Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

At 403 Chester Avenue in Bakersfield, the names Buck Owens and Merle Haggard appeared inside a publishing catalog rather than on a theater marquee. The songs could travel anywhere. The Beatles recorded “Act Naturally.” Ray Charles turned “Crying Time” into a soul record. Dean Martin and the British duo Peter and Gordon also reached into Buck’s catalog. Each version carried part of the revenue back to Blue Book Music—the company Buck had built far from Nashville’s publishing offices. The business began in 1957, when Owens and songwriter Harlan Howard started writing together. Their division of labor was often simple: Howard concentrated on lyrics; Buck worked on melodies. They formed Blue Book to publish the songs themselves rather than surrendering every copyright to an established company. When Howard moved to Nashville to concentrate on writing, Buck assumed control of Blue Book. What began as protection for two young writers expanded into an institutional base for the Bakersfield Sound. The catalog eventually included songs written by Owens, Merle Haggard, Bonnie Owens and Red Simpson. Buck understood that a hit created several kinds of income. A recording paid the performer, but publishing continued paying when another singer cut the song, when it was broadcast, or when it crossed into another market. As country, pop and R&B artists began recording his compositions, ownership became as important as chart position. By the end of the 1960s, Blue Book ranked among the leading country publishers and reportedly tied Nashville institution Acuff-Rose for BMI’s top country publishing honors. Buck surrounded it with other businesses: radio stations, a booking operation, a printing company and production interests. Bakersfield had developed more than a competing sound. It was beginning to possess some of the machinery required to circulate that sound. The arrangement was not always gentle. When Haggard needed money, Buck advanced it in exchange for a share of “Sing Me Back Home”—a transaction Haggard later resented. The same system that protected songs could also give leverage to the person controlling the checkbook. In 1984, Tree International purchased Blue Book and its companion catalog in one of Nashville’s largest publishing transactions of the period. By then, the Bakersfield Sound had already altered country music. Blue Book preserved the other half of that history: the moment its songs stopped traveling east empty-handed.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE COMPANY BEHIND THE BAKERSFIELD SOUND At 403…

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Ronnie Milsap’s country career began without a Nashville contract, a manager or even a job. It began with Joyce Milsap pulling a small trailer behind her Volkswagen, carrying what the couple could take from Memphis just after Christmas in 1972. Two months earlier, they had watched the CMA Awards at home. Charley Pride won Male Vocalist of the Year, and Joyce heard possibility in the applause. Ronnie had already made records for the R&B market, worked the Black clubs of Atlanta and played piano behind Elvis Presley on “Kentucky Rain.” He had been near important music without finding a durable place inside it. Joyce told him they should move to Nashville. Ronnie’s answer was practical: nobody there had hired him. They went anyway. A weeklong engagement at The Villa, a small room near Nashville’s Anchor Motel, brought Don Davis through the door. Davis offered Ronnie a steadier job in the ninth-floor showroom of Roger Miller’s King of the Road Motor Inn. Five nights a week, Milsap played country, soul, pop and whatever else the room could hold. Music executives and performers began coming upstairs after their own work was done. Among them was Jack Johnson, who managed Charley Pride. Within days, Johnson offered to manage Milsap and financed the demos that led toward RCA. The singer who had arrived with no job would eventually place more than forty singles in the country Top Ten. Joyce’s work did not end when the trailer was unpacked. Ronnie continued bringing songs home, trying them at the piano and listening for what changed in the room. She became the private audience behind the public career—the person close enough to recognize both his strengths and his evasions. Decades later, when he gathered long-kept material for A Better Word for Love, he described some of those songs as treasures that only he and Joyce had heard. Nashville history records the hotel engagement, the manager, the RCA contract and the chart numbers. The smaller beginning sits farther back: a television playing in Memphis, a woman hearing an opening in another singer’s victory, and a Volkswagen leaving town with a trailer attached.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOYCE MILSAP HEARD NASHVILLE BEFORE IT HEARD RONNIE…

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Barbara Mandrell had already spent nearly half her life working as a musician when she decided, at nineteen, to stop. Her mother had taught her to read music before she could read words. By eleven, Barbara was performing on steel guitar in Las Vegas with Joe Maphis. She later appeared on Town Hall Party, joined package tours featuring Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline and George Jones, and played military bases across the United States and Asia with the Mandrell Family Band. The family band also gave her Ken Dudney, its drummer. They married in 1967, shortly before Barbara finished high school. Tired from years of travel, she left music to become a Navy wife. When Ken was deployed as a carrier pilot, Barbara stayed with her parents, who had moved to Tennessee. Her father, Irby, took her to the Ryman Auditorium to watch a taping of The Porter Wagoner Show before the Grand Ole Opry. They sat in the balcony. From there, Barbara watched the performers working on the stage below. She had been doing versions of that work since childhood, but now she occupied the audience’s side of the room. She leaned toward her father. “Daddy, I can do that,” she told him. “I want to get back in music if you’ll manage me.” Irby’s answer was equally direct: “I’d bet my last penny on you.” Ken eventually joined her in Nashville. Within weeks, Barbara received interest from several record companies and signed with Columbia in 1969. Irby became her manager, beginning a partnership that carried her from her first chart records to the height of country television. She later became the first performer to win the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year award in consecutive years. Barbara retired permanently in 1997. This time, she sold most of her instruments because she did not want the temptation to return. She kept two: an engraved Dobro from her parents and the steel guitar that had started everything. That steel eventually entered the Country Music Hall of Fame—the same institution that would induct Barbara herself. The first time she left music, a view from the balcony pulled her back. The second time, she knew exactly what she was putting down.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BARBARA MANDRELL HAD BEEN A WORKING MUSICIAN SINCE…

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Before Capitol Records came to see Suzy Bogguss, she had already learned how to turn listeners into customers one performance at a time. After college, Bogguss traveled alone as a folk singer, carrying her guitar through coffeehouses, clubs and ski resorts. She sometimes lived from a camper truck, accompanied by her dog and cat. By 1985, she had moved to Nashville, where talent was common and a record contract remained distant. Her most useful opportunity came outside the city. Bogguss joined the first season of Dollywood in 1986. She performed four solo sets each day near the park’s steam-train station, then sang as the female lead in an evening jamboree with a full band. The location was not glamorous. Coal smoke from the train drifted over her daytime performances. But the schedule gave her something many aspiring singers lacked: repeated contact with a real country audience. Visitors knew the artists behind the songs she introduced. Their reactions taught Bogguss which material belonged naturally in her voice. She made a cassette to sell at the park. It was both merchandise and evidence. Anyone considering her as a recording artist could hear not only a few disconnected demonstration tracks but the musical identity she had been refining in front of paying visitors several times a day. A copy reached Capitol Records. Label representatives came to Dollywood to watch her perform. Bogguss later recalled that three weeks after the visit, she had a contract. The agreement did not create immediate stardom. Several early singles struggled before “Cross My Broken Heart” and “Someday Soon” established her. Her 1991 album Aces eventually went platinum, and she received the CMA Horizon Award the following year. The cassette had done more than reach the correct executive. It had emerged from a small working system Bogguss built herself: sing, observe, adjust, record and place the music directly into listeners’ hands. Long before artists were expected to manage their own audiences, Suzy Bogguss stood beside a coal-fired train selling the record that explained why a label should come looking for her.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” SUZY BOGGUSS SANG FOUR TIMES A DAY BESIDE…

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In 1993, Jimmy Fortune was losing two versions of home at the same time. His marriage was ending, while his father was dying of cancer. There was no clean space between those losses. Fortune was still deep inside the machinery of the Statler Brothers, a group whose concerts, recordings and enormously popular television show demanded consistency regardless of what waited beyond the stage. Professionally, he belonged to one of country music’s most recognizable institutions; privately, the two relationships that had helped define family were being pulled away from him at once. The divorce carried its own exhaustion, but his father’s illness gave the year a different kind of clock. One loss was already happening through separation, while the other was approaching with a finality that could not be negotiated. Fortune later spoke openly about the depression that followed, describing a period when the weight of what was happening became difficult to carry. Yet his working life offered almost no resemblance to the life he returned to after each performance. With the Statlers, Fortune’s high tenor was built into songs about devotion, memory, faith and families held together across time. He still had to find those notes night after night, surrounded by harmonies precise enough to make everything sound settled. When the performance ended, there was no harmony capable of repairing what was happening at home or stopping his father’s cancer. That contrast changed the meaning of singing for him. Music could not reverse either loss, but it gave grief somewhere to go; the stage gradually became less a place where Fortune concealed his private life than one of the few places where he could continue functioning while that life was being rearranged. He survived the year, although not by emerging unchanged. The experience deepened the spiritual current that would become increasingly visible in his later work, particularly after the Statler Brothers retired in 2002 and Fortune began building a solo career around country and gospel music. Years later, when Fortune spoke about family, he often did so with an awareness of how difficult it is simply to keep people together. He would eventually become the father of seven children, scattered into lives and homes of their own. That later family did not erase what 1993 took from him. But it gave the word *home* more people to hold than it had before.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” IN 1993, JIMMY FORTUNE STOOD ONSTAGE WITH THE…

