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Country Music

THREE WEEKS AFTER BURYING HIS 13-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, GEORGE STRAIT WAS BACK ONSTAGE. MONTHS LATER, WHEN HE FINALLY AGREED TO SPEAK TO REPORTERS AGAIN, THERE WAS ONE CONDITION: NO QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ACCIDENT. By the summer of 1986, Strait’s career was accelerating faster than at any point before it. He had just won CMA Male Vocalist of the Year and Album of the Year, his crowds were growing, and he later remembered working close to 200 dates a year. The quiet Texas singer who had broken through only five years earlier was becoming one of country music’s biggest stars. Then, late on June 25, his daughter Jenifer went riding with three teenage friends near San Marcos, Texas. Shortly before midnight, their car entered a sharp turn at excessive speed, skidded sideways and overturned into a ditch. Jenifer, thirteen, was partially thrown from the vehicle and died at the scene. The other occupants survived. Alcohol was not considered a factor. Strait had been away working when it happened. The touring stopped, but not for long. According to a later Country Music Hall of Fame profile, he returned to the stage roughly three weeks after Jenifer’s death, carrying on through a schedule that had already been relentless before his family’s life changed overnight. What changed more permanently was his relationship with the public. For several months he stopped speaking to the press altogether. When interviews resumed, reporters were told that questions about Jenifer and the accident were off limits. The man whose career was becoming increasingly visible began guarding his private life with unusual intensity—a boundary that would remain part of George Strait’s public image for decades. That October, the industry placed him back under its brightest lights. Strait won CMA Male Vocalist of the Year for the second consecutive year. This time, he accepted the award in Jenifer’s memory. The family also created the Jenifer Strait Memorial Foundation, directing support toward children’s charities. Nearly four decades later, the foundation was still active, helping organizations that serve children’s emotional, educational and medical needs. George Strait’s career did not slow after 1986; commercially, it became even larger. But something else had quietly disappeared that summer. The increasingly famous singer would continue giving audiences records, concerts and awards for decades, while keeping one room of his life firmly behind a closed door. Jenifer’s name remained outside that door—not in interviews, but in the foundation that continued helping other children.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THREE WEEKS AFTER BURYING HIS 13-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, GEORGE…

Country Music

BY 1995, COUNTRY RADIO HAD MOSTLY STOPPED CALLING EMMYLOU HARRIS. SO INSTEAD OF TRYING TO SOUND YOUNGER, SHE HIRED THE PRODUCER BEHIND U2 AND BOB DYLAN — AND MADE ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT RECORDS OF HER CAREER. Emmylou Harris was 48, deeply respected and increasingly absent from mainstream country radio. Her 1993 album Cowgirl’s Prayer had failed to produce a Top 40 country single, and Harris understood what was happening. Years later, she described it plainly: she was no longer being invited to the party. Rather than chase whatever Nashville programmers wanted next, Elektra gave her unusual freedom to choose her own direction. Her answer was Daniel Lanois. Lanois was hardly the obvious Nashville choice. He had built atmospheric records with U2, Peter Gabriel and Bob Dylan, and Harris had become fascinated with both his solo album Acadie and Dylan’s Oh Mercy. She did not know exactly what kind of record they would make. That uncertainty was part of the appeal. They began building Wrecking Ball around texture rather than conventional country polish. The sessions moved through New Orleans, Nashville and San Francisco. Reverb hung around Harris’ voice. Percussion became heavier. Electric guitars drifted in and out of the arrangements. U2 drummer Larry Mullen Jr. played on the record, while Neil Young, Steve Earle, Lucinda Williams and others entered the project from different corners of American roots music. Harris even recorded Jimi Hendrix’s “May This Be Love” alongside songs by Dylan, Young and Gillian Welch. For listeners who knew her from “Together Again,” “Blue Kentucky Girl” or the Hot Band, the sound could feel almost disorienting. But the roots had not disappeared. Country, folk, gospel and bluegrass were still underneath the record; Lanois had simply changed the air around them. That distinction mattered. Wrecking Ball was not Harris abandoning country so much as demonstrating how far its emotional language could travel once the usual studio rules were removed. The album won the 1996 Grammy for Best Contemporary Folk Album and became a major artistic turning point for Harris. More importantly, its mixture of country tradition, singer-songwriter material and experimental production arrived just as the modern Americana movement was beginning to take shape. Three decades later, the Recording Academy selected Wrecking Ball for the Grammy Hall of Fame. By then, the record had acquired a significance no radio programmer could have measured in 1995. Harris had been pushed toward the edge of mainstream country. From there, she helped show an entire generation of roots musicians how much territory existed beyond it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” COUNTRY RADIO HAD MOSTLY STOPPED CALLING EMMYLOU HARRIS.…

