: A Hundred Highways*. The album went all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard 200. More than 50 years after “Hey Porter,” Johnny Cash’s final original song brought him back to a train one last time.

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Johnny Cash Wrote His Last Song About Death. Three Years Later, the World Heard It Without Him. Near the end…

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DOC WATSON WAS BLIND FROM THE TIME HE WAS A BABY. FOR TWENTY-ONE YEARS, THE HAND THAT LED HIM ONTO EVERY STAGE BELONGED TO HIS SON. Eddy Merle Watson was named for Eddy Arnold and Merle Travis. He picked up a guitar at 15, and in 1964 he went out on the road with his father — driving him, guiding him, and playing rhythm behind the finest flatpicker in America. But Merle never loved the road. He kept a farm outside Lenoir, North Carolina, and other pickers sometimes filled his chair on tour so he could stay home. At 4:15 in the morning on October 23, 1985, Merle was working alone with a saw on houses he owned when a piece of wood struck his arm. He drove his tractor to a neighbor’s place to get it bandaged. Coming back down the drive, he took the turn too sharp. The tractor went over an embankment and landed on top of him. He was 36. He died where he fell. Doc had lost, in his own words, the best friend he ever had in this world. The night before the funeral he decided he would never play again. Then he dreamed he was sinking in dark quicksand, and a strong hand reached back for him — “Come on, Dad, you can make it.” He never wrote a song about it. Three years later he built something instead: MerleFest, held every spring in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, drawing tens of thousands. Doc played it until the end. He died in 2012 at 89, and he rests near Merle in Deep Gap, in the same mountains where they both began.

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The Hand That Led Doc Watson Onstage For more than two decades, the story of Doc Watson and his son…

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LUKE COMBS WAS FOUR YEARS OLD WHEN HE FIRST FELL IN LOVE WITH “FAST CAR.” Tracy Chapman wrote it in 1986, a college student playing coffeehouses around Boston, and released it as her debut single in April 1988. Combs put his own version on his 2023 album and it went to No. 1 on country radio, which made Chapman the first Black woman with sole writing credit on a No. 1 country hit. That November at the CMA Awards, Combs won Single of the Year and thanked her before anyone else, calling it one of the greatest songs of all time. Minutes later, Bill Anderson announced her as Song of the Year — the first Black songwriter to win it since the awards began in 1967. Chapman wasn’t there. Sara Evans read her note aloud, and the arena stood for an empty spot on the stage. Three months later she walked out at the Grammys and sang “Fast Car” herself, with Combs beside her, the first time she had performed it in years. The room rose again, and this time she was in it. That week her original 1988 recording hit No. 1 on the US iTunes chart — the first time it had ever gotten there.

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Luke Combs and the Long Road of “Fast Car” Luke Combs was only four years old when he first fell…

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FOR FIVE DECADES WILLIE NELSON HAS OPENED HIS SHOWS WITH A SONG WRITTEN BY HIS OLD DRUMMER — A MAN NASHVILLE REFUSED TO RECORD. Johnny Bush kept time behind Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys and in Willie’s own band, the Record Men. Labels heard him sing and said he was too close to Ray Price to be worth a contract. Willie had heard a version of that verdict about himself, so in 1967 he paid for Bush’s first album on the small Stop label and gave him “You Ought to Hear Me Cry” to sing on it. That single scraped the chart at No. 69. Then “Undo the Right” reached No. 10 and “You Gave Me a Mountain” went to No. 7, and RCA signed Bush in 1972. His first single there was one he wrote himself: “Whiskey River.” Willie recorded it for Shotgun Willie the next year. Right then Bush’s voice began failing. It took years before anyone named it spasmodic dysphonia. RCA dropped him in 1974, and there were stretches when he could barely speak, much less sing. Willie kept opening every show with the song. Bush said the money it earned him “saved me through the spasmodic dysphonia years.”

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How Willie Nelson Turned Johnny Bush’s “Whiskey River” Into a Country Music Homecoming For decades, Willie Nelson has opened his…

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IN 1991, A NEWSPAPER CALLED THEM “THE SAINT AND THE SINNER.” THEY WERE ON THE SAME TOUR BUS. Conway Twitty was the saint. He never drank. Never touched drugs. Kept his private life so quiet that even people in Nashville didn’t know much about him. George Jones was the sinner, and everybody knew it. The drinking. The drugs. The nights he simply didn’t show up. They called him “No-Show Jones” and he wore it like an old coat. Two men who had almost nothing in common. And still, there they were — same stages, same road, each singing his own set. Someone asked Conway why he kept touring with him. He said the contrast was the whole point. People got both sides of country music in one night. Then he said something that wasn’t about music at all. “We’re not real close friends… But George has been as close a friend as I’ve had in the music business over the years.” Conway died two years later. He was 59. That same year, George walked into a studio and sang “Hello Darlin’.” Conway’s song.

