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K.D. LANG TOOK HER HALL OF FAME AWARD FROM ANNE MURRAY IN 2013 AND TOLD HER, “I STILL HAVE A CRUSH ON YOU.” It happened at the Juno Awards in Regina, April 21, 2013, on national television. The woman handing lang the honour was one of the idols she’d grown up on out in Consort, Alberta. Murray said of her that night, “I loved her sense of fun, her spunk, her gumption, and she could sing.” Six years earlier they had already sung together. For Duets: Friends & Legends, Murray re-recorded seventeen of her own songs with her favourite female singers, and the one she cut with lang was “A Love Song.” Emmylou Harris, Shania Twain, Olivia Newton-John and Celine Dion were all on that record. Reviewers still singled out how cleanly lang’s voice sat against Murray’s. Eighteen years after that album, on October 27, 2025, the Grand Ole Opry House filled up for a tribute night called The Music of My Life. Murray was 80, retired from the stage since 2008, and she stayed down in the audience with more than a dozen of her family. One after another the singers took her hits. Then k.d. lang walked out and sang “A Love Song” — the one the two of them had recorded together — back to the woman who had been her idol since Alberta.

k.d. lang, Anne Murray, and a Full-Circle Moment That Still Resonates

On April 21, 2013, at the Juno Awards in Regina, k.d. lang stood on a national stage and received the Canadian Music Hall of Fame honor from one of her earliest idols, Anne Murray. The moment felt personal, almost tender, because it was. k.d. lang had grown up in Consort, Alberta, listening to Anne Murray long before she ever imagined she would share a stage with her. When k.d. lang joked, “I still have a crush on you,” it landed with the warmth of a fan meeting a hero, even after years of success.

Anne Murray responded with the kind of admiration that made the scene even more memorable. She spoke about loving k.d. lang’s “sense of fun,” “spunk,” and “gumption,” adding that she could sing. It was simple praise, but it carried the weight of one generation of Canadian music recognizing another.

A Collaboration That Came Before the Spotlight

The 2013 tribute was not the beginning of their connection. Years earlier, Anne Murray and k.d. lang had already recorded together for Duets: Friends & Legends, a project in which Anne Murray revisited seventeen songs with some of her favorite female singers. Their duet, “A Love Song,” became one of the album’s most quietly admired tracks. Critics often singled out how naturally k.d. lang’s voice blended with Anne Murray’s, as if the two singers had been meant to meet there all along.

The album’s guest list was impressive, with names like Emmylou Harris, Shania Twain, Olivia Newton-John, and Celine Dion joining Anne Murray on different songs. But the k.d. lang pairing remained special because it linked admiration, history, and craft in one performance. It was not just a duet. It was a conversation across decades of Canadian music.

Why the Moment Still Feels Human

What made the 2013 scene stand out was its honesty. Award shows can feel polished and distant, but this one felt grounded in real emotion. k.d. lang was not pretending to be above her influences. Anne Murray was not just presenting an honor; she was recognizing someone who had clearly carried her music into the next generation. That kind of respect is rare, and it is part of why the moment still gets remembered.

Years later, the story came back into focus when Anne Murray was celebrated again at a Nashville tribute at the Grand Ole Opry House on October 27, 2025. The event, titled The Music of My Life: An All-Star Tribute to Anne Murray, included k.d. lang among the performers, bringing the connection full circle once more. The singer who once received an honor from Anne Murray returned to sing “A Love Song” back to her in front of a new crowd. It was a fitting reminder that the best musical relationships do not fade; they deepen.

In the end, the story of k.d. lang and Anne Murray is not just about one award or one duet. It is about admiration that became friendship, and friendship that became part of Canadian music history. Some moments in entertainment are loud. This one was quieter, sweeter, and somehow more lasting.