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BY 1991, MARK O’CONNOR HAD PLAYED ON SO MANY NASHVILLE RECORDS THAT HIS FIDDLE WAS EVERYWHERE — EVEN WHEN HIS NAME WASN’T. SO HE MADE AN ALBUM THAT TURNED THE SESSION PLAYERS THEMSELVES INTO THE MAIN EVENT. Country music was entering one of its biggest commercial eras. Garth Brooks was exploding, Vince Gill was breaking through, and a new generation of singers was filling radio. But behind many of those records sat another cast of musicians whose names rarely reached the audience. O’Connor knew that world from the inside. By his twenties, he had become one of Nashville’s most in-demand players, moving between fiddle, guitar and mandolin sessions while working beside musicians such as Jerry Douglas, Brent Mason, Paul Franklin, Eddie Bayers, Matt Rollings and Roy Huskey Jr. They were the people producers called when a record needed a particular feel, a certain lick, or a part that had to be right before the clock ran out. In 1991, O’Connor decided those players deserved more than another line of small-print credits. He gathered more than fifty Nashville musicians for The New Nashville Cats, deliberately building the album around the instrumental side of the recording scene. Bluegrass sat beside western swing, country beside jazz and rockabilly. On “Restless,” even Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs and Steve Wariner stepped in — not to dominate the record, but to become part of the larger musical community O’Connor was documenting. The title carried its own piece of history. “The Nashville Cats” had already become shorthand for the city’s frighteningly good studio players after the Lovin’ Spoonful celebrated them in the 1960s. O’Connor’s version was effectively saying: another generation had arrived, and these were the hands now shaping the records America was hearing. The industry noticed. At the 1991 CMA Awards, O’Connor was named Musician of the Year, while Mark O’Connor & The New Nashville Cats won Vocal Event of the Year. The album later earned the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance, and “Restless” won Best Country Collaboration with Vocals. Those trophies mattered for a reason larger than one fiddler. Country music history is usually remembered through voices: the singer, the song, the star standing beneath the spotlight. The New Nashville Cats preserved something easier to lose — the sound of the room behind them. And for once, the musicians who normally disappeared when the singer’s name went on the cover had an album with enough room for people to learn theirs.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BY 1991, MARK O’CONNOR’S FIDDLE WAS ALL OVER…

Country Music

THEY WERE SINGING No. 1 HITS WHILE LAWYERS WERE BURNING THROUGH THE MONEY THEY EARNED ON THE ROAD. THE TROUBLE WASN’T A BAD RECORD OR A BROKEN BAND — IT WAS THE NAME PRINTED ACROSS THE FRONT OF THE DRUM KIT. Shenandoah had entered the 1990s exactly where a country band wanted to be. “Next to You, Next to Me” spent three weeks at No. 1, Extra Mile went gold, and the Academy of Country Music named them Vocal Group of the Year. Behind the stage lights, however, another clock had started running. The irony was that Shenandoah had never really been their first choice. Drummer Mike McGuire later said the musicians had wanted the name Diamond Rio. Their production company pushed them toward Shenandoah instead — and, according to McGuire, failed to run the trademark search that might have shown other bands were already using it. Then the letters from lawyers began arriving. Groups in several states claimed rights to the same name. One dispute was settled, then others followed. At one point, Marty Raybon recalled, Shenandoah had 11 attorneys on retainer. Every additional show helped pay legal bills, so the band worked harder while spending more time away from home simply to keep fighting for the right to remain Shenandoah. By 1991, the fight had consumed more than $2 million in settlements and legal costs. The band filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Their relationship with Columbia eventually ended, even though they ultimately kept the name. For many bands, that would have been the closing paragraph. Shenandoah signed with RCA instead. “Rock My Baby” reached No. 2 in 1992. The following year, Under the Kudzu produced another No. 1 with “If Bubba Can Dance (I Can Too).” Then came “Somewhere in the Vicinity of the Heart” with Alison Krauss, earning Shenandoah its first Grammy. And somewhere inside that comeback sat one final Nashville irony. The name Diamond Rio — the one Shenandoah had wanted before anyone had heard of them — eventually became the name of another country band entirely. By then, Shenandoah had spent millions making sure the name they never originally wanted was still theirs.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” SHENANDOAH WERE SINGING No. 1 HITS WHILE LAWYERS…

