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Country Music

FARON YOUNG SPENT TWO DECADES AS ONE OF NASHVILLE’S BIGGEST STARS. BY THE MID-1990s, YOUNGER ACTS WERE REDISCOVERING HIS SONGS—WHILE YOUNG HIMSELF FELT THE INDUSTRY HAD ALREADY LEFT HIM BEHIND. In the 1950s and early 1960s, Faron Young rarely had to wonder whether Nashville wanted him. He came out of the Louisiana Hayride, signed with Capitol, and built a run of hard-country hits including “Goin’ Steady,” “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young,” “Sweet Dreams” and “Hello Walls.” He was loud, funny, competitive and impossible to ignore—the kind of star whose personality could fill a room before he sang a note. The hits kept coming after he moved to Mercury. “Wine Me Up” returned him to the upper reaches of the charts, and in 1971 “It’s Four in the Morning” became his final No. 1. But by the middle of that decade, the records were slowing. His last major country hit came in 1974, and later label changes never restored the momentum he had once taken for granted. Young did not disappear from Nashville. He had invested in Music Row property, founded Music City News, and had long helped younger talent. Willie Nelson, Don Gibson and Bill Anderson benefited from his willingness to record their songs; Roger Miller and Johnny Paycheck spent time in his band, while Kris Kristofferson once earned rent money doing labor for him. But being respected was not the same as still being wanted on country radio. After a brief period recording for the independent Step One label beginning in 1988, Young gradually withdrew from public view. At the same time, his health deteriorated. He suffered from emphysema and underwent prostate surgery. Friends later said he had become deeply depressed. There was an especially bitter irony in what happened next. By the mid-1990s, younger traditional-country musicians such as BR5-49 were exposing a new generation to the kind of music Young had made decades earlier. His sound was beginning to look valuable again. Young apparently did not experience it that way. The Country Music Hall of Fame notes that he felt the industry had turned its back on him. On December 9, 1996, he shot himself at his Nashville home. He died in the hospital the following day at 64. Police found a note, while friends pointed to his declining health and depression as part of the circumstances surrounding his death. Four years later, Faron Young was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. By then, the songs had outlasted the period when Nashville stopped calling. And the younger musicians digging those records back out were proving something Young did not live long enough to fully see: his career had gone quiet, but his influence had not.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” FARON YOUNG SPENT TWO DECADES AS ONE OF…

Country Music

GLEN CAMPBELL HEARD “RHINESTONE COWBOY” ON THE RADIO AND DECIDED HE HAD TO RECORD IT. WHEN HE WALKED INTO CAPITOL RECORDS TO ASK ABOUT THE SONG, AN EXECUTIVE WAS ALREADY WAITING TO PLAY HIM THE VERY SAME RECORD. By 1974, Campbell knew what it felt like when the lights moved somewhere else. He had already lived through “Wichita Lineman,” “Galveston,” television stardom and years as one of America’s most recognizable crossover singers. But the huge records had slowed, and his personal life was becoming increasingly unsettled. “Rhinestone Cowboy” reached him at exactly the kind of moment its story described: a veteran still trying to find the lights again. The song belonged to Larry Weiss. Weiss had written and recorded it himself for his 1974 album Black and Blue Suite. His version failed to become a significant U.S. hit. Campbell heard it on Los Angeles radio, remembered the title even though he could not remember the singer’s name, and became so taken with it that he learned the song while touring Australia. Then came the coincidence. Back in Los Angeles, Campbell walked into Capitol executive Al Coury’s office intending to pursue the song. Coury told him he had something Campbell needed to hear. He put on “Rhinestone Cowboy.” There was little left to debate. Campbell recorded it in early 1975 with producers Dennis Lambert and Brian Potter. Before Capitol had even fully launched the single, Campbell performed it on a telethon. Los Angeles programmer Paul Drew saw the performance, obtained an acetate and began playing it across the RKO radio chain, helping force the label into an accelerated release. The result was bigger than a country comeback. “Rhinestone Cowboy” reached No. 1 on both the Billboard Hot 100 and the country chart, giving Campbell his first solo Hot 100 No. 1 after more than a decade of hits. For one week in September 1975, it topped both charts simultaneously — something no song had done since Jimmy Dean’s “Big Bad John” in 1961. But Campbell was not the only career altered by the record. Larry Weiss had become so discouraged after his own album failed that he was considering leaving music and going into the furniture business. Then word arrived that Glen Campbell was cutting his song. So “Rhinestone Cowboy” ended up carrying two men at once. One was a star trying to find his way back toward the center of American radio. The other was a songwriter getting ready to walk away from music entirely. The same three-minute song gave both of them a reason not to disappear.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GLEN CAMPBELL HEARD “RHINESTONE COWBOY” ON THE RADIO…

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FLEETWOOD MAC CUT STEVIE NICKS’ BREAKUP SONG FROM RUMOURS — THEN STUCK IT ON THE B-SIDE OF LINDSEY BUCKINGHAM’S BREAKUP SONG ABOUT HER. TWENTY YEARS LATER, SHE SANG IT TO HIS FACE ONSTAGE. The timing made the rejection sting even more. Nicks and Buckingham had been together for years before joining Fleetwood Mac, surviving lean days as a duo before the band suddenly made them famous. By the time Rumours was being made in 1976, their relationship was coming apart while they were still expected to write, record and perform beside one another. Nicks turned that fracture into “Silver Springs.” The title came from seeing a sign for Silver Spring, Maryland, while traveling. She liked the name and began imagining it as a place that represented what her relationship with Buckingham might have become. She expected the song to be on Rumours. It wasn’t. The album was already pushing the limits of vinyl running time, and “Silver Springs” was judged too long. The band substituted the shorter Nicks song “I Don’t Want to Know.” Producer Ken Caillat later confirmed that the physical limitations of the LP were part of the reason it was left behind. For Nicks, it felt like losing one of the songs that mattered most to her. Then came the placement that made the whole episode almost cruelly symmetrical. “Silver Springs” was released as the B-side of “Go Your Own Way” — Buckingham’s own public account of their breakup. His song became one of Fleetwood Mac’s defining hits. Hers remained the record people had to turn over to hear. For years, that might have been the end of it. It wasn’t. When Fleetwood Mac reunited for The Dance in 1997, “Silver Springs” returned to the set. During the televised performance, Nicks eventually turned toward Buckingham and delivered the song directly at him while he played guitar and sang harmony. Twenty years had passed since she wrote it. The performance gave the discarded song a second life, and “Silver Springs” later received a Grammy nomination for Best Pop Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocals. There was one more quiet consequence. Nicks had assigned the song’s royalties to her mother, Barbara, who called it her “rainy day song.” So the track that missed Rumours, disappeared into a B-side and spent two decades outside the album eventually became something else entirely: a source of income for her mother and, much later, one of the performances most closely associated with Stevie Nicks herself.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” FLEETWOOD MAC CUT STEVIE NICKS’ BREAKUP SONG FROM…

Country Music

BRAD PAISLEY WAS EIGHT WHEN HIS GRANDFATHER GAVE HIM HIS FIRST GUITAR. BY 13, HE WAS A REGULAR ON JAMBOREE USA. A WEEK AFTER COLLEGE GRADUATION, NASHVILLE WAS ALREADY PAYING HIM TO WRITE SONGS. Brad Paisley grew up in Glen Dale, West Virginia, watching his maternal grandfather Warren Jarvis play the country guitar music he loved. On Christmas Day in 1980, when Brad was eight, Jarvis gave him a Sears Danelectro Silvertone guitar. With lessons and encouragement, Paisley progressed quickly. By ten he was performing, and at 13 he wrote his first song and began appearing regularly on WWVA’s Jamboree USA in Wheeling. That was more than a childhood novelty. Paisley would spend roughly eight years performing through the Jamboree world, getting comfortable in front of real country audiences while still in school. As a teenager, he also opened shows for established artists including Roy Clark, Jack Greene and Little Jimmy Dickens, along with other major country names who passed through the region. After high school and two years at West Liberty State College, Paisley received a fully funded ASCAP scholarship to Belmont University in Nashville, where he studied music business. Belmont put him inside the machinery he had been watching from a distance. During an internship, people around Paisley discovered that he was writing songs himself. Once they heard the material, they began helping him make the right introductions. Paisley later said that by graduation, it felt as though much of the path had already been laid out. The timing proved it. Just one week after graduating from Belmont, Paisley signed a songwriting deal with EMI Music Publishing. Before he had a record contract of his own, other singers began cutting his songs. David Kersh recorded “Another You,” which became a Top 5 country hit and gave the newly graduated Paisley his first significant royalties as a professional songwriter. Cuts by David Ball and Tracy Byrd followed before Arista Nashville eventually signed Paisley as a recording artist. His debut album, Who Needs Pictures, arrived in 1999 and produced the No. 1 hits “He Didn’t Have to Be” and “We Danced.” But Nashville’s first serious vote of confidence had come several years earlier. Before the record deal, the videos or the No. 1 singles, somebody in Music Row had already decided that Brad Paisley’s songs were worth buying. And only a week earlier, he had still been a college student.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BRAD PAISLEY WAS EIGHT WHEN HIS GRANDFATHER GAVE…

