Uncategorized

ON OCTOBER 4, 2022, A 90-YEAR-OLD WOMAN DIED IN HER SLEEP AT HER RANCH IN HURRICANE MILLS, TENNESSEE — A TOWN SHE HAD BOUGHT OUTRIGHT, MILL AND ALL. Her husband had been dead twenty-six years. She had buried two of her six children. Her baby sister was Crystal Gayle. Loretta Webb was born in a hollow in eastern Kentucky in 1932, second of eight, daughter of a coal miner. She married Oliver Lynn while she was still a teenager and followed him to Washington State, where he cut timber. He bought her a guitar for about seventeen dollars. She taught herself on it, in a house already full of children. She was nearly thirty before she had a record. In 1960 she and Oliver drove it around the country themselves, station to station, out of the trunk of a car. Then radio started saying no. No to the one about a man coming home drunk. No to the one about a woman offering to fight another woman in the street. No to the one about divorcées. Fourteen of the songs she wrote got banned somewhere. In 1972 the Country Music Association named her Entertainer of the Year — the first woman ever to get it. Then in 1975, sixty stations refused to play “The Pill.” It stalled at number five in a career where number one was routine, and it still became the highest-charting pop record she ever made. A preacher in Kentucky devoted a sermon to condemning it. Much of his congregation walked out and went and bought it. The most dangerous song of her life was about a woman deciding when to have children. She’d had four of hers before she was twenty. The one song nobody ever tried to stop was the one that was nothing but her address.

No Comments

Loretta Lynn and the House She Turned Into a Home On October 4, 2022, Loretta Lynn died in her sleep…

Uncategorized

“IF ANYONE HAS LIVED THE AMERICAN DREAM, IT’S ME.” He and his wife Denise came into Nashville behind an old U-Haul trailer. That is his own account of it, and he has never dressed it up in the retelling — a rented trailer, a town they didn’t know, a boy from Newnan, Georgia who wanted to write songs. Sixty million records later, and a Hall of Fame plaque in 2017, the trailer is still the first thing he mentions. In 2021 he said publicly what he’d known for a decade: he had Charcot-Marie-Tooth, a nerve disease with no cure, and he had gotten it from his daddy. He said he knew he was stumbling around up there. Then he booked a two-year tour and ran it to the end, playing his last road show in Milwaukee in May 2025. On June 27, 2026, fifty thousand people filled Nissan Stadium for the last one. Lightning moved in before he could start and the stands had to be cleared; he went on an hour late and opened with “Gone Country.” Partway through he sat down on a stool and said the thing about the American dream. George Strait came out for two songs. He took his final bow at almost midnight, delayed by weather, in the city he had once driven into behind a rented trailer.

No Comments

The American Dream, One More Time in Nashville He did not arrive in Nashville with a grand entrance. He and…

Uncategorized

“YOU DON’T HAVE TO JUST PICK ONE. YOU CAN BE BOTH.” She calls herself the Yeehaw Meemaw. One part yeehaw because she is twenty-seven and sings country music; one part meemaw because of the crochet, the bread baking, the gardening, the homemaking — things she describes, cheerfully, as out of style for some folks. Her fans use it now. It is the only nickname she has. In Nashville, nicknames come down from above. The town decides you are The Voice, or The Possum, or the first of something, and you carry it whether you asked for it or not. She got out ahead of that. At twenty-seven she named herself a grandmother, which is the one thing nobody was ever going to offer her. She had reason to expect the naming to go badly. She was seventeen and still in high school when she finished second on The Voice in 2015, on Blake Shelton’s team, with three of her performances charting on their own. Then nothing — no deal, no machine. What she wrote didn’t sound like what Kelsea Ballerini and Maren Morris were doing. She has said that girls in pop could be girly, but girls in country had to be one of the guys, and that she is tenderhearted and wanted to lean into that instead. She did it alone for ten years. Sony signed her in 2025, her first record deal, at twenty-six, and an ACM nomination followed. She is on the road right now, opening for Thomas Rhett — still the smaller name on the poster. Nashville will get around to deciding what she is. She has not left it much room.

