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Country Music

BLACKHAWK WAS BUILT AROUND THREE VOICES. THEN CANCER TOOK ONE OF THEM — AND HIS LAST REQUEST WAS NOT TO LET THE BAND DIE WITH HIM. Before BlackHawk became one of the most recognizable harmony groups of 1990s country, its three members had already lived separate musical lives. Henry Paul had come out of the Southern rock band the Outlaws. Dave Robbins and Van Stephenson had spent years writing songs in Nashville, including material connected to Restless Heart. Stephenson had even made his own run at pop success, reaching the Top 30 in 1984 with “Modern Day Delilah.” By the early 1990s, Paul, Robbins, and Stephenson began writing and recording demos together. What separated them was not one dominant voice. It was the way all three voices locked together—Henry in front, Dave underneath, and Van carrying the high tenor that made the choruses sound larger than the three men standing at the microphones. Arista Nashville signed them in 1993. Their first single, “Goodbye Says It All,” reached the country Top 20. “Every Once in a While,” “I Sure Can Smell the Rain,” “That’s Just About Right,” and “There You Have It” followed. Their self-titled debut album eventually went double platinum. For several years, BlackHawk looked like one of the strongest new bands Nashville had built. Then, in early 1999, Van Stephenson was diagnosed with melanoma. He underwent treatment and surgery while the band’s future became increasingly uncertain. By February 2000, Stephenson stepped away from BlackHawk so he could continue fighting the disease and spend more time with his wife and three children. The loss was not simply a vacant position onstage. Van’s tenor had been part of the architecture of every BlackHawk harmony. Henry Paul and Dave Robbins could hire another musician, but they could not recreate the years of writing, recording, and learning how three particular voices breathed together. Stephenson understood that. He also understood what his absence might do to the two men left behind. Before his death, he asked Paul and Robbins to continue. His message was simple: there was still more music left in BlackHawk. Van Stephenson died at his Nashville home on April 8, 2001. He was 47. BlackHawk’s Greatest Hits album was dedicated to him and included “Ships of Heaven,” a final song connected to the man whose high harmony had helped define the band. Paul and Robbins then carried BlackHawk forward, not by pretending nothing had changed, but by accepting that it had changed permanently. They also established the Van Stephenson Memorial Cancer Research Fund, directing money toward cancer research at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. Over the years, the band and its fans raised nearly a quarter of a million dollars in his name. BlackHawk continued touring. New voices entered the lineup. Henry Paul and Dave Robbins kept singing the old songs. But whenever those original recordings reach the chorus, Van Stephenson is still there—in the highest part of the harmony, holding a place no replacement was ever truly asked to erase.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BLACKHAWK WAS BUILT AROUND THREE VOICES. THEN CANCER…

Country Music

CRAIG MORGAN WROTE A SONG ABOUT HIS DEAD SON AND DID NOT PLAN TO RELEASE IT. THEN RICKY SKAGGS HEARD IT AT THE OPRY AND TOLD HIM THE WORLD NEEDED TO HEAR IT. Jerry Greer was nineteen when the lake took him. On July 10, 2016, Craig Morgan’s son was tubing with friends on Kentucky Lake in Tennessee when the accident happened. He was wearing a life jacket. Search crews found his body the next day. Craig and his wife, Karen, buried their son on their Tennessee property near the family chapel. For three years, Craig carried it mostly inside the house. He had been a soldier before country music. He had sung “Almost Home,” “That’s What I Love About Sunday,” and “International Harvester.” His songs had always sounded like faith, work, family, and the kind of people who keep going because stopping is not an option. But losing Jerry was not a song he was trying to sell. Then “The Father, My Son, and the Holy Ghost” came out of him. Craig wrote it and sang it at the Grand Ole Opry. He thought it might stay there — one night, one room, one way to say something he could not say any other way. Ricky Skaggs heard it differently. He told Craig people needed to hear the song. So Craig recorded it. In 2019, the song was released without a big radio machine behind it. Then Blake Shelton heard it and started pushing people to buy it. Others followed. The song went to No. 1 on the iTunes all-genre chart. Craig Morgan did not turn Jerry into a single. He carried a song out of the Opry because another country singer told him not to leave it there.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” CRAIG MORGAN WROTE A SONG HE DID NOT…