Country Music

SAMMY KERSHAW HAD BEEN PLAYING MUSIC SINCE HE WAS 12. BY 1988, DRUGS, ALCOHOL AND YEARS OF CLUB WORK HAD WORN HIM DOWN SO BADLY THAT HE QUIT MUSIC AND TOOK A FULL-TIME JOB REMODELING WALMART STORES. THREE YEARS LATER, HIS FIRST MAJOR-LABEL SINGLE REACHED THE COUNTRY TOP 3. Raised in Kaplan, Louisiana, he began performing as a child and was opening shows for established country acts while still a teenager. But nearly two decades of bars, road work and unstable income took their toll. Kershaw later described years marked by failed marriages, drugs and alcohol, while supporting himself through jobs ranging from carpentry and welding to radio work. By 1988, he was finished. Trying to save his marriage and get his life under control, Kershaw quit drinking, quit drugs — and quit the music business with them. He took a full-time job supervising store remodeling for Walmart. In another interview, he remembered simply being tired of the business and deciding that chasing the dream was no longer practical. For a while, country music became the thing he used to do. Then songwriter Barry Jackson persuaded him to make another demo. That tape helped bring Kershaw to Mercury Records, which heard in his voice the traditional Louisiana-country sound that immediately drew comparisons to George Jones. Mercury signed him, and in 1991 released “Cadillac Style.” The single climbed to No. 3 on Billboard’s country chart. His debut album, Don’t Go Near the Water, followed and eventually went platinum. Two years later, Kershaw scored his first No. 1 with “She Don’t Know She’s Beautiful.” By then, the man who had once decided music could no longer support a real life had become one of the recognizable traditional voices of the 1990s country boom. The strangest part was how little time separated those two lives. In the late 1980s, Sammy Kershaw was remodeling stores because he believed the sensible part of his music career was over. By the middle of the next decade, he had gone from that Walmart job to platinum records — without changing the George Jones-inspired country voice that Nashville had ignored for years.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” SAMMY KERSHAW QUIT MUSIC IN 1988 AND TOOK…

Country Music

HARLAN HOWARD HEARD SARA EVANS SING ONE OLD COUNTRY SONG AND HELPED GET HER SIGNED TO RCA. THEN SHE MADE THE COUNTRY RECORD SHE WANTED — AND COUNTRY RADIO BARELY PLAYED IT. Sara Evans was still trying to find her place in Nashville when she was hired to sing a demo of “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail,” the Buck Owens hit Harlan Howard had co-written decades earlier. Howard was there. Evans remembered walking out of the vocal booth and finding the legendary songwriter stunned by how country she sounded. He became one of her strongest supporters and helped put her in front of RCA Nashville president Joe Galante. Evans later recalled that Galante signed her the day she auditioned. At 24, she decided not to soften the thing that had gotten everyone’s attention. She chose Pete Anderson, best known for producing Dwight Yoakam, and went to California to make Three Chords and the Truth. The album leaned hard into traditional country: steel guitar, fiddle, old-school arrangements, even songs associated with Buck Owens, Patsy Cline and Bill Anderson. Evans later described the idea as essentially making herself a female counterpart to Yoakam. The critics heard it. The Washington Post praised her vocal power and versatility. Radio & Records called Evans “the real deal.” Harlan Howard remained firmly in her corner. Country radio was another story. “True Lies” reached only No. 59. The title track did better, but stopped at No. 44. “Shame About That” peaked at No. 48. Not one of the album’s three singles reached the country Top 40. The album itself peaked at No. 56 on Billboard’s country albums chart. Evans was frustrated. Years later, she remembered visiting roughly 190 radio stations and repeatedly hearing variations of the same problem: programmers liked her, but they were nervous about playing something that sounded so traditionally country. RCA could have stopped there. It didn’t. For her second album, No Place That Far, the production moved toward a more contemporary sound without removing Evans’ country identity. Billboard noted the contrast at the time: one of Nashville’s most critically acclaimed newcomers had received almost no meaningful radio acceptance, but the second album appeared ready to change that. It did. The title track, a duet with Vince Gill, became Sara Evans’ first No. 1 country single in 1999. A year later, Born to Fly pushed her career much further, eventually becoming one of the defining albums of her career. Sara Evans had entered Nashville because Harlan Howard heard something unusually country in her voice. Her first album proved he was right. Her second proved that being right and getting played on the radio were two different things.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” HARLAN HOWARD HEARD SARA EVANS SING ONE BUCK…