Country Music

BILL MONROE HANDED HIS MANDOLIN TO A SIX-YEAR-OLD RICKY SKAGGS AND PUT HIM ONSTAGE. DECADES LATER, THAT BOY HELPED BRING BLUEGRASS BACK INTO MAINSTREAM COUNTRY. It happened in Martha, Kentucky, in the early 1960s. Skaggs had been carrying a mandolin almost as long as he could remember; his father, Hobert, had bought him one when he was five and taught him the old mountain music that filled their home. When Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys came through town, Hobert took Ricky to the show. Somewhere in the crowd, people began telling Monroe about the little boy who could play. Monroe called him up. The instrument hanging from the six-year-old’s shoulders was enormous against his small frame, but Skaggs played “Ruby, Are You Mad at Your Man?” beside the man widely regarded as the father of bluegrass. Years later, Skaggs still remembered Monroe’s gesture as one of the moments that set the direction of his life. By seven, another door had opened. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs heard him play and brought him onto their television program. By his teens, Skaggs was working with Keith Whitley in Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys, learning the music not from records but night after night beside the people who had built it. Then Nashville pulled him somewhere unexpected. Emmylou Harris brought Skaggs into her Hot Band in 1977, putting his fiddle and mandolin inside a country-rock world far removed from the mountain stages of his childhood. A few years later, when Skaggs launched his solo country career, he carried that older sound with him rather than sanding it away. It should have been a difficult fit for early-1980s radio. Instead, “Crying My Heart Out Over You” reached No. 1 in 1982. “Heartbroke,” “Highway 40 Blues” and a string of other chart-toppers followed, while the Country Music Association named him Male Vocalist of the Year in 1982 and Entertainer of the Year in 1985. By then, the little mandolin player from eastern Kentucky had become one of the artists helping turn mainstream country back toward fiddles, harmony singing and bluegrass precision. Bill Monroe lived long enough to see that happen. And when Monroe died in 1996, one of the men chosen to serve as an honorary pallbearer was Ricky Skaggs — the same boy Monroe had once called out of a Kentucky audience and trusted, for a few minutes, with his mandolin.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BILL MONROE HANDED HIS MANDOLIN TO A SIX-YEAR-OLD…

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ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1975, DAN FOGELBERG WALKED INTO A PEORIA CONVENIENCE STORE TO BUY WHIPPING CREAM. STANDING INSIDE WAS THE GIRL HE HAD LOVED IN HIGH SCHOOL — NOW MARRIED TO SOMEONE ELSE. FIVE YEARS LATER, SHE HEARD THEIR PRIVATE REUNION PLAYING ON THE RADIO. Fogelberg was home in Peoria, Illinois, visiting his family for Christmas. He was 24, his career was beginning to move, but he was not yet the soft-rock star he would become. That night his family needed whipping cream for Irish coffee, so Dan went to a nearby convenience store. Jill Anderson had gone out for eggnog. She and Fogelberg had dated at Woodruff High School before their lives separated: he headed west to pursue music; she eventually married and moved to Chicago. Neither had planned to see the other that night. They decided to talk. With nowhere convenient to go on Christmas Eve, they bought a six-pack and sat in Jill’s car for roughly two hours, catching up on the lives they had built without each other. Then they said goodbye and drove back to their families. Fogelberg kept the night. Five years later, he turned it into “Same Old Lang Syne.” He changed a few details for the song — Jill’s eyes were actually green, for example — but the encounter, the beer and the conversation were real. Even the final change in the weather was not invented: Fogelberg later said the snow really did turn to rain as he drove home. The single was released in 1980 and eventually reached No. 9 on the Billboard Hot 100. Jill discovered what Dan had done in perhaps the strangest way possible. She was driving to work when a new song came over the radio. The voice sounded familiar. Then came the convenience store, the old lovers and the conversation in the car. She realized she was listening to herself. But Jill said nothing publicly. Fogelberg had never identified her, and she respected that privacy. Only after his death from prostate cancer in December 2007 did she finally reveal that she was the woman behind the song. Then Peoria added one last chapter that neither of them could have imagined during those two hours in the car. In 2008, the city gave Abington Street — running past their old high school and toward the intersection where the convenience store stood — the honorary name Fogelberg Parkway. A chance Christmas errand had lasted only one evening. The city eventually put the songwriter’s name on the road leading back to where it happened.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” ON CHRISTMAS EVE 1975, DAN FOGELBERG WENT OUT…