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Carlene Carter climbed onto the tour bus and realized she had packed exactly like her mother. There was the juicer, the coffee maker, the extra things she once laughed at June Carter for carrying everywhere. Carlene had spent years trying not to become too easily identified with the family she came from, yet somewhere between the luggage and the road dates she caught herself repeating one of June’s smallest habits. By then, the larger part of her career had been moving in the opposite direction. Carlene was the daughter of June Carter and Carl Smith, the granddaughter of Maybelle Carter and the stepdaughter of Johnny Cash. But when she began making records in the late 1970s, she leaned toward rock, pop and the music she had absorbed as a teenager. Nashville heritage was something she possessed automatically; sounding like it was another matter entirely. By the mid-1980s, the experiments had stopped leading anywhere useful. Her recording career had stalled and her marriage had broken apart. She went back on the road with June and the Carter Family for roughly two years, returning to songs she had known before she ever thought seriously about having a career of her own. The effect was gradual. Carlene began to hear that the country phrasing, yodeling and Carter Family rhythms she had once treated as inheritance did not have to erase the rock music she loved. They could sit beside it. Friend and producer Howie Epstein encouraged her to write about childhood, leading to “Me and the Wildwood Rose,” a song Carlene said seemed to come from somewhere deeper than conscious imitation. That understanding fed into *I Fell in Love* in 1990, the record that finally gave her major country success after years of searching elsewhere. The title track reached No. 1, but the more interesting change had already happened before the chart position arrived. Carlene had spent years wondering how much distance she needed from the Carter name in order to become herself. The answer turned out to be less distance than she expected. She only needed enough time away to come back and hear the family music as something she could use without disappearing inside it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” CARLENE CARTER SPENT YEARS TRYING NOT TO DISAPPEAR…

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The McEntire children learned harmony somewhere between the ranch and the next rodeo. Their father Clark spent weekends competing as a steer roper, which meant long drives across Oklahoma with Reba, Pake, Susie and Alice packed into the vehicle. Jacqueline McEntire used those miles differently. She had once dreamed of becoming a country singer herself, but marriage, teaching and four children had taken her life in another direction. In the car, she began teaching the children how to find separate notes and hold them together. Those lessons eventually followed them out of the back seat. Reba, Pake and Susie became the Singing McEntires, performing around Oklahoma while still young enough to return home to ranch chores and school. In 1971, they even recorded a regional single, “The Ballad of John McEntire,” about their grandfather. Jacqueline encouraged all of them, not just Reba, and when country singer Red Steagall heard Reba perform at the National Finals Rodeo in 1974, Jacqueline initially asked whether he could help all three singing siblings. Steagall could only offer one opening. He believed Reba had something different. In early 1975, Jacqueline drove her daughter toward Nashville to record a demo. Reba was still uncertain enough about a professional career that she kept finding reasons to interrupt the trip. Her mother finally made the choice plain: they could turn around if Reba truly did not want it, but Jacqueline admitted that part of her own abandoned dream was traveling in the car with them. They kept going. Mercury signed Reba later that year. The success came slowly; years passed before the No. 1 records and awards arrived. Jacqueline remained close enough to remember what existed before any of it — the ranch work, the rodeos, the family singing and the daughter who once needed convincing just to finish the drive to Nashville. Reba eventually became the singer Jacqueline had once imagined becoming herself. But the exchange between them was never as simple as one woman surrendering a dream to another. Long before Nashville chose Reba, her mother had already given her the first practical piece of the career: how to hear another voice beside her and know exactly where her own belonged.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” REBA MCENTIRE’S FIRST MUSIC LESSONS DID NOT COME…

Country Music

The crib arrived in a life that had already been organized around tour buses, studios and hotel rooms. Reba McEntire had spent most of the 1980s building the career she had chased since those early trips out of Oklahoma. By the end of the decade, the records were selling, the awards were coming, and the machinery around her had grown into something much larger than the young singer who once needed her mother to drive her toward Nashville. Then she became pregnant. Reba later said she had reached a point where she did not think motherhood was going to happen for her. Her mother, Jacqueline, had always told her that she had not really lived until she had a child. So when Reba learned she was expecting, the news landed differently from another No. 1 record or industry award. She was, in her own words, thrilled. Shelby Blackstock was born in 1990. That same year, Reba released *Rumor Has It*, the album that included “Fancy” and became one of the biggest records of her career. The public side of her life was still accelerating. At home, however, the calendar now included feedings, travel arrangements and the practical work of raising a child inside a career that rarely stayed in one place for long. Shelby did not grow up trying to inherit his mother’s stage. He found his own world in racing, eventually competing professionally before moving into business and real estate. Reba followed that path as a mother rather than as a manager, speaking with the same pride about his independence that other parents might reserve for a child who chose the family profession. Years later, when asked what she was proudest of after decades of hit records, television work and awards, Reba did not choose anything from the career. She chose Shelby. The more revealing part of that answer sits back in 1990, when one of the busiest women in country music brought a child into a life already moving at full speed — and discovered that the thing she would value most had nothing to do with how many people were listening.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” REBA MCENTIRE RELEASED ONE OF THE BIGGEST ALBUMS…

Country Music

Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White married in August 1981, after meeting through the same traditional country and bluegrass circles that had shaped both of their lives. Ricky joked beforehand that guests should bring a covered dish and a guitar. It suited them. Music was already threaded so deeply through the relationship that separating the private life from the professional one was never going to be simple. Sharon continued singing with her father Buck and sister Cheryl in The Whites. Ricky’s solo career accelerated almost immediately, carrying him through a remarkable run of country hits during the 1980s. He also produced records for The Whites, which meant husband and wife could spend one day inside family life and the next working on opposite sides of a studio microphone. In 1986, they finally recorded together as a couple. “Love Can’t Ever Get Better Than This” placed Sharon beside Ricky rather than behind him in the credits. Released the following year, the duet reached the country Top 10 and earned them the 1987 CMA Award for Vocal Duo of the Year. A full album together seemed like the obvious next step. It never happened. Sharon was signed to Warner Bros.; Ricky was with Epic. Years later, he remembered the situation as a business mess: two competing labels, neither willing to let the project belong to the other. The marriage kept moving while the album stayed unwritten. They raised children, toured separately and together, watched careers change direction, and carried the idea with them long after its commercial moment had passed. Only in 2014, after thirty-three years of marriage, did they finally record *Hearts Like Ours*. By then, Sharon said the songs meant something different because they had actually lived through decades of family, faith, difficulty and commitment together. The album arrived far too late to capitalize on their 1987 award. That was partly what made it matter. What the record industry had once delayed for practical reasons eventually became something neither of them could have made in quite the same way when they were young.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” RICKY SKAGGS AND SHARON WHITE WON A CMA…

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A photograph from the Choctaw Indian Fair shows Marty Stuart still small enough to stand beside his mother, smiling next to a country singer he had gone there to see. It was 1970. Marty was eleven, already obsessed with the Grand Ole Opry, guitars and the musicians whose names filled the records at home. Connie Smith was an established RCA star by then, six years removed from “Once a Day” and already one of the strongest voices in country music. On the drive home, Marty told his mother that one day he was going to marry her. Life moved on before the prediction had any chance to become more than a family story. Marty left Mississippi young, joined Lester Flatt’s band, later played with Johnny Cash, built a solo career and became part of Nashville’s early-1990s commercial boom. Connie’s life moved differently. She continued recording, raised children, spent more time with family and faith, and by the 1980s was making records far less frequently even though the Opry remained home. Their paths eventually crossed again backstage at the Opry. This time Marty was no longer the boy asking musicians technical questions. He and Connie began writing together, and the friendship slowly moved into something neither had planned around a childhood memory. They married in July 1997, twenty-seven years after that first meeting. Marriage quickly folded back into music. In 1998, Marty produced Connie’s self-titled Warner Bros. album, her first major studio project in years. He later produced more of her work, while Connie became part of the steadier life surrounding Marty as his own music moved away from chasing country radio and back toward the traditional forms he had loved as a boy. The Country Music Hall of Fame notes that their marriage helped anchor the period of reflection that led into his next artistic chapter. The photograph came first, long before either of them knew what the intervening years would contain. What followed was not a straight line toward that childhood promise, but two separate musical lives that eventually met again at the same place country music had always given them both: backstage, among songs.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MARTY STUART MET CONNIE SMITH AT THE CHOCTAW…

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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.