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Country Music

SAMMY KERSHAW HAD BEEN PLAYING COUNTRY MUSIC SINCE HE WAS 12. THEN DRUGS, ALCOHOL AND YEARS OF HONKY-TONKS WORE HIM DOWN SO BADLY THAT IN 1988, HE QUIT MUSIC AND WENT TO WORK REMODELING WALMART STORES. Sammy Kershaw grew up in Louisiana and started performing professionally as a boy. By his teens, his George Jones-influenced voice was already getting him opening slots for established country acts. But years of clubs, failed relationships, money trouble, drugs and heavy drinking pushed him in the opposite direction from Nashville. By 1988, Kershaw was done. He quit alcohol and drugs, walked away from music, and took a full-time job supervising remodeling work for Walmart stores. For roughly two years, the man who had spent most of his life onstage barely performed. Then songwriter Barry Jackson, who remembered hearing Kershaw years earlier in a Lafayette nightclub, tracked him down and urged him to make a demo. Kershaw gave music one more chance. The tape reached Mercury Records. After a showcase, Mercury signed him in 1990. Don’t Go Near the Water arrived in 1991. “Cadillac Style” reached No. 3 on Billboard’s country chart, “Anywhere but Here” also made the Top 10, and the album eventually went platinum. Two years later, “She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful” became Kershaw’s first No. 1. The comeback did not erase the years that nearly ended his career. It gave them a different consequence. The Louisiana singer who had once stepped away from every stage to rebuild his life eventually spent the 1990s carrying traditional honky-tonk back onto country radio — not as the young man who had first chased Nashville, but as someone who had already learned he could survive without it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” SAMMY KERSHAW HAD BEEN SINGING COUNTRY MUSIC SINCE…

Country Music

KEITH WHITLEY AND EARL THOMAS CONLEY RECORDED “BROTHERLY LOVE” IN 1987. IT SAT UNRELEASED FOR FOUR YEARS. BY THE TIME IT BECAME A NO. 2 HIT, WHITLEY HAD BEEN DEAD FOR MORE THAN TWO YEARS. In 1987, Keith Whitley and Earl Thomas Conley were two of country music’s most recognizable voices. Conley was deep into the extraordinary run that would give him 18 No. 1 hits. Whitley was still climbing, only a year away from the breakthrough stretch that produced “Don’t Close Your Eyes,” “When You Say Nothing at All” and “I’m No Stranger to the Rain.” That year, they recorded “Brotherly Love,” written by Tim Nichols and Jimmy Alan Stewart. The song was built around two brothers who fight, compete and irritate each other, but remain bound by something stronger underneath. Then the recording disappeared into the vault. It was not released as a single. It did not appear on either man’s current album. On May 9, 1989, Whitley died from alcohol poisoning at 34. His career did not immediately stop with his death. RCA still had unreleased material, and records including “I Wonder Do You Think of Me” and “I’m Over You” became posthumous hits. Then, in 1991, someone went back to the duet with Conley. “Brotherly Love” appeared on Whitley’s posthumous Kentucky Bluebird and Conley’s Yours Truly. RCA released it as a single that August. Four years after the two men had stood in the studio together, their voices finally reached country radio side by side. The record climbed to No. 2 on Billboard’s country chart, spending 20 weeks on the chart. It later earned a Grammy nomination for Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. It also became the final Top 10 country hit for both singers. For Whitley, there could never be another session. For Conley, the result was different. He lived nearly three more decades, but country radio was changing, and none of his later singles returned him to the Top 10. So one recording from 1987 quietly became a dividing line neither man could have recognized when they made it. They walked into the studio with separate careers still moving forward. Country radio finally brought their voices together after one of those careers had already ended.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” KEITH WHITLEY AND EARL THOMAS CONLEY RECORDED “BROTHERLY…