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The Saint and the Sinner on the Same Bus In country music, some pairings make sense only after you have…

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GEORGE JONES THOUGHT CONWAY TWITTY WAS THE BIG SURPRISE AT THE OPENING OF HIS MUSIC PARK. TAMMY WYNETTE HAD SECRETLY BROUGHT IN ONE MORE MAN — HIS OLD FRIEND CHARLEY PRIDE. On April 4, 1971, George Jones and Tammy Wynette opened Old Plantation Music Park beside their home in Lakeland, Florida. More than 10,000 people packed the grounds. Conway Twitty was advertised as the headliner, and George and Tammy were there to perform at the place they had built together. But Tammy had kept one part of the day from George. Without telling him, she arranged for Charley Pride, one of George’s old friends, to come down from Nashville. Then Charley walked out and played a surprise set. At the time, Pride was already in the middle of one of country music’s great runs of No. 1 records. Yet that afternoon, he was not there because his name was on the marquee. Tammy had brought him there for George. On a day filled with thousands of fans and country stars, her best surprise was simply an old friend showing up.

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JOHNNY RUSSELL CANCELLED A DATE AND JOKED THAT HOLLYWOOD WAS GOING TO MAKE HIM A STAR. TWO YEARS LATER, BUCK OWENS TURNED THAT JOKE INTO HIS FIRST NO. 1 HIT. Johnny Russell was supposed to go out with his girlfriend when musician friends called and asked him to come to Los Angeles for a recording session. When she asked why he was leaving, Russell jokingly told her they were going to put him in the movies and make him a big star. They both laughed. But Russell couldn’t forget the line. He turned the joke into “Act Naturally,” a song about a brokenhearted man who figures he would be perfect for a sad movie because he wouldn’t even have to act. Then almost nothing happened. For roughly two years, Russell couldn’t get anyone to record it. Eventually songwriter Voni Morrison brought it to Buck Owens. Buck recorded the song at Capitol Studios on February 12, 1963. “Act Naturally” became Buck’s first No. 1 country hit and spent four weeks at the top. Two years later, the Beatles recorded it with Ringo Starr singing lead. A joke used to explain one cancelled date had traveled all the way from a girlfriend to Buck Owens — and then to the Beatles.

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MEL TILLIS WAITED FIFTY-TWO YEARS TO JOIN THE GRAND OLE OPRY. HIS DAUGHTER GOT THERE FIRST. Pam Tillis became an Opry member in 2000. She had first sung on that stage at eight years old, standing beside her father at the Ryman. He was still waiting. A childhood bout of malaria had left him with a stutter he didn’t know he had until first grade, and when he reached Nashville in the fifties, a record man told him to forget singing and sell his songs instead. He sold more than a thousand of them, six hundred recorded by other artists. “Detroit City,” written with Danny Dill, won Bobby Bare a Grammy in 1963. “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” came out of the house next door in Pahokee, where a paralyzed World War II veteran and the English nurse he had married argued through the window beside young Mel’s bed. Johnny Darrell had the hit first. Kenny Rogers made it a standard two years later. The stutter never followed him into a song. On June 9, 2007, Pam stood on that stage and told her father the best part of getting inducted first was that she got to induct him. He was seventy-four. “It took me 52 years,” he said, “and I do appreciate this.” Two months later the Country Music Hall of Fame elected him. He would have turned 94 this weekend.

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RAY PRICE KNEW HE WAS RUNNING OUT OF TIME. HE CALLED FRED FOSTER AND SAID, “I THINK I HAVE ONE ALBUM LEFT IN ME.” HE WAS RIGHT. Ray Price was battling pancreatic cancer when he called his longtime friend and producer Fred Foster in 2012. “I think I have one album left in me,” the 86-year-old told him. He wanted Foster to produce it. Despite the cancer and repeated health problems, Ray kept recording. The songs were mostly love ballads, many chosen with his wife Janie in mind — the woman who had been beside him since 1970. By October 2013, Ray had finished his studio work. Less than two months later, on December 16, he died at his Texas home at 87. He never saw the album released. On April 15, 2014, “Beauty Is… The Final Sessions” finally arrived, including duets with Vince Gill and Martina McBride. Ray had been right. He had one album left in him — and he used it to leave behind the kind of songs he loved most.