Country Music

BARBARA MANDRELL SURVIVED A HEAD-ON CRASH THAT KILLED THE OTHER DRIVER. HER BONES HEALED — BUT THE HEAD INJURY, LOST TOURING MONTHS AND PUBLIC BACKLASH TOOK MUCH LONGER. On September 11, 1984, Barbara Mandrell was 35 and still near the height of her career. She had already won the CMA Entertainer of the Year award twice, hosted a hit network television show with her sisters and built a reputation as one of country music’s most polished live performers. Even that week, one of her singles was sitting near the top of the country chart. That evening, Mandrell was driving near her Hendersonville, Tennessee, home with her two oldest children, Matthew and Jaime. A car driven by 19-year-old Mark White crossed the center line and struck Mandrell’s Jaguar head-on. White was killed. Matthew and Jaime escaped with comparatively minor injuries. Barbara did not. Her right femur was broken. Her ankle was fractured. She suffered knee injuries, cuts and a significant concussion. Doctors later inserted a metal rod into her thigh to stabilize the femur. The head injury brought severe headaches and neurological effects that Mandrell would describe as particularly difficult for both her and her family. For someone whose stage shows depended on movement, dancing and playing multiple instruments, recovery meant more than waiting for bones to heal. Concerts disappeared from the calendar. Doctors initially warned that she could be offstage for six to eight months. Mandrell later admitted that there were moments when she wondered whether she would ever sing professionally again. But the career did not end on that highway. She returned to the recording studio in 1985. More hit records followed, including “There’s No Love in Tennessee,” “Fast Lanes and Country Roads” and “Angel in Your Arms.” By 1986 she was performing live again, eventually resuming touring, television work and acting. The crash also followed her in a less expected way. A legal action connected to insurance claims produced harsh publicity because it formally named the dead driver’s family. Mandrell’s attorney and White’s father both explained publicly that the action was a procedural step aimed at insurance coverage, not an attempt to take money from the family, but the misunderstanding damaged her image with some fans. So the accident left two kinds of rehabilitation. One was physical: learning what her injured leg and head would allow her to do again. The other was public. Years later, Mandrell could point to the records, concerts and television work that came afterward. The Jaguar was gone, the touring calendar had been interrupted, and one family had lost a son — but September 11, 1984 did not become the final date on Barbara Mandrell’s stage career.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BARBARA MANDRELL SURVIVED A HEAD-ON CRASH THAT KILLED…

Country Music

BUCK OWENS HADN’T HAD A No. 1 COUNTRY HIT IN MORE THAN FIFTEEN YEARS. THEN DWIGHT YOAKAM ASKED HIM TO SING ONE OLD BAKERSFIELD SONG — AND PUT HIM BACK ON TOP. By the mid-1980s, Buck Owens no longer needed another hit to prove anything. He had already built one of the defining catalogs in country music, taken the Bakersfield sound national, recorded with the Buckaroos, and spent years on television through Hee Haw. But his recording career had faded badly during the 1970s. By the time a younger Kentucky-born singer named Dwight Yoakam started making noise in Los Angeles, Buck was largely outside the center of country radio. Yoakam was not. His 1986 debut Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. helped bring hard-edged honky-tonk back into mainstream country. And the sound he was reviving owed a clear debt to Owens. Yoakam spoke openly about Buck’s influence and helped introduce Bakersfield country to listeners who had not been around for its original run. Then Yoakam reached backward. He wanted to record “Streets of Bakersfield,” a song Buck had already cut years earlier. This time, Yoakam asked Buck to sing it with him. Owens agreed. The pairing worked because neither man tried to make the record sound like a museum piece. Buck’s voice sat beside Dwight’s as if the fifteen-plus years between their chart peaks were not there. Released in 1988, “Streets of Bakersfield” went all the way to No. 1. It gave Dwight another major hit. For Buck Owens, it was something else: his first country chart-topper since the early 1970s, and a return to the very radio audience that had moved on from him years before. The success pulled Buck back into recording for a time. New albums followed, including Hot Dog! and Act Naturally. But the bigger consequence had already happened. A younger artist had not simply covered the Bakersfield sound. He had gone back to one of the men who built it, put him beside him at the microphone, and carried him back to No. 1.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BUCK OWENS HAD NOT HAD A No. 1…