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JEFF BATES HAD THE VOICE TO SING COUNTRY MUSIC. METH TOOK HIM SOMEWHERE ELSE FIRST — INTO CRIME, JAIL AND A LIFE THAT NEARLY COLLAPSED BEFORE NASHVILLE EVER KNEW HIS NAME. Jeff Bates grew up in Mississippi with a deep baritone shaped by singers like Conway Twitty, Elvis Presley and Joe Cocker. By the 1990s, he was trying to build a music career, eventually making his way toward Nashville. But while the opportunity moved slowly, his methamphetamine addiction grew worse. Music stopped being the center of his life. Drugs became it. The addiction led Bates into crime and eventually jail. Instead of reaching Nashville as another promising Southern singer, he reached a point where the career he wanted mattered less than whether he could rebuild his life at all. Recovery came first. Bates got sober and began putting the pieces back together. Then music returned. By late 2002, only a few years removed from the darkest period of his addiction, RCA Nashville signed him to a major-label deal. Rainbow Man arrived in 2003. Its breakthrough single, “The Love Song,” climbed to No. 8 on Billboard’s country chart. The voice Bates had nearly thrown away was suddenly coming through country radio nationwide. “I Wanna Make You Cry” followed, and “Long, Slow Kisses” later reached No. 17. Bates never became a stadium-level star, but his past gave some of his later material a weight chart numbers could not provide. “One Second Chance,” in particular, landed differently coming from a man who had needed one himself. He also never hid the musical influence behind that deep voice. In 2014, Bates released Me & Conway, a tribute connecting him directly to Conway Twitty, one of the singers listeners had compared him to for years. But by then, Bates had another reason to keep telling his own story. He began speaking openly about addiction and recovery, including visits to prisons and treatment settings where the people listening were much closer to the life he had once lived than to the country charts he later reached. For them, “The Love Song” reaching No. 8 was not necessarily the most important number in Jeff Bates’ story. The years sober afterward were.

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Country Music

EMMYLOU HARRIS WAS SEARCHING FOR SONGS AFTER GRAM PARSONS’ DEATH WHEN SOMEONE PLAYED HER A FIVE-SONG CASSETTE BY AN UNKNOWN TEXAS WRITER NAMED RODNEY CROWELL. ONE SONG WAS ENOUGH TO CHANGE BOTH THEIR LIVES. Rodney Crowell arrived in Nashville from Texas in 1972 with songs but no reputation. He fell into the circle around Guy Clark and Townes Van Zandt, learned the songwriter’s life, and landed an early publishing break through Jerry Reed. But he was still largely unknown when a cassette containing five of his songs reached Emmylou Harris. Harris was rebuilding after Gram Parsons’ death. While listening through demos for the album that became Pieces of the Sky, she heard Crowell’s “Bluebird Wine.” She stopped. Harris recorded it as the opening track of the album in 1975, then wanted to know who had written it. Crowell was tracked down. When Harris later passed through Austin, she offered him a plane ticket to Los Angeles. He took it and joined her newly formed Hot Band as guitarist and harmony singer, working beside players including James Burton and Glen D. Hardin. The job changed Crowell’s position in Nashville. Harris kept recording his songs. Then other artists followed. Waylon Jennings cut “Ain’t Living Long Like This.” The Oak Ridge Boys took “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight” to No. 1. Crystal Gayle had a No. 1 with “’Til I Gain Control Again.” Bob Seger turned “Shame on the Moon” into a major pop hit. For years, Rodney Crowell songs were more famous than Rodney Crowell. Then Diamonds & Dirt arrived in 1988. The album produced five consecutive No. 1 country singles: “It’s Such a Small World,” “I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried,” “She’s Crazy for Leavin’,” “After All This Time,” and “Above and Beyond.” More than a decade after Harris first heard his cassette, Crowell had finally become the singer carrying his own songs to the top. The connection between them never disappeared. Nearly forty years after “Bluebird Wine,” Crowell and Harris recorded Old Yellow Moon together. In 2014, it won the Grammy for Best Americana Album. The young songwriter Emmylou Harris once hired for her band eventually stood beside her as an equal partner on an album bearing both their names.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” EMMYLOU HARRIS WAS STILL FINDING HER WAY AFTER…