Country Music

MARTINA McBRIDE WENT ON TOUR WITH GARTH BROOKS SELLING T-SHIRTS. A FEW YEARS LATER, SHE WAS WALKING ONSTAGE TO OPEN HIS SHOWS. Martina McBride moved to Nashville with her husband John in January 1990, just as country music was entering one of its biggest commercial eras. John found work as a sound engineer and, in 1991, became production manager for Garth Brooks. Martina was still trying to build a singing career, but she also wanted to spend more time with her husband, so she joined the tour in a very different role. She sold T-shirts. While Brooks was filling arenas, Martina worked the merchandise table and kept trying to get her own voice heard in Nashville. She recorded a five-song demo and began approaching labels, but RCA had strict rules against accepting unsolicited material. Martina found a way around them. She put the cassette inside a bright purple package and wrote “REQUESTED MATERIAL” across the front in large letters, even though nobody at RCA had requested it. The package made it through. RCA listened to the tape and signed Martina McBride in 1991. Her debut album, The Time Has Come, arrived in May 1992. It leaned heavily toward traditional country and earned some critical praise, but commercially it struggled and failed to give Martina the breakthrough she needed. Still, the record deal had already changed her place on Garth Brooks’ tour. By the summer of 1992, Martina was no longer working behind the merchandise table. She was opening shows for Brooks, including his sold-out appearance at the Forum in Los Angeles that July. The jump was enormous. Brooks was playing some of the biggest rooms in country music, while Martina was being asked to walk out in front of those crowds before she had a major hit of her own. She later described the experience as “sink or swim.” It forced her to learn quickly how to command an arena and trust herself onstage. The first album still did not take off. Her second one did. With The Way That I Am in 1993, Martina stopped second-guessing herself as much. “My Baby Loves Me” became a major hit, “Life No. 9” followed, and “Independence Day” helped establish the kind of strong, message-driven material that would become central to her career. By 1994, she was touring with Brooks again, this time with hit records behind her and European dates ahead. Garth Brooks gave Martina McBride access to enormous audiences before country radio had fully decided what to do with her. But the first real door had opened earlier, back in Nashville, when a five-song cassette arrived at RCA inside a purple package carrying two words that were technically untrue. “REQUESTED MATERIAL.” Sometimes the difference between an unheard demo and a record contract was simply getting someone to open the package.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MARTINA McBRIDE WENT ON TOUR WITH GARTH BROOKS…

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THE MONKEES PASSED ON “DIFFERENT DRUM.” WHEN THE STONE PONEYS RECORDED IT, LINDA RONSTADT WAS THE ONLY MEMBER OF THE GROUP ALLOWED TO PLAY ON THE HIT — AND THE SONG THAT SAVED THEIR CAREER ALSO HELPED PULL THE BAND APART. By 1967, Linda Ronstadt had already left Arizona for Los Angeles and formed the Stone Poneys with Bobby Kimmel and Kenny Edwards. Their first Capitol album had failed commercially, leaving the trio without the breakthrough they had expected. Then they found a song written by Michael Nesmith. “Different Drum” had been written before Nesmith became famous with the Monkees, and he later tried to bring it into that group’s orbit, only to have the material rejected by the people controlling much of the Monkees’ recording decisions. The song eventually reached the Stone Poneys, who heard the potential immediately. But the recording session changed more than the arrangement. The Stone Poneys had imagined the song as a relatively simple acoustic performance. Producer Nick Venet instead brought in outside session musicians, added strings and harpsichord, and built a more polished folk-pop arrangement around Ronstadt’s voice. Ronstadt was the only Stone Poneys member who actually performed on the released recording. Even Ronstadt was uneasy with the result. She later remembered feeling unprepared for the new arrangement and dissatisfied with aspects of her own vocal, yet listeners heard something else entirely. Released in 1967, “Different Drum” reached No. 13 on the Billboard Hot 100, giving Ronstadt her first national hit. The single was credited to the Stone Poneys but prominently identified her, and Capitol increasingly began treating Ronstadt as the act’s obvious focal point. That success created a problem the first album never had. The hit opened doors for Ronstadt while widening the distance inside the trio. The label wanted more of the voice that had sold the record, Ronstadt’s musical interests were moving beyond Bobby Kimmel’s material, and the Stone Poneys gradually became less a three-person identity than a vehicle built around their singer. By the end of 1968, the group was finished. Ronstadt stayed with Capitol and moved into a solo career that would eventually make her one of the dominant American singers of the 1970s. The striking part is that her first real hit did not arrive because a band finally found its perfect collective sound. It arrived when the studio temporarily removed the band from its own record — and discovered that the woman standing at the microphone could carry the song by herself.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE MONKEES PASSED ON “DIFFERENT DRUM.” THE STONE…

