Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Chưa phân loại

MILLIONS WATCHED ROY CLARK MAKE THEM LAUGH EVERY WEEK. BUT WHEN HE DIED, IT WASN’T ON A STAGE — IT WAS AT HOME IN TULSA, WITH THE WIFE HE HAD MARRIED 61 YEARS EARLIER. For more than two decades, Roy Clark was the face of Hee Haw. He played guitar, banjo, and fiddle better than almost anyone alive, then turned around and told a corny joke to get the laugh. He never seemed to mind that people remembered the jokes first. But 2018 handed him something no joke could soften. On September 24, his 14-year-old grandson Elijah died. Fifty-two days later, on November 15, Roy died at his home in Tulsa from complications of pneumonia. He was 85. He had married Barbara Joyce Rupard on August 31, 1957 — 61 years before. They raised five children, three sons and two daughters, and stayed in Tulsa long after fame could have taken them anywhere else. To the world, Roy Clark was the man who made country music fun. To Barbara and their children, he was the man who came home when the show was over.

0 Comments

Roy Clark’s Final Bow Wasn’t on a Stage For millions of television viewers, Roy Clark was pure joy. Night after…

Chưa phân loại

SIXTY-TWO YEARS AFTER A PLANE CRASH SILENCED A COUNTRY LEGEND, THE ANNIVERSARY STILL BELONGS TO HIS WIFE — THE WOMAN WHO SPENT THREE DECADES GUARDING A VAULT OF UNRELEASED MUSIC. When Jim Reeves died on July 31, 1964, his single-engine plane went down in a storm outside Nashville, killing him at 40 along with his pianist and manager, Dean Manuel. The world mourned the velvet baritone who had helped invent the Nashville sound. But behind closed doors, Reeves left something the public knew nothing about: a backlog of finished vocal masters that had never been issued. It fell to Mary Reeves — the woman he married on September 3, 1947, one day after he proposed — to decide what happened to that voice. She did not step away from the industry. She founded Jim Reeves Enterprises, took control of the estate, and began releasing the vault one record at a time, working with producer Chet Atkins to overdub fresh arrangements behind vocals cut years earlier. What followed was extraordinary. Reeves scored six number-one country hits after his death. Of his fifty-one Top 10 records, nineteen arrived posthumously. “Distant Drums,” originally cut as a discarded 1961 demo, was rebuilt in 1966 and went to number one in the UK. Mary went further still, approaching producer Owen Bradley about splicing Jim’s voice together with Patsy Cline’s — two artists who never sang a note together, both already dead. For Mary, this was never only commerce. It was a widow refusing to let her husband become a memory. But what happened to that vault after Alzheimer’s took her own memory in the 1990s — and where Jim’s tapes, personal effects and museum finally ended up — is a far darker chapter than the hit records ever suggested.

0 Comments

Sixty-Two Years After Jim Reeves, Mary Reeves Still Owns the Quiet Power of His Voice When Jim Reeves died in…

Chưa phân loại

KENNY ROGERS RECORDED A SONG FOR HIS TWIN BOYS AND LEFT IT IN THE VAULT. MORE THAN A DECADE LATER, THEIR MOTHER PUT IT ON HIS FINAL ALBUM. It is called “Catchin’ Grasshoppers,” written by Laura McCall Torno and Earl Torno, produced by Kenny with Randy Dorman from his band, and sung to Justin and Jordan. The twins were born July 6, 2004, when Kenny was sixty-five. They were fifteen when he died at home on March 20, 2020, at eighty-one, under hospice care with his family around him. Wanda, who married him on June 1, 1997 at his ranch outside Athens, Georgia, was the one who went through what he left. She curated and co-executive produced Life Is Like a Song, released June 2, 2023, the twenty-ninth and final studio album of his career. Eight of its ten tracks were recordings from 2008 to 2011 that had never been released, among them a Dolly Parton duet, “Tell Me That You Love Me,” that fans had never been able to stream. “I want to make sure his legacy grows and stays alive,” she said. She also kept “Goodbye” on it — written for Kenny by Lionel Richie, hard to find for years, played at his memorial. A wife going through her husband’s tapes, choosing the song about leaving. For many listeners, that is where the album stops being a collection and starts being a marriage.

0 Comments

Kenny Rogers, the Song He Saved for His Twins, and the Final Album That Brought It Home Some songs do…

Chưa phân loại

FOR FIVE YEARS, DION PRIDE STOOD BEHIND HIS FATHER PLAYING GUITAR AND KEYS. IN 2025, THREE OF CHARLEY PRIDE’S OLD TOURING MUSICIANS STOOD BEHIND HIM. Before Dion Pride ever stood at the center microphone singing his father’s songs, he knew them from inside the band. For five years, Dion played lead guitar and keyboards during Charley Pride’s shows. He also opened for his father, slowly adding some of his own music to the set. By the time he began building a solo career, he had learned those classic arrangements from only a few feet away. Charley died in December 2020 at 86. But Dion did not simply take over his father’s band afterward. The real story took longer. In 2025, Dion brought “Dion Pride Sings the Songs of His Father” across Australasia. Standing behind him were three musicians who had once toured with Charley: Ronnie Miller on pedal steel, Danny Hutchins on keyboards and Mark Kalson on fiddle. Then came the difficult part. When the familiar opening notes filled the room, everyone knew the voice they remembered. Would Dion try to recreate it, or would he allow himself to remain Charley Pride’s son? He chose the second. During the televised *CMT Giants* tribute, Dion performed “Mountain of Love,” a song he said had become a personal favorite “from touring with him.” That small explanation carried years inside it. This was not a son trying to replace his father. It was a musician returning to songs he had once played from the background, now trusting the same men who had helped his father bring them to life.

