Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

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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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MERLE HAGGARD DROVE ALL NIGHT TO RECORD WITH THE MAN WHO HAD TAUGHT HIM EVERYTHING. BY THE TIME HE ARRIVED, BOB WILLS HAD SUFFERED A MASSIVE STROKE — AND WOULD NEVER WAKE UP AGAIN. As a boy in Bakersfield, Merle rode his bicycle to Beardsley’s Ballroom and listened to Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys through an open window. Years later, he said of Wills, “You know what I learned from Bob Wills? Everything.” In December 1973, Wills gathered his former Texas Playboys in a Dallas studio for one final album. He was already partly paralyzed and arrived in a wheelchair, but he still called for solos and added his familiar “Ah-ha!” as the band played around him. That night, Bob suffered another massive stroke. Merle had just finished a show in Chicago. His bus drove through the night because he had begged for the chance to play with his hero. When he reached the studio the next day, Bob was gone and the room had fallen quiet. Merle stayed. He played fiddle and sang three songs with the Texas Playboys. Bob Wills never regained consciousness. The album was released under a title no one could have made more fitting: “For the Last Time.”

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Merle Haggard, Bob Wills, and One Final Night of Western Swing Some stories in country music feel less like industry…

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FOUR COUNTRY OUTLAWS SANG ABOUT A BOY WATCHING HIS CHILDHOOD HERO GROW OLD. BUT “DESPERADOS WAITING FOR A TRAIN” WAS NOT FICTION. IT WAS GUY CLARK’S GOODBYE TO THE MAN WHO HAD BEEN LIKE A GRANDFATHER TO HIM. Jack Prigg was an oil driller who lived in the Texas hotel owned by Guy’s grandmother. While Guy’s father was serving overseas during World War II, Jack became the steady male figure in the boy’s life. He took Guy with him, taught him to drive and filled his childhood with stories. But years later, Guy watched the strong man he admired become old and weak. Guy visited Jack shortly before he died. There was little left to say. In the song, they simply close their eyes, return to an old kitchen in their memories and sing together one more time. In 1985, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson recorded it as The Highwaymen. Four famous outlaws. One quiet truth. Even the strongest childhood heroes eventually grow old.

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Four Country Outlaws Sang About a Boy Watching His Childhood Hero Grow Old In 1985, Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon…

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ONE COUNTRY SINGER TOOK THIS SONG TO #53. A YEAR LATER, CONWAY TWITTY TOOK THE SAME SONG TO #1. In 1981, “Slow Hand” was a Pointer Sisters record. Pure pop. It sat at #2 for three weeks, stuck behind “Endless Love.” Country radio gave it a try. Del Reeves cut his own version that same year. It stopped at #53 and vanished. Then Conway Twitty picked it up. He had just left MCA. The label had turned its attention to younger acts. So he signed with Elektra and started over. He didn’t dress the song up as country. He changed a few words so a man could sing them — and that small switch changed who the song was speaking to. Once you hear it, you can’t hear it the old way again. The writers never had him in mind. John Bettis admitted the Pointer Sisters weren’t in their heads either. Released April 24, 1982. Two weeks at #1 that June. It was his last multi-week #1. And the last gold record with his name on it.

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How One Song Moved from Pop to Country and Found Its Second Life with Conway Twitty In 1981, “Slow Hand”…

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IN 2019 THIS SONG NEVER WENT TO RADIO. FOUR YEARS LATER IT WENT TO NO. 1. “Different ‘Round Here” was the title track of Riley Green’s 2019 debut album and nothing more than that — no single release, no radio push. It just sat there while people found it on their own. By 2023 it had gone Gold with close to half a billion streams, and Green said it had become one of those songs proud hometown fans sing along to the loudest, night after night. So he cut it a second time with Luke Combs while he was opening Combs’ world tour, and in February 2024 that version reached No. 1 at country radio. The place in that song is not a metaphor. Green is from Jacksonville, Alabama, and he told Fox News earlier this year that moving to Nashville has never once crossed his mind. He told Theo Von he now owns 1,780 acres back home, all of it connected, bought in small pieces over years of calling neighbors to ask if anyone was ready to sell. He clears the fields himself. The first 141 acres belonged to his great-uncle Bill, his granddaddy Buford’s brother. It was the ground Riley ran around on as a boy. He bought that piece first, and every acre since has grown outward from it.

