THE NEWSPAPER FARON YOUNG BUILT FOR COUNTRY MUSIC
The first issue of Music City News came off the press in July 1963. A year’s subscription cost three dollars.
Faron Young’s name gave the new publication recognition, but recognition did not guarantee survival. Country magazines had appeared before and disappeared after advertisers, readers or the music business failed to support them. Printing required money every month. Postage required more. The next issue had to be financed before anyone knew whether the current one would sell.
Young entered anyway.
He had spent a decade learning how country music traveled: records through radio, performers through package shows, gossip through dressing rooms and songs from one musician’s hands into another’s career. What the genre lacked was a regular printed place where those movements could be gathered for the people sustaining them.
Rock-and-roll fans had magazines. Young believed country fans should have one too.
More Than the Singing Sheriff
By 1963, Faron Young was not searching for a way into the business.
He had arrived in Nashville from Louisiana, recorded a long run of honky-tonk hits and become known as both the Hillbilly Heartthrob and the Singing Sheriff. His records included “Goin’ Steady,” “If You Ain’t Lovin’,” “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young” and “Sweet Dreams.”
In 1961, he recorded two songs by a struggling Nashville writer named Willie Nelson. “Hello Walls” became a country No. 1 and crossed into the pop market. Its success strengthened Young’s position and gave Nelson one of the breakthroughs that allowed him to remain in town.
Young possessed a loud personality, sharp business instincts and a willingness to place money in enterprises beyond his own recordings. He invested in Music Row real estate and publishing. He understood that careers were shaped not only in front of microphones but in offices, buildings and channels of information.
Music City News emerged from that practical understanding.
The Missing Magazine
Trade publications such as Billboard and Cash Box covered country records, but their responsibility extended across the commercial music business. Country appeared as a category within a larger system.
Young wanted a publication that began with country music rather than making room for it.
He later described the motive simply: rock fans had their magazines, while country did not have a comparable national fan publication. That absence affected more than stars. Without sustained coverage, the music’s working world could remain invisible between radio broadcasts and live shows.
Young co-founded the paper with Preston Temple, a promoter connected to the Grand Ole Opry. Their first issue established a format broad enough to follow the industry while remaining accessible to ordinary fans.
The pages contained record information, personal appearances, photographs, columns and profiles. A reader far from Nashville could follow who had signed with a label, which singer was touring nearby and who worked behind a record heard on the radio.
Country music acquired a monthly address.
July 1963
The timing gave the first issue a particular weight.
Country music had entered 1963 under a shadow. In March, Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas and pilot Randy Hughes died in a plane crash near Camden, Tennessee. Jack Anglin died in a car accident while traveling to Cline’s funeral. Later that month, Texas Ruby died in a trailer fire.
The industry was still small enough for those deaths to feel like damage inside one extended working community.
That summer, the first Music City News appeared. It did not arise as a memorial project, but it entered a world newly conscious of how quickly performers and their stories could disappear.
A monthly paper could not prevent loss. It could retain names, schedules, photographs and the ordinary business of careers while those careers were still unfolding.
The value of that record would become clearer with time.
The Cost of Every Issue
Young’s fame could attract initial attention. It could not make printing inexpensive.
He later described Music City News as a costly project that nearly broke him. After selling his remaining interest, he sat down and calculated what he had earned from the enterprise. His conclusion was characteristically blunt: he had never made a dime—not enough to pay for a postage stamp.
The exaggeration, if there was any, revealed how he measured the experience. Whatever value the publication created for country music, it had not functioned as a dependable personal investment.
That imbalance separates the project from the usual story of a celebrity expanding into media. Young did not attach his name to a finished product and collect a licensing fee. He entered an uncertain publishing business and absorbed years in which cultural usefulness did not produce equivalent financial return.
Each new subscription brought three dollars during the first year. Each subscriber also created another address to which a printed issue had to be manufactured and mailed.
Growth carried its own bill.
The People Behind the Records
By the end of the 1960s, surviving issues show how much ground the paper covered.
There were stars on its pages—Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Glen Campbell, Porter Wagoner and others whose names sold copies. Beside them appeared disc jockeys, booking agents, publishers, songwriters, television figures and musicians who worked beyond the spotlight.
The mixture mattered.
Country music history is often compressed into a sequence of famous singers and hit songs. The daily business required many other hands: someone carried records to radio, booked the rooms, wrote the charts, operated the bus, found the song or placed an advertisement where fans could see it.
