Country Music

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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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HE TOOK $1,600 TO RECORD 16 SONGS — JUST ENOUGH MONEY TO LEAVE NASHVILLE FOREVER. By 1963, Roger Miller was done with Nashville. His RCA deal had run out. Nothing stuck. He’d been funny on the Tonight Show, people liked him, and he figured acting in Los Angeles was worth a shot. He just needed the money to get there. So he asked Smash Records for $1,600. They said yes — on one condition. Sixteen songs, $100 a side. January 10th and 11th, 1964. He walked into a Nashville studio with a dozen of his own songs and cut fifteen of them in two days. One ran 1 minute and 47 seconds. He’d written it in about ten minutes and didn’t think much of it. Neither did the label. The first single was supposed to be a completely different song. The only reason it wasn’t comes down to one man standing in that control room. “Dang Me” came out that May. By July it was No.1 country — six weeks at the top — and No.7 on pop, in the year The Beatles owned the radio. Miller took his $1,500 and moved to California anyway. He lived above Lee Hazlewood’s garage. At the 1965 Grammys he won five awards. Four were for that little song. He never did become an actor.

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Roger Miller’s $1,600 Gamble That Changed Everything By 1963, Roger Miller was ready to walk away from Nashville. His RCA…

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EIGHT WEEKS. THAT’S ALL THE TIME MARTY ROBBINS HAD LEFT AFTER THEY CALLED HIS NAME. On October 11, 1982, Marty Robbins nearly didn’t show up. His son Ronny said the CMA had never been warm to his father. Maybe one nomination in twelve or fifteen years. Marty had stopped expecting anything from that room a long time ago. Eddy Arnold is the only reason he walked in that night — and Arnold never told him why he was asking. Then Arnold stood up and said Marty’s name for the Country Music Hall of Fame. Marty looked stunned. He told the room he really felt there were other people who deserved it before he should get it. Then he added a line that got a laugh: “Possibly it might not happen again, so I’m gonna take it tonight.” They laughed because it sounded like a joke. He was 57 and having his best year in a decade. What almost nobody in that room knew was how much of it he was holding back. “Some Memories Just Won’t Die” had come out that April and climbed to No. 10 in August — his first Top 10 in over four years. Billboard gave him its Artist Resurgence Award the same month they gave him the Hall of Fame. Four weeks later, on November 7, he climbed into a Buick Regal at the Atlanta Journal 500 and finished 33rd. His last race. A month after that, his heart gave out. December 8, 1982. Fifty-eight days after he took the trophy he said might never come again.

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EIGHT WEEKS: THE NIGHT MARTY ROBBINS GOT HIS NAME CALLED On October 11, 1982, Marty Robbins almost did not show…

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THEY WAITED 20 YEARS TO SING TOGETHER AGAIN. THEY HAD 19 DAYS LEFT. The wind wouldn’t stop that night in Nashville. Naomi and Wynonna stood face to face outside the Country Music Hall of Fame, singing “Love Can Build a Bridge” — their first awards show performance together in more than 20 years. A gospel choir in white robes stood behind them. Halfway through, Wynonna looked at her mother and said it out loud: “This is really happening.” Earlier that day, a camera crew had asked Naomi one small question. Her answer only makes sense now. That same night they announced a 10-show farewell tour. And the building right behind them was about to induct them. Naomi never made it inside. She died on April 30 — nineteen days later. Her family said they lost her to mental illness. The ceremony went ahead the next day. Wynonna came with no speech written; she’d always figured her mom would do most of the talking. “Though my heart is broken, I will continue to sing,” she said. The question they’d asked Naomi was which one song she’d want to be remembered for. She said: “Love Can Build a Bridge.”

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They Waited 20 Years to Sing Together Again. They Had 19 Days Left. The wind was restless in Nashville that…

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40,000 EMPTY SEATS. ONE 86-YEAR-OLD MAN. AND A SONG NOBODY WAS THERE TO HEAR. July 24, 2020. The first game ever played at Globe Life Field in Arlington. Charley Pride walked out to the pitcher’s mound. He was 86 years old. The seats were empty. All 40,000 of them. Pandemic rules, no fans allowed. No cheering. Nothing. Back in the 1950s he pitched for the Memphis Red Sox in the Negro Leagues, a hundred dollars a month plus meal money. He kept trying to reach the majors. The door stayed shut. Even his first album in 1966 came out with his face left off the cover, so people would hear the voice before they saw the man. And how he got from those long bus rides to a seat in a Major League ownership group is a story most fans have never actually heard. In 2010 he bought a minority stake in the Texas Rangers. Ten years later he was standing on their mound as one of the owners. He closed his eyes and sang the anthem into the silence. Then he threw out the first pitch. Less than five months later, he was gone.