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When a Song Waited Years to Be Heard In 2019, Riley Green released his debut album, Different ‘Round Here, and…

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WHEN MINNIE AALDERS MARRIED HANK SNOW IN 1935, HE WAS A STRUGGLING RADIO SINGER WITHOUT A RECORD CONTRACT. SIXTY-FOUR YEARS LATER, SHE WAS STILL HIS WIFE WHEN COUNTRY MUSIC LOST HIM. Minnie worked at a chocolate factory in Halifax while Hank tried to build a life with his guitar and small radio appearances. They married on September 2, 1935. Their only son arrived the following year and was named Jimmie Rodgers Snow, after Hank’s musical hero. Success did not come quickly. Hank faced years of traveling, rejection and failed attempts to break into the United States. Minnie stayed through all of it. She was there before RCA signed him. Before the Grand Ole Opry. Before “I’m Movin’ On” made him a star. Hank died at their Rainbow Ranch on December 20, 1999, at 85. The man famous for singing about leaving and moving on spent 64 years married to the same woman.

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Before Hank Snow Was Famous, Minnie Aalders Was Already There Long before Hank Snow became a country music legend, before…

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HE WROTE A SONG ABOUT REFUSING TO LET AGE DEFEAT HIM. FIVE YEARS LATER, TOBY KEITH SANG IT WHILE CANCER WAS TRYING TO TAKE HIS STRENGTH AWAY. In 2018, Toby Keith played golf with Clint Eastwood shortly before the actor’s 88th birthday. Eastwood was preparing to direct and star in another movie, so Toby asked how he kept going. Eastwood answered, “I don’t let the old man in.” Toby went home and wrote “Don’t Let the Old Man In.” Eastwood later used it in the closing scene of The Mule. Five years later, the song belonged to Toby in a way he could never have imagined. In September 2023, after stepping away for 18 months to battle stomach cancer, Toby returned to television at the People’s Choice Country Awards. Wearing his white cowboy hat and holding an acoustic guitar, he sang the song slowly before a silent room. The words had not changed. Toby had. He had originally written about an old man refusing to surrender to age. Now, at 62, he was singing while fighting to remain on the stage himself. The performance sent the song to No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart. Toby died four months later, on February 5, 2024. “Don’t Let the Old Man In” began as advice from Clint Eastwood. In Toby Keith’s final televised performance, it became something deeper: one last declaration that illness could weaken his body, but it would not decide how he faced the end.

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Toby Keith, “Don’t Let the Old Man In,” and the Performance That Changed Its Meaning Sometimes a song begins as…

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SHANIA TWAIN AND HER HUSBAND CAME INTO THIS MARRIAGE CARRYING THE EXACT SAME INJURY. She met Frédéric Thiébaud in Switzerland in the nineties, back when he was married to Marie-Anne and Shania was married to Robert “Mutt” Lange. The two families holidayed together. Shania has said she considered Marie-Anne one of her closest friends. Then in 2008 both marriages collapsed for the same reason, when it emerged that Lange had been involved with Marie-Anne. Shania later said Fred was the one person who could comfort her, because he had been through exactly the same thing. They started dating in 2009 and married at sunset on New Year’s Day 2011, in Rincón, Puerto Rico, in front of forty family and friends. Fifteen years on, she told People what actually holds it together, and it isn’t romance. It’s that Fred refuses to let anything go unsaid. He wants a problem talked through the moment it appears. Her instinct is to walk it off, or sit alone with her guitar, and get to it later. She says he isn’t wrong. She also said that had she met him as a teenager, he still would have been her lifelong love. “This is the love I’m going to grow old with,” she told the magazine.

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Shania Twain and Frédéric Thiébaud Built a Marriage on the Same Wound Long before Shania Twain became one of the…

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FOR 25 SUMMERS, HAROLD REID COULD HAVE SPENT JULY 4TH ANYWHERE. HE KEPT COMING HOME — SOMETIMES TO SING FOR 100,000 PEOPLE WITHOUT CHARGING THEM A TICKET. In 1970, Harold Reid and The Statler Brothers began a Fourth of July celebration in their hometown of Staunton, Virginia. They called it “Happy Birthday USA”. The concert was free. Year after year, Harold returned to Gypsy Hill Park. What began as a hometown gathering grew into one of Virginia’s largest Independence Day celebrations. Fans came from all 50 states and other countries. By the final Statler concert in 1994, about 100,000 people filled the small city. Harold had won Grammys, traveled across America and performed on its biggest stages. Yet for 25 years, he brought the celebration back to the same Virginia town that knew him before fame. He did not simply return home to be honored. He returned to give something back.

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Harold Reid and the July Fourth Tradition That Brought Staunton Together For 25 summers, Harold Reid could have spent July…

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MILLIONS KNEW THE FIDDLE ON “THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO GEORGIA.” BUT CHARLIE DANIELS SAID THE THING HE WAS PROUDEST OF WASN’T THE HALL OF FAME — IT WAS THE 55 YEARS HE STAYED MARRIED TO ONE WOMAN. He met Hazel Alexander at a club in Tulsa where he was playing. They married on a Sunday morning, September 20, 1964, because Sunday was the only day he had off. There was no honeymoon. He was back on stage Monday night. That turned out to be the shape of the next nineteen years. Charlie was gone so much that Hazel raised their only son, Charlie Jr., mostly on her own. Then in 1983, when the boy left for college, Hazel packed a bag and started going out on the road with her husband. She stayed out there with him for the rest of his life. Charlie Daniels died on July 6, 2020, after a stroke. He was 83. He left behind Hazel and Charlie Jr. To the world, he was the man with the fiddle. To Hazel, he was the man she finally got to travel with.