No Comments

You Don’t Have to Just Pick One. You Can Be Both. She calls herself the Yeehaw Meemaw, and the nickname…

Uncategorized

IN 1956 HE MADE A RECORD HE WOULDN’T PUT HIS NAME ON. HE SPENT THE REST OF HIS LIFE CALLING IT JUNK. On New Year’s Eve 1955, a bill at the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium carried five names: Elvis Presley, Johnny Horton, George Jones, David Houston, Johnny Cash. Admission was sixty cents. Jones was twenty-four and had exactly one hit to his name. He stood on that stage and watched what was happening to the audience. In March he went into a studio and cut two rockabilly sides. Starday released them that May under a name that wasn’t his — Thumper Jones — because he would not risk his standing as a country singer on them. He never pretended otherwise afterward. Country was losing its young listeners, so they decided to try one. He was ashamed while he was doing it, he said, because he was so country, so he used a different name. “When you’re starving to death, you’ll try anything.” The record went nowhere. He disowned it for the rest of his life — in his 1995 memoir he said he’d used copies as Frisbees. Here is the part he never conceded. Writing in Texas Monthly, Nick Tosches argued that the rockabilly in him had shaped his voice as much as Roy Acuff or Hank Williams did, and pointed to a side Jones cut in 1954 — months before Elvis had a record out — that was already most of the way there. He didn’t follow it. He got there first, then spent the rest of his life denying he’d been.

No Comments

The Record George Jones Wouldn’t Claim In the middle of 1956, George Jones made a decision that says a lot…

Uncategorized

HE COULDN’T STAND. SO HE SAT DOWN, OPENED WITH A SONG CALLED “NEVER SAY DIE,” AND MADE JOKES ABOUT HIS OWN LEGS. By the middle of 1999, Waylon Jennings and the people closest to him understood his health was not going to improve. He mostly kept it to himself and kept booking work. What he booked was the biggest band he’d ever fronted. He pulled back old hands from the Waylors — Richie Albright, his drummer and right arm for decades. He added Robby Turner on steel and Reggie Young, one of the great session guitarists, and then he hired a horn section, which he had never done. Thirteen players. He called them the Waymore Blues Band and said it was the band he’d always wanted. They played the Ryman on January 5 and 6, 2000. Nobody billed it as a farewell. He was too ill to stand, so he performed sitting down. He opened with “Never Say Die,” a song he’d written himself in the last stretch of his life. Jessi Colter came out for four numbers. John Anderson, Travis Tritt, Montgomery Gentry each took one. And somewhere in a room full of people who could see exactly what shape he was in, he told the women in the audience not to worry about him — because once you’ve had a cripple, you never go back. He died in February 2002.

No Comments

Waylon Jennings, Sitting Down at the Ryman and Still Owning the Room By the middle of 1999, the people around…

Uncategorized

WHEN CHARLEY PRIDE DIED ON A SATURDAY IN DECEMBER 2020, THERE WAS NO ARENA FILLED WITH FANS. DAYS LATER, HIS FAMILY AND CLOSEST FRIENDS SAID GOODBYE BEHIND CLOSED DOORS IN DALLAS. Pride died on December 12 from complications of COVID-19. He was 86 and had been hospitalized since late November. Only one month earlier, he had stood beneath the lights at the CMA Awards, accepted the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award, and sung “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’” with Jimmie Allen. It became his final public performance. That week, his family held a private wake and memorial service in Dallas. There was no long public procession and no crowded theater where thousands could pass his casket. A larger celebration of life was planned for a later date, when people could gather safely. Instead of flowers, the family asked fans to support scholarships, a community center, local food banks, or charities close to their own hearts. For a man whose voice had reached millions, the final room was deliberately small. But beyond its doors, an entire country music world was saying goodbye.

No Comments

Charley Pride’s Quiet Farewell in Dallas When Charley Pride died on Saturday, December 12, 2020, the news carried a particular…

Uncategorized

FROM A WOMAN WHO OWNED HORSES IN TENNESSEE… TO A LEGEND HONORED AT THE KENNEDY CENTER In Hurricane Mills, Loretta Lynn walked through open fields, not red carpets. Her mornings smelled like hay, not perfume. She owned horses because they kept her close to the life she came from — quiet, honest, and unafraid of dirt on her boots. The world called her a star. The horses only knew her footsteps. Then one night, she left the ranch and entered the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Chandeliers replaced barn lights. Applause replaced hoofbeats. She wore a gown instead of denim. But the voice inside her was the same girl from coal country. The Kennedy Center Honors is not about fame. It is about meaning. And Loretta’s songs meant survival, womanhood, and truth. From horses that carried her body… to songs that carried a nation. She didn’t leave the country behind. She brought it with her.