 

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NOBODY BECOMES A LEGEND BY STANDING AT THE BOTTOM OF A HARMONY. EXCEPT HAROLD REID. Don Reid sang the words. Jimmy Fortune reached the high notes. Phil Balsley held the middle. But Harold Reid held the floor beneath all of them. He was the bass of The Statler Brothers — not always the first voice people hummed on the way home, but the one they felt before they understood why the song worked. Take Harold out of a Statler record and the song still plays. It just does not land the same way. Something underneath is gone. That was his power. He was also funny enough to own a room before the first chorus ever arrived. In a group known for faith, family, and harmony, Harold gave the Statlers something just as important: warmth. He made the crowd laugh, then dropped his voice so low it felt like the whole song had found its foundation. Near the end, he told Jimmy Fortune he had been a blessed man and was ready whenever the Lord called him. When Harold passed in 2020, Jimmy wrote the plainest truth: “Our hearts are broken tonight.” Some singers want you to look at them. Harold Reid made you feel what was missing when he was gone.

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FOR YEARS, THE QUEEN OF COUNTRY MUSIC PARKED HER TOUR BUS OUTSIDE A TENNESSEE SCHOOL SO SECOND GRADERS COULD WALK THROUGH IT. Every year, when the second grade class at Goodpasture Christian School in Madison, Tennessee reached its unit on country music, Kitty Wells and her husband Johnnie Wright brought the bus over and let the kids climb around inside it. Then the two of them sang a song or two before heading home. Later, when the couple opened their museum in Madison, they let that same class walk through it free. It went back to the fall of 1969, when their grandson John Sturdivant Jr. started at the school. Eight grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and ten nieces and nephews followed him in. By the school’s own count, more than forty years passed without a single one in which somebody from that family wasn’t enrolled. They played benefit concerts in the high school gym. When Goodpasture wanted a band room, the donation that got the fundraising started came from them. Johnnie died in September 2011, after 74 years of marriage. Kitty died at her Madison home the following July, at 92. The woman who became the first female singer to reach No. 1 on the country chart could have had her name attached to any memorial in Nashville. Her family asked for no flowers, and sent mourners to Goodpasture instead, in the name of the Kitty Wells/Johnnie Wright Scholarship Fund — tuition money for kids down the road from the house where she died.

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THEY PUT IT ON T-SHIRTS. “NO SHOW JONES.” NASHVILLE TURNED A MAN DROWNING IN ADDICTION INTO A PUNCHLINE, AND SOLD IT BACK TO HIM. The story was too good not to laugh at. His wife hid the car keys so he couldn’t drive drunk. So George Jones climbed onto a riding lawnmower — top speed maybe five miles an hour — and rode it eight miles into town to the liquor store. People still tell it like a joke. And sure, it’s absurd. He missed shows. He cost promoters money. He left fans standing in parking lots. He earned the nickname and he knew it. None of that is invented. But listen to what the joke is actually describing. A man so gripped by drink that no locked door, no hidden key, no ounce of dignity could stand between him and the bottle. He said it himself, plainer than any biographer could: he drank because he was miserable, and he was miserable because he drank. That’s not a punchline. That’s a diagnosis. Here’s what the smirk always leaves out: the voice under the wreckage. Merle Haggard — no soft touch — called George Jones the greatest country singer who ever lived. Not “for a drunk.” The greatest, period. And the man got the last laugh. He got sober, lived another thirty years, and put that lawnmower in his own music videos — climbing back on it, grinning, telling the joke on his own terms. The thing they mocked him with, he took and made his. They called him No Show Jones. He outlived the joke and kept the voice. Which one do you think history remembers?

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NOBODY BECOMES A LEGEND BY STANDING AT THE BOTTOM OF A HARMONY. EXCEPT HAROLD REID. Don Reid sang the words. Jimmy Fortune reached the high notes. Phil Balsley held the middle. But Harold Reid held the floor beneath all of them. He was the bass of The Statler Brothers — not always the first voice people hummed on the way home, but the one they felt before they understood why the song worked. Take Harold out of a Statler record and the song still plays. It just does not land the same way. Something underneath is gone. That was his power. He was also funny enough to own a room before the first chorus ever arrived. In a group known for faith, family, and harmony, Harold gave the Statlers something just as important: warmth. He made the crowd laugh, then dropped his voice so low it felt like the whole song had found its foundation. Near the end, he told Jimmy Fortune he had been a blessed man and was ready whenever the Lord called him. When Harold passed in 2020, Jimmy wrote the plainest truth: “Our hearts are broken tonight.” Some singers want you to look at them. Harold Reid made you feel what was missing when he was gone.

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K.D. LANG TOOK HER HALL OF FAME AWARD FROM ANNE MURRAY IN 2013 AND TOLD HER, “I STILL HAVE A CRUSH ON YOU.” It happened at the Juno Awards in Regina, April 21, 2013, on national television. The woman handing lang the honour was one of the idols she’d grown up on out in Consort, Alberta. Murray said of her that night, “I loved her sense of fun, her spunk, her gumption, and she could sing.” Six years earlier they had already sung together. For Duets: Friends & Legends, Murray re-recorded seventeen of her own songs with her favourite female singers, and the one she cut with lang was “A Love Song.” Emmylou Harris, Shania Twain, Olivia Newton-John and Celine Dion were all on that record. Reviewers still singled out how cleanly lang’s voice sat against Murray’s. Eighteen years after that album, on October 27, 2025, the Grand Ole Opry House filled up for a tribute night called The Music of My Life. Murray was 80, retired from the stage since 2008, and she stayed down in the audience with more than a dozen of her family. One after another the singers took her hits. Then k.d. lang walked out and sang “A Love Song” — the one the two of them had recorded together — back to the woman who had been her idol since Alberta.

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FOR YEARS, THE QUEEN OF COUNTRY MUSIC PARKED HER TOUR BUS OUTSIDE A TENNESSEE SCHOOL SO SECOND GRADERS COULD WALK THROUGH IT. Every year, when the second grade class at Goodpasture Christian School in Madison, Tennessee reached its unit on country music, Kitty Wells and her husband Johnnie Wright brought the bus over and let the kids climb around inside it. Then the two of them sang a song or two before heading home. Later, when the couple opened their museum in Madison, they let that same class walk through it free. It went back to the fall of 1969, when their grandson John Sturdivant Jr. started at the school. Eight grandchildren, five great-grandchildren and ten nieces and nephews followed him in. By the school’s own count, more than forty years passed without a single one in which somebody from that family wasn’t enrolled. They played benefit concerts in the high school gym. When Goodpasture wanted a band room, the donation that got the fundraising started came from them. Johnnie died in September 2011, after 74 years of marriage. Kitty died at her Madison home the following July, at 92. The woman who became the first female singer to reach No. 1 on the country chart could have had her name attached to any memorial in Nashville. Her family asked for no flowers, and sent mourners to Goodpasture instead, in the name of the Kitty Wells/Johnnie Wright Scholarship Fund — tuition money for kids down the road from the house where she died.

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THEY PUT IT ON T-SHIRTS. “NO SHOW JONES.” NASHVILLE TURNED A MAN DROWNING IN ADDICTION INTO A PUNCHLINE, AND SOLD IT BACK TO HIM. The story was too good not to laugh at. His wife hid the car keys so he couldn’t drive drunk. So George Jones climbed onto a riding lawnmower — top speed maybe five miles an hour — and rode it eight miles into town to the liquor store. People still tell it like a joke. And sure, it’s absurd. He missed shows. He cost promoters money. He left fans standing in parking lots. He earned the nickname and he knew it. None of that is invented. But listen to what the joke is actually describing. A man so gripped by drink that no locked door, no hidden key, no ounce of dignity could stand between him and the bottle. He said it himself, plainer than any biographer could: he drank because he was miserable, and he was miserable because he drank. That’s not a punchline. That’s a diagnosis. Here’s what the smirk always leaves out: the voice under the wreckage. Merle Haggard — no soft touch — called George Jones the greatest country singer who ever lived. Not “for a drunk.” The greatest, period. And the man got the last laugh. He got sober, lived another thirty years, and put that lawnmower in his own music videos — climbing back on it, grinning, telling the joke on his own terms. The thing they mocked him with, he took and made his. They called him No Show Jones. He outlived the joke and kept the voice. