Country Music

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IN 1975, CHARLIE RICH BURNED JOHN DENVER’S NAME ON THE CMA STAGE. IN 1989, THE CMA HANDED DENVER’S VOICE ITS ALBUM OF THE YEAR. The night Rich opened the Entertainer of the Year envelope, he pulled out a lighter and set the card alight before announcing “my friend, Mr. John Denver.” Denver accepted by satellite, gracious and completely unaware. Whether it was protest or too many gin and tonics, nobody has ever settled — Rich’s own daughter said he felt terrible that people took it as an insult. But to many fans, the fire came to stand for one question: did Denver’s gentle sound belong in country music at all? Denver’s answer came fourteen years later, when the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band invited him into the studio for Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Volume Two. Before the tape rolled, someone asked, “Is this practice?” Denver replied, “They’re all practice.” Then he sang “And So It Goes” exactly as himself — no edge, no attempt to sound tougher than he was. The single climbed to No. 14 on Billboard’s country chart. The album won three Grammys, and then the Country Music Association named it Album of the Year. The card burned in seconds. The voice is still playing.

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THE BIGGEST SONG IN AMERICA STARTED WITH A KANGAROO RIDING SHOTGUN. At a writing retreat in October 2024, Miranda Lambert told the room a story from her younger years: she once got pulled over with Texas plates on her vehicle and her pet kangaroo in the passenger seat. Ella Langley answered with a line aimed straight at her: “She’s from Texas, I can tell.” That line grew into “Choosin’ Texas.” And Miranda never left the song’s side — she co-wrote it with Ella, Luke Dick, and Joybeth Taylor, co-produced it with Ella and Ben West, and sang backup on the record itself. Released in October 2025, it has now spent 13 weeks at No. 1 on the Hot 100, one of only five songs by women without male-billed acts ever to do that, and the first non-holiday song to reach the milestone since Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” 21 years ago. This week, Luminate’s midyear report crowned it America’s most-streamed song of the first half of 2026, with 570.9 million streams. On July 11, Miranda headlined the Big Week Kick Off Concert in Salinas, with Ashley Cooke and Dylan Scott opening the night, and the song has ridden along in her shows all year. When she sings it, she isn’t borrowing Ella Langley’s hit. She’s singing a story that was hers before it was anyone’s — truck, Texas plates, kangaroo and all.

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COUNTRY MUSIC’S HIGHEST HONOR CAME THROUGH ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 6, 2024. TOBY KEITH HAD DIED IN HIS SLEEP THE NIGHT BEFORE, AT 62. Hall of Fame voting had closed on February 2, three days before he went. Hours after the country woke to the news out of Oklahoma, the results landed at the CMA: elected, Modern Era, class of 2024. Sarah Trahern, the CMA’s chief executive, said her heart sank knowing they had missed their chance to tell him. That October his widow, Tricia, accepted the medallion and told the room she figured Toby would have said, “I should have been.” He came up out of the Oklahoma oil fields with a guitar his grandmother bought him, and he finished with twenty No. 1 country singles, more than 40 million albums and eleven USO tours behind him. That was the giant the world got. The version his mother got was smaller. On December 12, 2023, at the Park MGM in Las Vegas, he walked over and brought Carolyn Covel out into the light. “Eighty-two years old and she’s in Vegas tonight,” he told the crowd, and said she was the one who taught him to sing. Almost nobody out there knew she had been the singer first, that record men once came to her mother’s supper club in Fort Smith to look at her, that Toby thought her young pictures looked like Patsy Cline. Then he told her to tell everybody to go to hell, and she took the microphone and did it, laughing. Two nights later he played his last show. On February 5 she outlived her son. Nashville got the last word on his career. She got the night he handed her his microphone, and at eighty-two she brought the house down with it.

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BEFORE HOLLY DUNN EVER SANG “DADDY’S HANDS” IN PUBLIC, IT WAS ALREADY SITTING ON SOMEONE ELSE’S ALBUM, IGNORED. The Whites — Buck White and his daughters, Sharon and Cheryl — recorded it for their 1985 record Whole New World. It stayed an album cut, never pushed out as a single, and reached almost nobody. Which meant the woman who wrote it still had it. And she hadn’t written it for a chart anyway. She wrote it as a Father’s Day present for her dad, a Church of Christ preacher in San Antonio, and never meant it to travel any further than his hands. So she cut it herself and took it out on the road, and by her own account people in the crowd wept every single time. She’d look over at her band mid-song, trying to figure out what was happening to the room. It puzzled her enough that she went to her label and pushed for it as a single. August 1986: No. 7, six months on the country chart, two Grammy nominations the year after. The song hadn’t changed a word since 1985. What changed was who was singing it, and why. Dunn wasn’t performing a song about fathers, she was handing her own father a present in front of a room full of strangers, and for a lot of those strangers it stopped being her father they were hearing. It was theirs. They told her so for the rest of her life. A gift written for one preacher in San Antonio, and it’s still the song people can’t get through in June.