Country Music

TERRI CLARK MOVED FROM CANADA TO NASHVILLE AT 18 AND STARTED SINGING FOR TIPS AT TOOTSIE’S. SHE COULD SEE THE COUNTRY-MUSIC BUSINESS AROUND HER — BUT IT TOOK NEARLY EIGHT YEARS BEFORE ANY LABEL LET HER THROUGH THE DOOR. Terri Clark left Medicine Hat, Alberta, for Nashville as a teenager with little more than a guitar and a very clear idea of what she wanted. Soon after arriving, she walked into Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, the famous honky-tonk across the alley from the Ryman Auditorium, asked if she could sing and landed work performing for tips. It was her first professional Nashville gig. The location made the situation almost cruelly appropriate. Tootsie’s sat in the middle of country-music mythology, close enough to the Ryman and Music Row to make Nashville success feel physically nearby. Clark later remembered playing those clubs hoping that somebody from the industry might hear her voice drifting out and offer her a record deal. Nobody did. For years, she kept singing while taking whatever work helped pay the bills. She waited tables, worked as a secretary, painted houses, worked retail and tended bar. One contemporary profile put the wait at roughly eight years between her arrival in Nashville and the record deal she had come there to find. There were days when even Tootsie’s barely paid. Clark has recalled taking a city bus downtown with her guitar to work the daytime shift and occasionally walking out with only a few dollars in tips because almost nobody had come through the bar. Still, the years were doing something a demo tape could not. She was learning how to hold a room. A producer who heard Clark at Tootsie’s eventually passed a tape to manager Woody Bowles. She continued developing for several more years, and in 1994 Mercury Nashville finally signed her. Then the pace changed almost immediately. Her debut single, “Better Things to Do,” arrived in 1995 and climbed to No. 3 on the U.S. country chart. “When Boy Meets Girl” and “If I Were You” followed into the Top 10, while her self-titled debut album eventually went platinum. Clark had written or co-written almost the entire record herself. The following year alone, she spent more than 260 days on the road. That number says more about the turnaround than almost anything else. For most of her twenties, Terri Clark had been working Nashville bars while waiting for somebody in the industry to notice. Once they finally did, the problem was no longer finding somewhere to sing. It was finding enough days in the year to play all the places that suddenly wanted her.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TERRI CLARK MOVED FROM CANADA TO NASHVILLE AT…

Country Music

WHEN THE FIRST EDITION BROKE UP, KENNY ROGERS SAID IT FELT LIKE HIS LIFE HAD LOST ITS FOOTING. HE WALKED ONSTAGE ALONE, STARTED OVER — AND WITHIN TWO YEARS “LUCILLE” TURNED HIM INTO A SOLO SUPERSTAR. By the mid-1970s, Kenny Rogers was hardly an unknown. The First Edition had already given him major pop and country hits, including “Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)” and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.” For years, Rogers had been surrounded by the same musicians, the same road routine and the security of belonging to a group. Then the band ended. The First Edition broke apart in the mid-1970s as its members moved toward separate careers. Rogers later admitted the split hit him harder than outsiders might have expected. “When the First Edition broke up,” he recalled, “it was like my life had just lost all the footing.” For the first time, there was nobody behind him to absorb part of the pressure. Rogers signed with United Artists and began making records under his own name. The first releases produced modest results, but nothing yet suggested that the 38-year-old singer was about to become bigger than he had ever been with a band. Then he heard “Lucille.” Written by Roger Bowling and Hal Bynum, the song told a simple story: a woman leaves her husband in a bar, and the man she leaves with later hears the husband’s side of what happened. Rogers recorded it in 1976. Released the following year, “Lucille” went to No. 1 country and No. 5 pop, won Rogers a Grammy and was named CMA Single of the Year. More importantly, it solved the identity problem. Rogers was no longer the singer from a psychedelic pop group trying to continue on his own. “Lucille” revealed exactly what would carry the next phase of his career: a rough, conversational voice and story songs about ordinary people making painful choices. “The Gambler,” “She Believes in Me” and “Coward of the County” followed soon afterward. Between 1977 and 1987, Rogers accumulated twenty No. 1 country hits. The First Edition had taught Kenny Rogers how to stand in front of an audience. Its breakup forced him to find out what would happen when he had to stand there by himself.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” WHEN THE FIRST EDITION BROKE UP, KENNY ROGERS…

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