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What Charlie Daniels Was Proudest Of Wasn’t the Spotlight Millions remember Charlie Daniels for the fire in his fiddle and…

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SHE GAVE UP HER OWN SINGING CAREER AND TAUGHT FOUR CHILDREN TO HARMONIZE IN A CAR WITH NO RADIO. AT NINETY, REBA McENTIRE’S MOTHER FINALLY GOT HER NAME ON A RECORD. Jacqueline Smith wanted to be a country singer. People in Oklahoma said she could have been as big as Patsy Cline. She was teaching school by sixteen. She married Clark McEntire, a three-time world champion steer roper, and raised four children on a ranch in Chockie, Oklahoma. The family car had no radio. So on the long drives to her husband’s rodeos, Jacqueline taught the children to sing harmony in the backseat. One of them was Reba. Reba went on to sell tens of millions of records. Her mother stayed a teacher, a librarian, a school secretary. Then, more than fifty years after those car rides, Reba made a gospel album. She refused to record “I’ll Fly Away” until her mother and her sisters could get to Nashville. When they arrived, all three sang harmony behind her — exactly the way Jacqueline had taught them. On another track, her mother suggested a change to the words. Reba put her name on it as a co-writer. “Sing It Now: Songs of Faith & Hope” came out in February 2017. Jacqueline McEntire was ninety years old. She died three years later, at ninety-three.

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THE BUCKLE RONNIE DUNN WORE TO ACCEPT HIS 18TH ACM AWARD ISN’T AN AWARD AT ALL. Every artist who performs at Cheyenne Frontier Days walks away with one, and Brooks & Dunn have played the Daddy of ’em All several times over the years. You don’t beat anybody for it. You show up, you play the rodeo grounds in Wyoming, and the silver is yours. That is what sat on his belt on May 17 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas, when Brooks & Dunn won Duo of the Year at the 61st ACM Awards. Second year running, and the eighteenth time in that category. No duo has ever won it more. “I don’t know why y’all aren’t getting sick of us,” Kix Brooks said at the podium. It was the second time in seven months the buckle made national television, because Dunn had it on in November too, when they took Vocal Duo of the Year at the CMAs in Nashville. So a man with closets full of trophies keeps reaching past all of them for the one piece of silver he didn’t have to win. On August 19 the ACM hands Cheyenne Frontier Days a trophy of its own, Fair/Rodeo of the Year, at the Honors ceremony in Nashville. Ronnie Dunn was wearing that place on his belt long before anyone thought to give it an award.

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On November 19, 2007, Charlie Daniels was at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium for his annual Christmas For Kids benefit concert, an event created to help children in need enjoy a better Christmas. During the show, Martina McBride walked onto the stage carrying a small gift box. Inside was a card with news Charlie had waited decades to hear. He was being invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry. Charlie stepped back, clearly overwhelmed as the audience rose to its feet. For a man who had come to Nashville years earlier with his wife and young son, it was one of the highest honors country music could give him. “This is very emotional for me,” he told the crowd. The moment was especially fitting because Charlie had spent that evening trying to give something to other people. He came to the Ryman to help children at Christmas. Before the night was over, country music had given Charlie Daniels a gift of its own.

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HE SPENT HIS CHILDHOOD WATCHING HIS MOTHER CUT HAIR TO KEEP FOOD ON THE TABLE. DECADES LATER, JIMMY DEAN FINALLY FOUND A WAY TO REPAY HER — WITH A SONG. Jimmy Dean grew up poor in the Texas Panhandle. His mother, Ruth, raised the family through hard years, cutting hair in their home to earn money. When Jimmy was ten, she taught him to play piano. He later taught himself guitar, harmonica, and accordion. That small beginning eventually carried him far beyond Texas. “Big Bad John” made him a star. Television made him a household name. But by the mid-1970s, his biggest recording years seemed to be behind him. Then, in 1976, Jimmy recorded “I.O.U.” It wasn’t a love song or another story about a larger-than-life character. It was a spoken tribute to mothers — remembering all the jobs a mother performs without ever sending her children a bill. The record became Jimmy’s first Top 10 country hit in a decade. For Ruth Dean’s son, the meaning went deeper than a chart position. The woman who had worked inside their home to support him had also placed his fingers on a piano when he was ten. Nearly forty years later, he was still using what she gave him to say thank you.