Music City News preserved part of that working network in real time. Its reporting was not written with the distance of a later historian. It recorded who was active, who was moving to a new label and who mattered inside Nashville at the moment an issue closed.
Those ordinary pages later became evidence.
Letting the Readers Choose
In 1967, the publication began presenting the Music City News Awards. The winners were chosen by fans.
The principle distinguished the awards from honors determined by professional organizations and industry voters. Readers who bought the magazine and followed the artists could register their own preferences.
Fan voting was not automatically purer or more accurate than an industry ballot. Popularity could dominate craftsmanship, and organized fan clubs could exert enormous influence. But the system acknowledged a group Nashville depended upon while rarely allowing it formal authority.
The people buying tickets and records were given a ballot.
As the ceremony grew, its categories created annual snapshots of public allegiance. Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, Charley Pride, the Statler Brothers, Marty Robbins, Barbara Mandrell, Alabama and later generations of performers accumulated awards reflecting the durable organization of their fan bases.
The magazine was no longer merely reporting country music. It had created an institution within it.
From Printed Ballots to National Television
The awards moved beyond the page. By the late 1970s, the ceremony had entered television, and in the 1980s it became a nationally broadcast part of Fan Fair week.
The scale would have been difficult to imagine from the three-dollar subscriptions of 1963.
In 1990, the Music City News Awards combined with The Nashville Network’s viewers’ awards. The resulting TNN/Music City News Country Awards carried fan voting into the cable era, when country television had become a daily presence in American homes.
After further changes in ownership, sponsorship and identity, the awards entered the lineage of the modern CMT Music Awards. The connection is not a perfectly unbroken institution under one name, but the organizing idea survived: country fans, rather than a private academy, choosing the winners.
A ballot once printed in Faron Young’s magazine became part of a national television format.
The Founder Moves Out of the Center
Young remained a successful performer after founding the publication. He returned to the top of the chart with “It’s Four in the Morning” in the early 1970s and continued touring long after his largest radio years had passed.
The magazine did not depend upon his remaining current.
This may have been the project’s most important transition. Celebrity publications often weaken when their founder’s visibility declines. Music City News developed an identity broad enough to cover artists who had been children when Young made his first hits.
During the 1980s and 1990s, its pages and awards followed Alabama, Reba McEntire, Randy Travis, George Strait, Garth Brooks, Alan Jackson and the other performers remaking the commercial scale of country music.
Young had helped build a room in which he would eventually become one historical figure among many.
The room stayed open.
A Life Larger and Rougher Than the Magazine
Faron Young’s biography cannot be polished into a simple portrait of generosity.
Colleagues remembered his humor, loyalty and assistance to younger performers. They also remembered his drinking, temper and capacity to wound people close to him. His final years included declining health, professional frustration and depression. He died in 1996 after a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Music City News should not be used to flatten those contradictions into redemption. Building something valuable does not settle every account in a life.
The publication instead reveals a durable part of him that the louder stories can obscure: Young recognized a need beyond his own career and accepted real financial risk to meet it.
He was not always able to protect the people around him. He did help preserve the world in which they worked.
The Final Issue
Music City News continued until February 2000, nearly four years after Young’s death and more than thirty-six years after the first issue.
Its closure came during another transformation. Print fan magazines faced competition from cable television, consolidated media and the rapidly expanding internet. Information that had once required printing presses and postage could now travel almost instantly.
The old issues remained.
For historians, collectors and families, they hold more than lists of hits. They retain advertisements for forgotten tours, photographs of working bands, columns by people inside the business and small notices that may provide the only surviving public trace of a career.
Young said the publication never earned him enough to buy a postage stamp.
Thousands of postage stamps had already carried it into private homes.
What Faron Young’s Newspaper Really Leaves Behind
Faron Young entered Music City News expecting country music to be large enough for its own national publication. The gamble helped make that belief visible.
The magazine gave fans a common place to gather before cable networks and websites could do the job. It covered the people behind the stars, recorded the business while it was moving and handed readers a ballot through which their preferences could enter country history.
Young’s own name eventually became smaller than the institution he had started.
That is visible in the later issues. New performers occupy the cover. New tours fill the listings. Readers vote for singers whose careers belong to another era. The founder is no longer required to stand in the foreground.
Somewhere inside is still the practical object with which the enterprise began: a subscription form, a mailing address and a price of three dollars for twelve months.
The money never returned to Faron Young in the way he had hoped.
The pages did.
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