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Country Music

In 1987, Linda Ronstadt used one of the largest careers in American popular music to record the Mexican songs her father had set aside when he chose steady work at the family hardware store over life as a professional singer. Gilbert Ronstadt had possessed a fine voice and once stood close to a musical career of his own. But a stage offered no dependable way to support four children. He returned to Ronstadt Hardware in Tucson, spending his days among tools, hinges and household supplies. At home, he kept singing. Linda grew up hearing Gilbert perform the rancheras and traditional songs passed through the family from Sonora into Arizona. He played them at the piano, during gatherings and on family trips into northern Mexico. Some of Linda’s earliest memories were of falling asleep in someone’s lap while her father’s voice continued across the room. Decades later, after “You’re No Good,” “Blue Bayou,” Heart Like a Wheel and her orchestral work with Nelson Riddle had made her one of America’s most successful singers, Linda returned to that childhood repertoire. A Spanish-language mariachi album was not an obvious commercial choice. Her record company knew how to market her to country, rock and pop listeners. It had no assurance those audiences would follow her into an album without an English-language single. Linda proceeded anyway. Working with arranger Rubén Fuentes and leading mariachi musicians, she treated the material as serious vocal music rather than a nostalgic side project. During production, she played portions of the unfinished record to Gilbert over the telephone. The sound arrived thin and compressed, but he recognized every song. Canciones de Mi Padre eventually achieved double-platinum certification and became one of the most commercially successful non-English-language albums released in the United States. Gilbert had given up professional singing to provide his children with a stable home. Inside that home, he passed the songs to a daughter who could take them where his own voice had never gone.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” LINDA RONSTADT BUILT HER LARGEST MUSICAL RISK FROM…

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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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