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40,000 Empty Seats. One 86-Year-Old Man. And a Song That Filled the Silence. On July 24, 2020, the first game…

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JOHN PRINE SAT IN HIS LIVING ROOM AND RECORDED ONE LAST SONG ABOUT REMEMBERING EVERYTHING. THE WORLD DID NOT HEAR IT UNTIL AFTER HE WAS GONE. In 2019, Prine gathered with producer Dave Cobb and engineer Gena Johnson inside his Nashville home. There was no large studio and no audience. Just John, his guitar and a song he had written with his longtime friend Pat McLaughlin. It was called “I Remember Everything.” Prine sang about the towns, hotel rooms and imperfect guitars that had filled his long life on the road. No one in the room knew it would be his final recording. John died on April 7, 2020, from complications of COVID-19. He was 73. Two months later, his family released the song. It became the highest-charting single of his career as a performer and later won two Grammy Awards: Best American Roots Performance and Best American Roots Song. John Prine spent nearly 50 years writing about ordinary people and the memories they carried. In the final song he left behind, he did not sing about forgetting. He told the world he remembered everything.

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John Prine’s Final Song and the Memory He Left Behind In 2019, John Prine sat in the comfort of his…

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RILEY GREEN WROTE A SONG WHERE THE MAN HAS ALREADY RUN OUT OF PRIDE. “Imagine That” arrived Friday, July 31, as track five on That’s Just Me, the 19-song album he releases September 18. He wrote it with Jonathan Singleton and Ray Fulcher, and it’s stripped back to acoustic guitar and steel, the traditional sound he built his name on. The man in it calls an old love late at night. He doesn’t argue his case and doesn’t relitigate anything. He just describes the night the way it could still go: a truck ready to leave, a long drive, no reason to be anywhere by morning. Imagine that, he keeps asking her. Then he stops asking her to picture it. He tells her he’s standing right outside her door. That’s why the song lands. Every imagine in it came from a man who was already there.

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Riley Green’s “Imagine That” Finds Its Power in What Was Already There Riley Green has built a career on songs…

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ELEVEN YEARS AFTER CONWAY TWITTY DIED, ANITA COCHRAN RELEASED A DUET WITH HIM. HE HAD NEVER HEARD THE SONG — OR SUNG ITS LYRICS. Anita wrote “(I Wanna Hear) A Cheatin’ Song” and imagined Conway’s deep voice answering hers. But Conway had died in 1993, long before the song existed. With permission from his family, Anita and her producers searched through dozens of Conway’s recordings from the 1980s. They isolated words, syllables and small pieces of his voice, then carefully joined them together to create entirely new lines. Some words were already complete. Others had to be built from several different recordings. Near the end, Anita asks, “Can you help me, Conway?” His familiar voice answers, “Yeah.” The duet was released in 2004 and reached No. 57 on Billboard’s country chart. It became Conway’s first appearance there in more than a decade. To listeners, it sounded as though Conway had returned to the studio for one last song. But he never knew the song existed. His voice had been carried across 11 years of silence to sing words he had never spoken together.

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When Anita Cochran Reached Across Time for Conway Twitty In country music, some songs feel like a conversation waiting to…

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ROY CLARK HAD ALREADY PLAYED FOR PRESIDENTS, PACKED THEATERS AND MILLIONS OF TELEVISION VIEWERS. BUT AT 76, HE STILL FELT HUMBLED JUST TO SEE HIS NAME BESIDE HIS HEROES. On May 17, 2009, Roy Clark entered the Country Music Hall of Fame. By then, he had spent four decades bringing country music into American homes through Hee Haw. He had performed in Las Vegas, guest-hosted The Tonight Show and carried country music into the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He could make an audience laugh, then silence the same room with a guitar or banjo. Yet when the Hall of Fame finally placed his name among the legends who had inspired him, Roy did not speak like a man reviewing his achievements. He spoke like the teenage boy who had once played beside his father for two dollars. Roy said the moving part was knowing that his name would now be spoken “right along with all the list.” After more than half a century of music, Roy Clark’s greatest honor was not standing above his heroes. It was finally standing beside them.

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Roy Clark and the Quiet Weight of a Great Honor On May 17, 2009, Roy Clark entered the Country Music…

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MILLIONS KNEW ROY CLARK’S SMILE. BUT THE WOMAN WHO KNEW THE MAN BEHIND IT HAD BEEN BESIDE HIM FOR 61 YEARS. Roy married Barbara Joyce Rupard on August 31, 1957. They built a family with five children and stayed together through decades of touring, television and fame. Their marriage began twelve years before “Hee Haw” made Roy’s face familiar in millions of American homes. Barbara knew him before the awards, before the packed theaters and before “Yesterday, When I Was Young” became the song most closely tied to his name. On November 15, 2018, Roy died from complications of pneumonia at his home in Tulsa. He was 85. Barbara was still his wife—the same woman he had married more than six decades earlier. Country music lost a gifted entertainer that day. Barbara lost the man with whom she had shared nearly her entire adult life.

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Roy Clark’s Smile Was Famous. Barbara Joyce Rupard Knew the Man Behind It. Millions of American viewers came to recognize…

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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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HE TOOK $1,600 TO RECORD 16 SONGS — JUST ENOUGH MONEY TO LEAVE NASHVILLE FOREVER. By 1963, Roger Miller was done with Nashville. His RCA deal had run out. Nothing stuck. He’d been funny on the Tonight Show, people liked him, and he figured acting in Los Angeles was worth a shot. He just needed the money to get there. So he asked Smash Records for $1,600. They said yes — on one condition. Sixteen songs, $100 a side. January 10th and 11th, 1964. He walked into a Nashville studio with a dozen of his own songs and cut fifteen of them in two days. One ran 1 minute and 47 seconds. He’d written it in about ten minutes and didn’t think much of it. Neither did the label. The first single was supposed to be a completely different song. The only reason it wasn’t comes down to one man standing in that control room. “Dang Me” came out that May. By July it was No.1 country — six weeks at the top — and No.7 on pop, in the year The Beatles owned the radio. Miller took his $1,500 and moved to California anyway. He lived above Lee Hazlewood’s garage. At the 1965 Grammys he won five awards. Four were for that little song. He never did become an actor.

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EIGHT WEEKS. THAT’S ALL THE TIME MARTY ROBBINS HAD LEFT AFTER THEY CALLED HIS NAME. On October 11, 1982, Marty Robbins nearly didn’t show up. His son Ronny said the CMA had never been warm to his father. Maybe one nomination in twelve or fifteen years. Marty had stopped expecting anything from that room a long time ago. Eddy Arnold is the only reason he walked in that night — and Arnold never told him why he was asking. Then Arnold stood up and said Marty’s name for the Country Music Hall of Fame. Marty looked stunned. He told the room he really felt there were other people who deserved it before he should get it. Then he added a line that got a laugh: “Possibly it might not happen again, so I’m gonna take it tonight.” They laughed because it sounded like a joke. He was 57 and having his best year in a decade. What almost nobody in that room knew was how much of it he was holding back. “Some Memories Just Won’t Die” had come out that April and climbed to No. 10 in August — his first Top 10 in over four years. Billboard gave him its Artist Resurgence Award the same month they gave him the Hall of Fame. Four weeks later, on November 7, he climbed into a Buick Regal at the Atlanta Journal 500 and finished 33rd. His last race. A month after that, his heart gave out. December 8, 1982. Fifty-eight days after he took the trophy he said might never come again.

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THEY WAITED 20 YEARS TO SING TOGETHER AGAIN. THEY HAD 19 DAYS LEFT. The wind wouldn’t stop that night in Nashville. Naomi and Wynonna stood face to face outside the Country Music Hall of Fame, singing “Love Can Build a Bridge” — their first awards show performance together in more than 20 years. A gospel choir in white robes stood behind them. Halfway through, Wynonna looked at her mother and said it out loud: “This is really happening.” Earlier that day, a camera crew had asked Naomi one small question. Her answer only makes sense now. That same night they announced a 10-show farewell tour. And the building right behind them was about to induct them. Naomi never made it inside. She died on April 30 — nineteen days later. Her family said they lost her to mental illness. The ceremony went ahead the next day. Wynonna came with no speech written; she’d always figured her mom would do most of the talking. “Though my heart is broken, I will continue to sing,” she said. The question they’d asked Naomi was which one song she’d want to be remembered for. She said: “Love Can Build a Bridge.”