Country Music

WADE HAYES WAS 42, FIT AND STILL TOURING WHEN DOCTORS FOUND STAGE IV COLON CANCER THAT HAD ALREADY SPREAD DEEPLY INTO HIS LIVER. DURING CHEMOTHERAPY, HE STARTED WRITING A SONG AROUND THE QUESTION HE WAS AFRAID TO ASK: “IS IT ALREADY TIME?” Years earlier, Hayes had arrived on country radio almost effortlessly. His 1994 debut single, “Old Enough to Know Better,” went to No. 1, followed by a run of Top 10 records that made his baritone familiar across 1990s country. By 2011, that commercial peak was behind him, but Hayes was still recording and performing. For several years he had also been ignoring minor bleeding and fatigue. He was young, lifting weights heavily and had no known family history of colon cancer, so cancer seemed an unlikely explanation. Then one October night, the pain became impossible to dismiss. Hayes still flew to Houston the next morning and played his scheduled show. Back in Nashville, a colonoscopy found a large tumor. Further tests delivered the worse news: the cancer had spread extensively into his liver. Kix Brooks heard about the diagnosis through a mutual friend and helped get Hayes into Vanderbilt. The situation soon became urgent. On December 8, surgeons removed more than 20 inches of his large intestine, roughly 60–75 percent of his liver and part of his diaphragm. Chemotherapy followed. That was when Hayes began writing “Is It Already Time?” Much of it came during chemotherapy and walks with his dog Jack. The title was not poetic invention. Hayes had been reading survival statistics and found himself genuinely wondering whether, at 42, he had already reached the end of his life. Then, almost exactly a year after the first battle, doctors found cancer again — this time in his lymph nodes. More chemotherapy. Another operation. Hayes survived that one too. After his second treatment, an oncologist looked at his results and gave him a simple instruction: go live your life. Hayes carried those words away and turned them into another song, eventually making Go Live Your Life the title of his 2015 album. That left two songs documenting two very different Wade Hayeses. He has since said he no longer wants to write from the place that produced “Is It Already Time?” The experience changed what he wanted his songs to give people: less fear, more hope. And Jack — the dog beside him on those walks while the first song was taking shape — eventually received a song of his own. Hayes called it “Who Saved Who?”

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” WADE HAYES WAS 42, FIT, AND STILL TOURING…

Country Music

BEFORE DIAMOND RIO HAD A RECORD DEAL, THEY WERE PLAYING FOR TOURISTS AT OPRYLAND. THEN THEIR FIRST SINGLE WENT TO No. 1 — SOMETHING NO COUNTRY GROUP HAD EVER DONE BEFORE. Diamond Rio did not begin as six musicians arriving in Nashville with a finished plan. Its roots ran through the Tennessee River Boys, a band that performed at the former Opryland USA theme park. Marty Roe, Jimmy Olander and Dan Truman eventually left that group to build something of their own in 1986. Drummer Brian Prout and mandolinist Gene Johnson joined the following year, and bassist Dana Williams completed what became the classic six-man lineup in 1989. That same year, the group adopted the name Diamond Rio. The chemistry was unusually important. Their sound depended not only on Roe’s lead vocal but on tight harmonies and musicians who could play with the precision of a studio band. Unlike many country acts built around one star and changing road musicians, Diamond Rio’s identity came from the six men functioning as a unit. Arista Nashville signed them in 1990. Then came the first test. Their debut single, “Meet in the Middle,” was released in 1991. It told a simple story about two young people meeting halfway beneath an old Georgia pine, but radio reacted far beyond anything expected from a brand-new group. The song climbed all the way to No. 1. In doing so, Diamond Rio became the first country group in history to send its debut single to the top of the chart. It was not a one-record accident. “Mirror, Mirror” and “Mama Don’t Forget to Pray for Me” followed, while their self-titled debut album helped establish Diamond Rio as part of the early-’90s “young country” movement. The combination of polished harmonies, bluegrass-rooted instrumentation and contemporary country production gave them a sound that was recognizable almost immediately. Seven years after that first single, another Nashville institution made the trajectory even more significant. On April 18, 1998, Diamond Rio was inducted into the Grand Ole Opry. They were the first group since The Whites in 1984 to receive Opry membership. For a band whose roots had grown only a short distance away inside an amusement park built around country music, that distinction carried a different weight. The early Opryland years had taught them how to play together. “Meet in the Middle” proved that country radio was ready for them. But the Opry invitation meant something else entirely: Diamond Rio was no longer simply part of Nashville’s new generation. By 1998, one of Nashville’s oldest institutions had decided they belonged in its permanent family.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BEFORE DIAMOND RIO HAD A RECORD DEAL, THEY…

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