Country Music

BEFORE EARL THOMAS CONLEY COULD SELL HIS OWN RECORDS, CONWAY TWITTY TOOK ONE OF HIS SONGS TO NO. 1—YEARS BEFORE CONLEY BUILT AN 18-NO. 1 CAREER OF HIS OWN. After leaving the Army, Earl Thomas Conley spent years chasing country music while working blue-collar jobs. Nashville did not move quickly for him. When progress stalled, Conley went to Huntsville, Alabama, where he worked in a steel mill and met producer Nelson Larkin. Larkin helped him sign with the small GRT label in 1974. Conley finally had records with his own name on them. Almost nobody bought them. His GRT singles reached only the lower end of the country chart. But something strange was happening to the songs Conley wrote. Other singers were having better luck with them. Mel Street recorded “Smokey Mountain Memories,” co-written by Conley and Dick Heard, and took it to No. 13 in 1975. Then Conway Twitty recorded “This Time I’ve Hurt Her More Than She Loves Me,” written by Conley with Mary Larkin. In early 1976, it reached No. 1. Conley was watching one of country music’s biggest stars stand at the top of the chart with words he had written while his own recording career remained stuck near the bottom. He returned to Nashville and kept going. Warner Bros. gave him another opportunity, and “Dreamin’s All I Do” became his first Top 40 hit in 1979. But the breakthrough still did not come, and Conley left the label. He reunited with Nelson Larkin at Sunbird Records for another try. This time, “Silent Treatment” reached the Top 10. Then, in 1981, “Fire and Smoke” went to No. 1. RCA signed him, and the long wait suddenly turned into one of the most dominant chart runs of the 1980s. Conley eventually scored 18 No. 1 country hits, including “Holding Her and Loving You,” “Nobody Falls Like a Fool” and “Once in a Blue Moon.” In 1984, Don’t Make It Easy for Me made him the first artist in any genre to place four No. 1 singles from the same album. By then, Conway Twitty recording one of his songs no longer represented the closest Earl Thomas Conley could get to the top. Other writers were now trying to get songs onto an Earl Thomas Conley record.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BEFORE EARL THOMAS CONLEY COULD SELL HIS OWN…

Country Music

JEFF CARSON LEFT A NO. 1 COUNTRY CAREER FOR A POLICE BADGE—THEN DIED JUST AS HE WAS MAKING HIS MUSICAL COMEBACK. HIS FINAL ALBUM WAS NAMED AFTER HIS BADGE NUMBER: 448. Born Jeffrey Herndon in Tulsa, Oklahoma, he played in bands, moved to Missouri and eventually came to Nashville. There he worked recording demos, singing songs that publishers hoped to place with established artists. In 1995, Curb Records gave him his own chance. “The Car” became a Top 5 hit, but “Not on Your Love” went even further, reaching No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart. Carson followed with records including “Holdin’ Onto Somethin’” and continued touring through the late 1990s and early 2000s. Then he made an unusual decision. In 2009, Carson retired from country music. He entered law enforcement. Carson joined the Franklin Police Department in Tennessee, trading tour buses and radio promotion for patrol work. For roughly the next decade, the former country star served as a police officer while the records that had made his name remained on country radio playlists. Music eventually found its way back. Carson began recording again and returned to the studio with producer Buddy Hyatt. In 2022, he released “God Save the World,” his first new single in years, with plans for more music to follow. He never got to complete that return. On March 26, 2022, Jeff Carson died suddenly of a heart attack at a hospital in Franklin. He was 58. The recordings he had been making were not abandoned. Friends and fellow artists helped complete 448, a posthumous album named for Carson’s badge number. Michael Ray, Darryl Worley, Mark Wills and Craig Morgan were among the country artists who contributed. Carson had spent years being known by a name printed on record sleeves. The final album carried another number instead: 448 — the one he wore while serving Franklin.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JEFF CARSON LEFT A NO. 1 COUNTRY CAREER…

