Country Music

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Country Music

CHET ATKINS HEARD A TEENAGER PLAYING ON THE RADIO, BROUGHT HIM TO NASHVILLE, AND PUT HIM IN HIS ROAD BAND. THAT TEENAGER WENT ON TO SCORE 14 NO. 1 HITS, WIN MULTIPLE GRAMMYS, AND BECOME ONE OF COUNTRY MUSIC’S MOST RESPECTED GUITARISTS. Steve Wariner grew up in Noblesville, Indiana, in a family where music was part of everyday life. He learned several instruments as a child, but the guitar quickly became the one he never put down. While still in high school, he was performing on local radio and television, building a reputation as a teenager who could play far beyond his years. One broadcast reached an unexpected listener. Chet Atkins. Already one of country music’s most respected guitarists and the executive guiding RCA Nashville, Atkins invited the 17-year-old to audition. By the end of the meeting, Wariner had been offered a job in Nashville. The move changed everything. Instead of chasing club gigs for years, Wariner found himself playing guitar in Atkins’ road band, watching recording sessions from inside RCA Studio B, and learning how Nashville worked from one of the architects of the city’s sound. Atkins became more than an employer. He became Wariner’s mentor. As the years passed, Atkins encouraged him to sing as well as play, believing the quiet Indiana guitarist could build a career of his own instead of remaining behind other artists. RCA eventually signed Wariner as a recording artist. Success arrived gradually before accelerating in the 1980s. Songs including “All Roads Lead to You,” “Some Fools Never Learn,” “Life’s Highway,” “Small Town Girl,” “The Weekend,” and “Lynda” helped establish him as one of country music’s most dependable hitmakers. During that run, he earned 14 No. 1 singles and became one of Nashville’s most respected guitarists as well as a major recording star. The relationship with Atkins never disappeared. The two men later recorded together, and Wariner remained one of the few musicians Chet openly praised for carrying forward his style of tasteful, melodic guitar playing. When Atkins died in 2001, Wariner did more than remember his mentor in interviews. He continued performing the music they had shared, speaking often about the lessons learned inside RCA Studio B and the patience Atkins had shown a teenager who arrived in Nashville with talent but little experience. Years later, Wariner won Grammy Awards, entered the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, and built a career that stretched far beyond the opportunity first offered to him. But one instrument never left his side. Among the many guitars he has owned, the most meaningful have always been the ones that carried a reminder of the man who first looked beyond a teenage radio performance and decided it was worth bringing to Nashville.

Country Music

CLAY WALKER WAS 26, HAD ALREADY SCORED SIX NO. 1 COUNTRY HITS, AND HAD JUST BECOME A FATHER. THEN DOCTORS TOLD HIM HE COULD BE IN A WHEELCHAIR WITHIN YEARS By 1996, Clay Walker’s career was moving almost too quickly to slow down. The Texas singer had broken through with “What’s It to You” and “Live Until I Die,” then followed them with records including “Dreaming with My Eyes Open,” “If I Could Make a Living,” and “This Woman and This Man.” His first albums had gone platinum, his touring schedule was full, and his first daughter had recently been born. Then his vision split in two. Walker began experiencing numbness, facial spasms, weakness, and trouble controlling one side of his body. He initially feared a tumor. MRI scans revealed lesions on his brain, brain stem, and spinal cord. In April 1996, he was diagnosed with relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis. He was 26. The prognosis was brutal. Walker later recalled being told that the number and location of the lesions could leave him in a wheelchair within a few years and might sharply shorten his life. At the time, he had only recently finished recording his fourth album. He began treatment, changed his diet, and kept working. The album Rumor Has It was released in 1997. Its title track became another No. 1 country hit, while “Watch This” and “Then What?” also reached the upper part of the chart. Most listeners heard the records without knowing what had been happening away from the stage. Walker continued touring through a disease known for its unpredictability. Some days brought weakness or problems with balance. Others allowed him to perform with the same energy audiences expected. Instead of building his public identity around the diagnosis, he tried to keep the illness from deciding when his career would end. In 2003, he founded Band Against MS to raise money for research and help other people living with the disease. Through benefit concerts, golf events, auctions, and other programs, the organization raised millions of dollars for MS-related causes. The diagnosis never disappeared. It remained behind every tour, recording session, medical scan, and physical setback. But the timeline doctors had described in 1996 did not arrive as predicted. Nearly three decades after the MRI revealed lesions across his central nervous system, Walker was still recording and walking onto country stages. The foundation created from that hospital diagnosis had also begun helping families whose names would never appear on a concert poster.