0 Comments

Dion Pride and the Music That Came Full Circle For years, Dion Pride learned his father’s songs from a place…

Chưa phân loại

SHE WROTE THE GREATEST MYSTERY IN AMERICAN SONG, AND THEN SHE BECAME ONE HERSELF. “Ode to Billie Joe” was Bobbie Gentry and nothing else — her words, her voice, her guitar, a keeper take in about forty minutes. Jimmie Haskell dubbed strings over it afterward and won a Grammy for the arrangement. The producer credit went to a Capitol staffer. Gentry always maintained the work had been hers, and she said why in an interview: a woman “doesn’t stand much chance in a recording studio.” The song shoved the Beatles out of number one and stayed four weeks. Her album ended the fifteen-week reign of Sgt. Pepper. She took home three Grammys. The BBC gave her a series, and the producer later admitted she was effectively co-directing it while the network refused to put an artist’s name on the credits. She spent the 1970s headlining Las Vegas in a production she ran herself, writing the music, designing the costumes. The last time the public ever heard Bobbie Gentry sing was a 1981 television special for Mother’s Day. The song was “Mama, A Rainbow.” Her mother was sitting in the audience. She has not performed, recorded, or given an interview in the forty-four years since.

0 Comments

The Woman Behind the Mystery Song Bobbie Gentry and the silence that followed a landmark career When Bobbie Gentry released…

Chưa phân loại

ELLA LANGLEY WAS WRITING ABOUT THE VOICE IN HER HEAD LONG BEFORE ANYONE WAS LISTENING. On “monsters,” a deep cut from her 2024 debut, she sings about a voice that lists off everything she will never be. On her 2023 EP she was already wishing she could call the man upstairs whenever she needed someone to talk to. Then came 2025. In the middle of the biggest year of her life she pulled out of a run of shows to rest, went home, and started reading her Bible again. The song that came out of that stretch is called “Loving Life Again.” Now she stops the show before she plays it. On July 10, at the Cowboys Music Festival in Calgary, she told the crowd how easy it is to scroll and feel behind and not good enough, and said she has quit caring what any of that thinks of her. The one opinion she still cares about, she said, belongs to someone who loves her the same on her best day and after she has sinned seven hundred times. Then she gave the crowd the ending she has been giving crowds all summer. You are loved, you are worth it, you are worthy.

0 Comments

Ella Langley, the Voice Inside the Noise, and the Song That Brought Her Back Long before Ella Langley stood on…

Chưa phân loại

ASHLEY MCBRYDE SAID SHE COULDN’T LOOK DOWN AT THE KID SINGING ALONG IN THE OPRY CROWD, BECAUSE SHE WOULD HAVE CRIED. The kid was ten and a half. Her name was Sawyer June Dinwiddie, and she was there on February 21 because her parents had bought tickets so she could see her favorite singer. Afterward the family went backstage, where McBryde came the other way down the hall. They gave her pecans from their farm, and Sawyer’s mother mentioned that her daughter knew every word of “Bible and a .44.” McBryde got out her guitar and sat down on the hallway floor. Sawyer sat facing her and sang. “When they sat down in the floor, the whole room went silent,” her mother Kit said. Before they parted, McBryde told her that Sawyer June was a star’s name, and that she meant to be in the crowd the night Sawyer walked across the Opry stage. Five months later, Sawyer was live on WSM Radio when McBryde called in. “I told you I’m gonna watch you walk across that stage,” she said, and then, on behalf of the Opry, invited her to stand in the circle and make her debut. Sawyer told her it was the biggest honor of her life, and that she was the best friend she had ever had. No date has been announced yet. She is eleven.

0 Comments

A Quiet Moment at the Opry Became a Memory Sawyer June Dinwiddie Will Carry Forever Some nights at the Grand…

Country Music

HIS FIRST GUITAR WAS A SARDINE CAN, A LENGTH OF WIRE, AND SCRAPS OF WOOD.Before anyone knew the name Freddy Fender, he was Baldemar Huerta, born in San Benito, Texas, to a family that went wherever the harvest went. They picked beets in Michigan and cucumbers in Indiana, tomatoes and hay in Ohio, cotton in Arkansas, onions in New Mexico, then turned back toward Texas hoping the money would last until Christmas. He usually got home two months after school started.What stayed with him was the sound. He worked beside Black field hands who sang blues and gospel while they worked, and his family later wrote that it reached the core of him. Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb came off the truck radio, and boleros and rancheras came from home and from the stations across the river. He was assembling a voice years before he had any use for one.By 1974 he was still only a part-time musician when a producer asked him to sing over an instrumental track, and he put a full verse and chorus of it in Spanish. “The recording only took a few minutes,” he said later, figuring that was the end of it. “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” went No. 1 on the country chart in March 1975 and No. 1 on the pop chart that May. In 2025 the Library of Congress placed that recording in the National Recording Registry — kept for good, beet fields and cotton rows and all.

0 Comments

Freddy Fender’s First Guitar and the Long Road to a Classic Before the name Freddy Fender became part of American…

Chưa phân loại

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.

0 Comments

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

Chưa phân loại

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.

0 Comments

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

You Missed

Chưa phân loại

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.

Chưa phân loại

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.

Chưa phân loại

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.

Chưa phân loại

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.