Country Music

TRACY BYRD WALKED INTO A MALL STUDIO TO SING ONE HANK WILLIAMS SONG FOR A FRIEND. THE OWNER ENTERED HIM IN A CONTEST—AND THAT SMALL DECISION EVENTUALLY LED TO TWO NO. 1 COUNTRY HITS. Tracy Byrd was studying business at Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas, when a friend persuaded him to record a song at a small studio inside a local shopping mall. Byrd chose Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” He was not making a professional demo. There was no Nashville executive waiting outside. But the studio owner heard the recording and believed the voice deserved a larger room. He entered Byrd in a local talent contest. Byrd won. That small victory pushed him toward the clubs around Beaumont, where a thriving country scene was already producing another traditional singer: Mark Chesnutt. Byrd began playing the same Texas honky-tonk circuit, gradually building an audience while abandoning his original college plans for music. Then Nashville came looking. MCA Records signed him, and his self-titled debut album arrived in 1993. The first singles did little. Then “Holdin’ Heaven” reached No. 1. Byrd followed it with “Lifestyles of the Not So Rich and Famous,” but his second album, No Ordinary Man, pushed the career much further. “Watermelon Crawl” became one of his signature records. Then came “The Keeper of the Stars,” a ballad Byrd initially had not expected to become the defining song of the album. It became a major hit and won Song of the Year at the 1996 Academy of Country Music Awards. Byrd went on to record more hits, including “Ten Rounds with Jose Cuervo,” which gave him another No. 1 in 2002. By then, the business student who walked into that mall studio had spent nearly a decade on national country radio. The studio owner never had a record contract to offer him. He only had a contest application. For Tracy Byrd, that was enough to get the first door open.

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BUDDY JEWELL SANG MORE THAN 4,000 DEMOS SO OTHER COUNTRY SINGERS COULD FIND THEIR NEXT HIT. THEN, AFTER NEARLY A DECADE IN NASHVILLE WITHOUT A RECORD DEAL, AMERICA FINALLY VOTED FOR THE MAN BEHIND THE VOICE. Buddy Jewell came to Nashville in 1993 expecting to become a recording artist. Nashville found another use for him. By the mid-1990s, Jewell was working steadily as a demo singer. Songwriters needed professional recordings to pitch their material to artists and labels, and Jewell had the kind of country voice that could make an unfinished song sound ready for radio. The work paid bills. It also kept him anonymous. Over the years, Jewell estimated that he sang more than 4,000 demos. Some of those songs eventually found their way to major artists, including George Strait, Clay Walker and Trace Adkins. Jewell kept watching songs leave the demo room and build careers for somebody else. His own deal never came. Nearly ten years after arriving in Nashville, he was married, raising a family and still working behind the scenes when a new television competition called Nashville Star began looking for contestants. Jewell auditioned. He was 41 years old. That mattered in a business increasingly interested in finding young artists it could build for the future. Jewell was competing not only against other singers, but against the years Nashville had already spent declining to make him one of its stars. Then the audience started voting. Week after week, Jewell survived. On May 3, 2003, he reached the finale against John Arthur Martinez and a 19-year-old Miranda Lambert. Jewell won. He received roughly 65 percent of the nationwide vote, finishing more than two million votes ahead of Lambert. The machinery that had refused to move for nearly a decade suddenly moved very quickly. Columbia Records Nashville signed him. Clint Black produced his debut album, and only weeks after the Nashville Star finale, Buddy Jewell was released. It entered Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart at No. 1. “Help Pour Out the Rain (Lacey’s Song),” inspired by a conversation with his daughter, became a Top 5 country hit. “Sweet Southern Comfort” followed into the Top 10. For years, Jewell had stood behind a studio microphone trying to make somebody else’s song convincing enough for a star to record. In 2003, the microphone stayed exactly where it had always been. The name printed on the record was what finally changed.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BUDDY JEWELL SANG MORE THAN 4,000 DEMOS SO…

Country Music

WADE HAYES HAD ALREADY SURVIVED STAGE IV COLON CANCER ONCE. THEN THE CANCER CAME BACK — AND HIS DOCTOR GAVE HIM FOUR WORDS THAT BECAME A SONG: “GO LIVE YOUR LIFE.” By the time cancer entered Wade Hayes’ life, country radio already knew his name. In the mid-1990s, “Old Enough to Know Better” had gone to No. 1, followed by hits including “I’m Still Dancin’ with You,” “What I Meant to Say” and “On a Good Night.” Hayes had built the kind of traditional-country career that placed him naturally beside many of the decade’s new male voices. Then, in October 2011, doctors found stage IV colon cancer. It had already spread beyond the colon into much of his liver, as well as parts of the diaphragm, gall bladder and lymph nodes. Hayes underwent major surgery followed by chemotherapy at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center. The treatment worked. For a time, Hayes was told he was cancer-free. Then the disease returned. The recurrence appeared in his lymph nodes, sending him back into treatment for a second fight only about a year after the first. Again, Hayes made it through. When treatment finally ended, his oncologist, Dr. Jordan Berlin, told him to go live his life. The words landed harder than a routine discharge. Hayes understood two things inside them: he was fortunate to still be there, and there was no guarantee the cancer would never return. He later told songwriter Bobby Pinson what the doctor had said. They wrote “Go Live Your Life.” The song became the title track of Hayes’ 2015 album. By then, his relationship with music had changed. He was no longer simply chasing another radio run. Cancer had become part of the shows, the interviews and the reason he began speaking publicly about screening and supporting cancer organizations. Hayes continued recording and performing after the illness that had twice threatened to stop both. But “Go Live Your Life” carried something his earlier hits never could. It was not written from an imagined character or a Nashville pitch meeting. It came from the sentence a doctor gave him when there was finally no more treatment scheduled for the next morning. And years later, Hayes was still singing those four words to rooms filled with people who had their own reasons for needing to hear them.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” WADE HAYES HAD ALREADY BEATEN STAGE IV COLON…

Country Music

HAL KETCHUM WENT FROM BUILDING HOUSES AS A TEXAS CARPENTER TO SINGING “SMALL TOWN SATURDAY NIGHT”—BEFORE TWO DEVASTATING ILLNESSES TOOK HIM OFF THE ROAD AND ENDED HIS LIFE AT 67. Born in Greenwich, New York, he grew up playing drums before teaching himself guitar. As a young man, he performed around the folk clubs of Greenwich Village, but music alone did not pay the bills. After moving to Texas, he worked as a carpenter, building houses during the day and playing clubs whenever he could at night. The construction work was steady. Music was not. For years, Ketchum wrote songs, drove between small venues and wondered whether Nashville would ever hear him. His warm tenor and folk influences did not fit neatly into the polished country sound that dominated much of the late 1980s. Then he wrote “Past the Point of Rescue.” The song attracted attention in Nashville and led to a recording contract with Curb Records. While preparing his debut album, Ketchum also recorded another song that had first appeared on songwriter Pat Alger’s demo tape. It was called “Small Town Saturday Night.” Released in 1991, the single climbed into the country Top 5 and introduced Hal Ketchum to a national audience. His debut album, Past the Point of Rescue, went gold, and songs including “I Know Where Love Lives,” “Sure Love” and “Hearts Are Gonna Roll” quickly established him as one of the strongest new traditional voices of the decade. The success looked sudden. It had actually taken years of construction sites, bar stages and long drives across Texas before Nashville finally noticed. Ketchum never abandoned the plainspoken style that had brought him there. His records blended country, folk and Americana without chasing trends, and that honesty earned him a loyal audience even as country radio changed through the late 1990s. Later in life, health problems gradually limited his career. He was diagnosed with acute transverse myelitis in 1998, and years afterward his family revealed that he was living with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. He retired from touring in 2018. Hal Ketchum died on November 23, 2020, at the age of 67. By then, “Small Town Saturday Night” had outlived the radio era that first embraced it. The houses he built in Texas eventually belonged to other families. The song he built still belonged to everyone who heard a little of their own hometown in it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” HAL KETCHUM WAS BUILDING HOUSES IN TEXAS WHEN…

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