Country Music

CHRIS LEDOUX HAD ALREADY WON A WORLD RODEO TITLE AND RELEASED 22 ALBUMS ON HIS OWN. NASHVILLE DID NOT NOTICE UNTIL GARTH BROOKS PUT HIS NAME INSIDE A HIT SONG. He began competing as a teenager and eventually became one of the best bareback riders in the country. In 1976, after years of injuries, entry fees, overnight drives, and eight-second rides, LeDoux won the world bareback championship at the National Finals Rodeo. Music had started as a way to document that life. LeDoux wrote about the men, horses, highway miles, broken bones, cheap motel rooms, and small rodeo arenas he knew firsthand. He was not trying to create a cowboy image. He was singing about the job he went back to after the show. Nashville showed little interest. So LeDoux and his father created their own record company. He recorded the songs independently, carried the albums to rodeos, and built an audience one cowboy at a time. By 1989, he had released 22 independent albums, and the small family operation had generated millions of dollars without major-label support or regular country-radio play. Then an unknown Oklahoma singer recorded a song called “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old).” Near the end of the first verse, Garth Brooks sang about a worn-out rodeo man whose tape of Chris LeDoux had replaced the younger music he once played. The name lasted only seconds. But when the song became Brooks’ first country hit in 1989, listeners began asking who Chris LeDoux was. Nashville suddenly discovered that the cowboy mentioned in the lyric already had a large catalog and a loyal audience waiting beyond Music Row. Liberty Records signed him and brought his earlier recordings into its catalog. His first major-label album, Western Underground, arrived in 1991. A year later, LeDoux and Brooks recorded “Whatcha Gonna Do with a Cowboy,” which reached the country Top 10. LeDoux never fully reshaped himself for Nashville. His concerts kept the speed and danger of rodeo in them. He ran across stages, rode mechanical bulls, and sang about cowboys without treating them as costumes. The radio success remained modest compared with Brooks’, but his touring audience grew because the people in those rooms believed the man singing the songs. In 2000, LeDoux underwent a liver transplant after developing a serious liver disease. He returned to performing, but was later diagnosed with cancer of the bile duct. He died in Casper, Wyoming, on March 9, 2005, at 56. Four months later, the ProRodeo Hall of Fame inducted him not as a country singer borrowing the West, but as the world champion bareback rider he had been before Nashville learned his name.

Country Music

FARON YOUNG HAD SUNG “LIVE FAST, LOVE HARD, DIE YOUNG.” THEN ONE NIGHT, HE FIRED A GUN INTO HIS OWN KITCHEN CEILING AND HIS MARRIAGE BEGAN TO COME APART. Hilda Macon had been there before the legend got old. Faron met her while he was stationed at Fort McPherson in the early 1950s. She was the daughter of an Army master sergeant and came from country-music blood herself, with Uncle Dave Macon in the family line. They married in 1954, after Faron left the Army. Then came the children, the road, the records, and the years when Faron Young was one of the loudest men in Nashville. He was the “Young Sheriff.” He had No. 1 records. “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young.” “Hello Walls.” “It’s Four in the Morning.” He helped build Music City News, backed writers, made stars laugh, made enemies mad, and filled rooms with the kind of personality that did not know how to stay small. But the house got the other part of him. By the 1980s, the drinking had become harder to manage. The hits were not coming the same way. On December 4, 1984, inside their Harbor Island home, Faron fired a pistol into the kitchen ceiling. Hilda wanted him to get help for his drinking. He refused. The marriage split after that. They separated, sold the house, and bought separate homes. At the divorce trial, when Faron was asked if he feared hurting someone by shooting holes into the ceiling, he answered, “Not whatsoever.” In 1987, after more than three decades together, the marriage was over. The public had known Faron Young as the man who could make honky-tonk sound cocky, bright, and dangerous. Hilda had heard the gun go off in the kitchen.