No Comments

From a Woman Who Owned Horses in Tennessee to a Legend Honored at the Kennedy Center Loretta Lynn never needed…

Uncategorized

ON THE MORNING OF FEBRUARY 13, 2002, A 64-YEAR-OLD MAN DID NOT WAKE UP IN A HOUSE IN CHANDLER, ARIZONA. Jessi had been his wife for thirty-three years. His left foot had been gone since December. Four months earlier, country music had built him a room in Nashville with his name on the wall, and he had not gone to see it. Waylon Jennings was born outside Littlefield, Texas, in 1937, on somebody else’s farm. He had his own show on the local radio station at twelve. He quit school at sixteen. In 1958 Buddy Holly produced his first single and he was, at twenty-one, a bass player working for another man. He spent the next fourteen years being told what to do. RCA signed him in 1965 and Nashville handed him his songs, his session players, his tempos, his arrangements — the whole apparatus that decided in advance what a country record was permitted to sound like. He shared an apartment in that town with Johnny Cash and neither one of them slept much. Then in 1972 he renegotiated his contract and asked for a thing no country singer had been given: the right to choose. His own band. His own songs. His own room to cut them in. He got it, and the next ten years came out of that one sentence. Honky Tonk Heroes. Wanted! The Outlaws, the first country album ever to sell a million. Luckenbach. The song with Willie about the cowboys. He also became, improbably, the voice narrating a Friday night television show about a car, for seven seasons, to children. In October 2001 they inducted him into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He was the one living man on the list who would not turn up for it. In December they took the foot. In February he stayed in Arizona for good.

No Comments

Waylon Jennings: The Morning the Outlaw Fell Quiet On the morning of February 13, 2002, Waylon Jennings did not wake…

Uncategorized

ON APRIL 26, 2013, AN 81-YEAR-OLD MAN DIED IN A NASHVILLE HOSPITAL WITH A SOLD-OUT ARENA SHOW STILL ON THE BOOKS, SEVEN MONTHS OUT. Nancy had been his wife for thirty years. Before her there were three other wives and a decade he could not fully account for. George Jones was born in Saratoga, Texas, in 1931, the youngest of eight. As a boy he sang on the streets of Beaumont for whatever people dropped. Then the drinking. He missed so many dates that promoters started calling him No Show Jones. He took the insult, cut it as a record, and sold it back to them. A wife hid the car keys once and he drove a riding lawnmower to the liquor store. By 1979 he was bankrupt. In 1980 a producer handed him a song about a man who stops loving a woman only by dying. Jones thought it was too morbid to sell. It has sat at the top of every list of the greatest country records ever made since. He announced a sixty-date farewell tour in 2012 and told Nancy privately that he would not live to finish it. He asked her to make the last night a tribute instead. She did. On November 22, 2013, a hundred-odd singers filled Bridgestone Arena for a concert billed Playin’ Possum! The Final No Show.

No Comments

George Jones and the Night Country Music Refused to Let Go On April 26, 2013, George Jones died in a…

Uncategorized

“THEY BANNED HER FOR SINGING THINGS NOBODY WOULD SAY OUT LOUD. THEN CAME THE ONE THING SHE COULDN’T SING AT ALL.” Loretta Lynn wrote about pills. About cheating husbands. About being poor in Butcher Holler. She put out “The Pill” in 1975 and let country radio ban it, and she never took a word of it back. There was one thing she never wrote a line about. Her second child and first son was born in December 1949, named after her favorite comedian: Jack Benny Lynn. He wanted nothing to do with the music business. He was a blacksmith and a horse trainer, and he stayed behind at Hurricane Mills to run the ranch while the rest of the family lived out of tour buses. On July 22, 1984, he tried to ford the Duck River on horseback — something he’d done many times, on land he’d worked for years. The coroner’s finding was short and terrible: he fell, struck his head, lost consciousness, drowned. He was 34. The horse was found near the bank, unhurt. The search party that recovered him the next morning included his father. His mother was two hundred miles away, in intensive care in Mount Vernon, Illinois, admitted for exhaustion in the middle of a tour. For days, nobody told her. Doolittle came and said it to her face, in the room. She went back to work. Kept touring. Kept the ranch open. She buried Doolittle in 1996. She buried her oldest, Betty Sue, in 2013. She buried Jack’s boy Jeffrey in 2018. She died in October 2022, at ninety. And in all those years, the woman who turned her entire life into three-minute songs never turned that morning at the river into one. Her family said it plainly: it was one of the few things that hurt too much to write about. But she talked about him. Every July, she talked about him. Her blond-headed, blue-eyed baby. Quiet and tender. Just what she’d asked for. The songs were where she said everything. This she just said out loud, one more year, and then one more.

No Comments

Loretta Lynn, the Songwriter Who Said What Others Wouldn’t Loretta Lynn built a career by singing the kinds of truths…

Uncategorized

You Missed

The Bird on Jerry Reed’s 1982 Hit Sang Like Willie Nelson and George Jones. The Voice Belonged to a Georgia Pest Control Man.

Brad Paisley’s Free Christmas Toy Store Started With 400 Kids. This Year It’s Ready for More Than 1,200.

Nine Days Before Jerry Reed Recorded With Elvis Presley, He Made a Hit About a Star Nobody Recognized

At 52, Waylon Jennings Went Back to Finish High School, and His 10-Year-Old Son Helped Him With the Math