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KEITH WHITLEY HAD BEEN DEAD FOR MORE THAN A YEAR WHEN LORRIE MORGAN WALKED INTO THE STUDIO TO SING WITH HIM ONE LAST TIME. The tape had been sitting there since 1987. Keith had recorded “’Til a Tear Becomes a Rose” as a demo. Ricky Skaggs was on the harmony part. At that point, Keith and Lorrie were still building a life together in Nashville. They married that November. Their son Jesse Keith was born the next year. Then the hits got bigger. “Don’t Close Your Eyes.” “When You Say Nothing at All.” “I’m No Stranger to the Rain.” On May 9, 1989, Keith Whitley died at his home in Goodlettsville. He was thirty-three. Afterward, RCA began putting together Greatest Hits. The old demo was still there. Keith’s lead vocal was still there. Ricky Skaggs’s harmony was still there. Lorrie replaced it with her own. She went into the studio and sang beside a voice that had already been gone for more than a year. The record came out in July 1990. Country radio took it to No. 13. That fall, “’Til a Tear Becomes a Rose” won CMA Vocal Event of the Year. The award had both their names on it. Keith Whitley was not there to accept it. Lorrie Morgan was.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” KEITH WHITLEY HAD BEEN GONE FOR MORE THAN…

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KEITH WHITLEY TOOK A BUS BACK TO NASHVILLE AFTER ANOTHER DRINKING BINGE. BY THE TIME HE GOT THERE, LORRIE MORGAN HAD LEFT THE HOUSE WITH THEIR BABY. Keith Whitley had already spent years making country music sound older than he was. He came out of bluegrass with Ricky Skaggs. He had sung through the Ralph Stanley years, the Kentucky bars, the long drives, and the kind of drinking that kept following him even after Nashville started paying attention. By 1988, “Don’t Close Your Eyes” and “When You Say Nothing at All” had made him one of the biggest voices in country music. He was married to Lorrie Morgan. They had a baby son, Jesse Keith. The records were working. The house was supposed to be the safe part. But the drinking kept coming back. Lorrie tried to manage it. Friends tried to manage it. Keith went through treatment. He stopped for stretches. Then the road, the pressure, and the bottles found their way back into the room. One time, after another run of drinking, Keith came home and found the house empty. Lorrie had taken Jesse and left. There was no headline. No television interview. Just a country singer at the top of the charts walking through his own house and realizing his wife had taken their son somewhere he could not reach. Keith kept recording. In 1989, “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” became another No. 1. The song was about a man who knew storms were coming and kept moving anyway. On May 9, 1989, Keith Whitley was found dead at his home in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. He was thirty-three. By then, the house had filled back up with people. But the bottles were still there.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” KEITH WHITLEY CAME BACK FROM ANOTHER DRINKING BINGE…

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MARK COLLIE SPENT YEARS VISITING A TENNESSEE PRISON BEFORE HE EVER BROUGHT A BAND INSIDE. THEN HE WALKED ONSTAGE AT BRUSHY MOUNTAIN AND OPENED WITH: “HELLO, I’M MARK COLLIE.” By 2001, Mark Collie had already been through the Nashville part of the story. He had made records for MCA and Giant. He had written songs for Garth Brooks, Tim McGraw, and George Jones. He had the voice, the rockabilly edge, and enough country-radio history to keep playing the regular rooms. But he had started spending time at Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary in Tennessee. Not for a photo. Not for one afternoon with cameras. He went in before the concert, sat with inmates, listened to their stories, and worked on songs with some of them. Brushy Mountain was not a symbolic place. It was a real prison built in the mountains north of Knoxville, with a history that went back more than a century. Then Collie brought in a band. In October 2001, he played a concert inside Brushy Mountain with Dave Grissom, Willie Weeks, Sean Camp, Kelly Willis, and Gatemouth Brown. The songs were about prison, bad choices, death row, and men trying to figure out what was left after they had already ruined most of their lives. Collie walked out and introduced himself with a line that everybody in the room understood. “Hello, I’m Mark Collie.” It was his answer to Johnny Cash. Cash had walked into Folsom Prison in 1968 and said, “Hello, I’m Johnny Cash.” Merle Haggard had once been an inmate when Cash performed at San Quentin. Collie knew both men. He had heard Merle talk about what that first prison show meant. But this was not Folsom. And Mark Collie was not Johnny Cash. The concert was recorded. Then the tapes disappeared into industry limbo. The footage sat underwater for two weeks during the Nashville flood before Collie and his wife recovered and restored it. The album and documentary did not finally come out until years later. The prison show did not make Mark Collie a bigger star. It gave him a room full of men who had nowhere to go after the last song.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MARK COLLIE WALKED INTO A TENNESSEE PRISON WITH…

Country Music

RODNEY ATKINS DID NOT MEET THE WOMAN WHO GAVE HIM UP UNTIL HE WAS ALMOST FORTY. WHEN THEY FINALLY SAT DOWN TOGETHER, SHE KEPT SAYING SHE WAS SORRY. HE KEPT SAYING THANK YOU. Rodney Atkins was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1969. His birth mother was nineteen, scared, and hiding the pregnancy from her family. She placed him for adoption. Rodney was eventually adopted by Allan and Margaret Atkins and raised around Cumberland Gap, Tennessee, where he grew up doing chores, playing ball, learning guitar, and singing at local fairs. By the time country radio knew him, he had built a career on songs about ordinary people trying to hold onto something. “If You’re Going Through Hell” went to No. 1. “Watching You” did too. He sang about fathers, sons, back roads, small towns, and the things people carry without saying much about them. But he did not know why his own mother had let him go. In 2008, Rodney went through the proper channels and arranged to meet her in Nashville. She had spent nearly four decades carrying the secret. Her family had not known. Even her younger son did not know he had an older brother until the truth finally came out. When they met, she kept apologizing. Rodney told her he was grateful. He told her she had given him a life. Then he met the brother who had never known he existed, and the grandmother who had never been told she had another grandson. After the meeting, Rodney went back to the road. But now there was a woman in Nashville who knew where he had been all those years. And a younger brother who had just learned he had one.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” RODNEY ATKINS DID NOT MEET THE WOMAN WHO…

Country Music

THE SURGERY TOOK CHARLIE ROBISON’S VOICE. FOUR YEARS LATER, HE WALKED BACK INTO BILLY BOB’S TEXAS AND SANG AGAIN. Charlie Robison came out of Bandera, Texas, where his family had worked ranch land for generations and Saturday night meant the dancehall. He played Austin bars, made Bandera in 1996, then built a following on the Texas circuit with records like Life of the Party, Step Right Up, and “I Want You Bad.” He never sounded built for Nashville polish. He sounded like a man who had brought Hill Country dust into the studio. By 2018, he had been doing it for more than two decades. Then, on January 3, he underwent surgery on his throat. The procedure was meant to deal with medical problems that had been bothering him. Complications followed. For months, Robison disappeared from the road. Then, on September 24, he wrote to fans himself. The surgery, he said, had left him with the permanent inability to sing. He was retiring from the stage and studio. No farewell run. No final hometown show. One of the men who had spent twenty-five years singing Texas bars, dance halls, and festival stages was suddenly finished because his own voice would not come back. Charlie Robison did return to the stage in 2022 after the damage proved less permanent than first believed. But the break had already happened. The singer who had once made a career out of sounding loose and unbreakable had spent four years waiting to find out whether he could still open his mouth and make a song.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE SURGERY TOOK CHARLIE ROBISON’S VOICE. FOUR YEARS…

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TRACE ADKINS WAS SHOT BY HIS SECOND WIFE DURING A 1994 DOMESTIC DISPUTE. THE BULLET PASSED THROUGH BOTH LUNGS AND HIS HEART — AND HE SURVIVED EMERGENCY TREATMENT. TWO YEARS LATER, HE WAS WALKING INTO A NASHVILLE STUDIO TO MAKE HIS FIRST ALBUM. On February 21, 1994, Trace Adkins was at home outside Nashville with his second wife, Julie Curtis. He had been drinking. The argument got worse. Curtis picked up a .38 pistol. Adkins later said he tried to take it from her. Then she fired. The bullet went through his left lung, through his heart, through his right lung, and out the other side. He was rushed to Vanderbilt. Doctors operated. For a while, the people around him were waiting to find out whether he would make it through the night. At that point, Trace was still just another big-voiced singer trying to get noticed in Nashville. He had moved there from Louisiana in 1992. He was playing Tillie and Lucy’s, a small beer joint in Mount Juliet. No hit record. No Capitol album. No “You’re Gonna Miss This.” No crowds waiting for the deep voice everybody would know later. He survived. He did not press charges. The marriage ended. Then he went back to Tillie and Lucy’s. Later that year, Capitol Nashville executive Scott Hendricks came in to hear him. Trace sang. Hendricks signed him on the spot. In 1996, Dreamin’ Out Loud came out. A year later, “(This Ain’t) No Thinkin’ Thing” went to No. 1.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TRACE ADKINS TOOK A BULLET THROUGH BOTH LUNGS…

Country Music

HE WAS ON THE ROAD, TALKING TO HIS WIFE, WHEN HE SAID THE WORDS THAT WOULD TURN INTO A SONG ABOUT A MAN DYING UNDER A BRIDGE. The road had become part of the job. Airports, buses, hotel rooms, soundchecks, another city before the last one had settled in his mind. He tried to reassure her the way people on the road often do. “This is temporary,” he told her. “I’m almost home.” The phrase stayed with him. Later, Morgan and songwriter Kerry Kurt Phillips built a different story around it. Not a road song. Not a love song. A song about a homeless man lying under a bridge, cold and tired, dreaming of a woman named Jenny and a place he can finally reach. “Almost Home” did not sound like a normal radio calculation. The man in the song was not drinking in a bar, driving a truck, or trying to get a girl back. He was dying. The final turn was quiet: the police officer finds him in the morning, but the man has already gone where he believed home really was. Morgan recorded it for his 2003 album I Love It. The song became his breakthrough. It reached the country Top 10, won BMI Song of the Year recognition, and introduced a different side of Craig Morgan to listeners. They knew the soldier. They knew the working-class singer. Now they heard him telling a story about someone most people passed without seeing. Years later, Jelly Roll told Morgan that “Almost Home” had helped him through jail. That may be the strangest part of the song’s life. It began with a husband on the road trying to reassure his wife. It became a dying man’s last dream. Then it reached people in places Craig Morgan could not have imagined when he first said the words into a phone.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” HE WAS ON THE ROAD, TALKING TO HIS…

Country Music

NINE YEARS AFTER COUNTRY RADIO LAST TOOK RANDY TRAVIS TO NO. 1, HE CAME BACK WITH A SONG ABOUT THREE CROSSES BESIDE A HIGHWAY. By the early 2000s, Randy Travis was no longer the new man changing Nashville. The years of “On the Other Hand,” “Forever and Ever, Amen,” and “Deeper Than the Holler” were behind him. Country radio had moved toward younger voices, bigger production, and songs built for a different kind of audience. Randy was still recording, still touring, still carrying the deep baritone that had helped bring traditional country back in the 1980s. But his last No. 1 had come in 1994. Then he began making gospel records. It was not a sharp break from the Randy Travis people already knew. Faith had always been close to the way he sang. The voice was still slow, low, and steady. But the songs came from a different room now — less about barstools and broken promises, more about judgment, mercy, and the things people carry after the road has gone dark. In 2002, he recorded “Three Wooden Crosses.” The song followed four strangers on a midnight bus bound for Mexico: a farmer, a teacher, a preacher, and a woman nobody in the story expected to matter most. Then an eighteen-wheeler came through the darkness. Three people died. Three crosses were left beside the highway. But the song did not end at the wreck. The preacher handed his bloodstained Bible to the woman who survived. Years later, her son stood in a church holding that same Bible, telling the story of the night that changed his mother’s life. Randy did not sing it like a sermon. He sang it like a country story people had to sit still and hear all the way through. The record kept climbing. In May 2003, “Three Wooden Crosses” reached No. 1 — Randy Travis’s first chart-topper in eight years and the last No. 1 of his career. It later won CMA Single of the Year, while the album Rise and Shine earned Grammy recognition. For a singer country radio had started treating like part of another era, the comeback did not come with a flashy new sound. It came with a bus, a dark highway, and three crosses standing where four people had been.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” NINE YEARS AFTER COUNTRY RADIO LAST TOOK RANDY…

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At 2:30 One Afternoon, the Traffic Outside Angel Delgadillo’s Barbershop Disappeared Angel Delgadillo remembered the time because a barber learns the rhythm outside his window. Before September 22, 1978, approximately 9,000 vehicles passed daily through Seligman, Arizona, on Route 66. At busy hours, Delgadillo sometimes waited ten or fifteen minutes for a break in traffic before crossing the street. Then Interstate 40 opened around the town. The cars did not gradually thin. They moved to the new highway a few miles away. Delgadillo later recalled that by midafternoon, residents could stand in the old road without needing to step aside. His barbershop depended on travelers, railroad employees and townspeople whose incomes came from the same traffic. Motels, filling stations and restaurants began closing. When the railroad later reduced its Seligman operations, another part of the customer base disappeared. Delgadillo remained behind his chair. During the following years, occasional visitors began finding the old road. They entered the shop carrying memories of family vacations, roadside signs and the slower America they associated with Route 66. Listening while he cut their hair, Delgadillo realized that the abandoned highway still possessed value—but only if travelers could find it. In February 1987, he gathered fifteen business owners to form the Historic Route 66 Association of Arizona. They lobbied for signs and official recognition of the surviving road between Seligman and Kingman. Later that year, Arizona designated the section Historic Route 66. Similar organizations formed elsewhere. What began among merchants trying to keep small businesses alive developed into a preservation movement extending across the old highway’s eight states. Congress later established a Route 66 preservation program within the National Park Service. Delgadillo’s barbershop became a visitor center and gift shop. The chair remained, but travelers now came from around the world to hear how the road had vanished and returned. The interstate had offered speed by removing Seligman from the journey. A barber put the town back on the map by asking drivers to leave the interstate on purpose.

Country Music

Emmylou Harris Returned to the Ryman After the Balcony Had Become Too Dangerous to Use In 1970, Emmylou Harris was serving drinks at the Hi-Hat Lounge near the Ryman Auditorium. Her daughter was an infant. Harris had not yet found a durable place in the music business, and customers sometimes came into the lounge after attending shows at the Ryman. She later remembered thinking that perhaps she would see a performance inside the building someday. Twenty-one years later, she entered through the stage door with a new acoustic band and recording equipment. The Grand Ole Opry had moved away in 1974. Although preservation work had begun on the Ryman’s exterior, the interior remained badly neglected. The balcony was considered unsafe, and no audience member could sit in it or beneath it. Only about 200 people were placed in a narrow section of the lower floor. From April 30 through May 2, 1991, Harris and the Nash Ramblers played three concerts there. The band included Sam Bush, Roy Huskey Jr., Larry Atamanuik, Al Perkins and a young Jon Randall. Instead of building the performances around Harris’s radio hits, they prepared country, bluegrass and folk material that was largely new to their stage set. The conditions shaped the sound. Acoustic instruments moved through a room built before electronic amplification. The empty balcony and unused pews became part of the recording’s air. The musicians could hear why singers had once regarded the Ryman as an instrument of its own. Released in 1992, At the Ryman won a Grammy. More importantly for the building, the album and accompanying film allowed the public to see the old auditorium as a working music room rather than an obsolete shrine. In March 1993, its owner announced a full interior rehabilitation. The Ryman reopened as a concert hall and museum in June 1994. Harris did not restore the building by herself; preservationists, owners, architects and workers carried that responsibility across many years. What she did was place live music back inside before the renovation was certain. The balcony remained empty for those three nights. The room below it proved the building was not finished.

Country Music

Marty Robbins suffered his first major heart attack in August 1969, at forty-three. Five months later, doctors opened his chest for coronary bypass surgery, a procedure still new enough that survival could not be treated as routine. Between those two events, Robbins recorded “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife.” The woman was Marizona Baldwin, whom he had married in 1948. She had known him before “El Paso,” the Grand Ole Opry, television shows and the stock cars he drove at speeds few heart patients would have considered sensible. By 1969, they had been married for more than twenty years and had raised two children. Robbins later connected the song to his hospitalization, saying the experience showed him what a woman endured across a shared life. Over time, the story hardened into the image of him writing the entire lyric from a hospital bed. His biographer found evidence that the song existed earlier and was likely refined during his illness. Robbins himself once told Ralph Emery that he had written it on a bus. The less cinematic truth carries more weight. The heart attack did not necessarily create the song. It changed what Robbins understood himself to be saying. He recorded it on January 2, 1970. On January 27, surgeons operated on his blocked coronary arteries. He recovered quickly enough to receive an Academy of Country Music award three months later and returned to NASCAR competition that October. “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife” reached No. 1 and earned Robbins the Grammy for Best Country Song. Its language belonged to an older style of marriage, but its gratitude was specific: a restless man acknowledging the person who had absorbed the consequences of his restlessness. Robbins would live with heart disease for the remainder of his life. He kept touring, recording and racing until shortly before his death in 1982. The song survived as a love letter to Marizona. It did not need to have been born beside a hospital bed. The man who carried it into the studio already knew the words. The failing heart taught him how little time he might have left to mean them.

Country Music

WHEN WILLIE NELSON’S CHILDHOOD CHURCH WAS PUT UP FOR SALE, AN OLD FRIEND CALLED HIM In 2006, only a handful of worshippers remained inside the small Methodist church in Abbott, Texas. The denomination decided to close it. The white wooden building where Willie Nelson and his sister Bobbie had sung as children was placed on the market and could have been moved away for use as a wedding chapel. A longtime Abbott resident named Bernice Pope heard what was happening and contacted Don Reed, one of Willie’s oldest friends. Reed called Willie. Willie’s instruction was brief: make an offer. He purchased the church and entrusted Reed with keeping it open. This was not intended to become a Willie Nelson museum or another performance property. Willie wanted it to remain a church for the town that had raised him. The building contained some of his earliest musical education. Willie and Bobbie had been raised by their grandparents, who brought them to services and encouraged their music. Bobbie played the church piano. Willie sang hymns, learned guitar and absorbed songs long before Nashville knew either sibling’s name. The reopened church was celebrated with a Sunday service in July 2006. Willie stood beside Bobbie’s piano, joined by family, friends and Leon Russell. They sang “Uncloudy Day,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “Precious Memories.” After the famous visitors left, the building returned to smaller work. Don and Joyce Reed cared for the property. Services continued. The church helped support scholarships for local students. Management later passed to another caretaker chosen before Reed’s death. Willie also bought Abbott’s old cash grocery around the same time because he did not want the town to lose its store. Neither purchase could reverse every force emptying small American communities. They kept two doors from closing. Years later, Willie and Bobbie returned to the sanctuary and performed “Family Bible” around the piano. By then they had played stages across the world. In Abbott, the room still asked only that Bobbie sit down and Willie stand beside her.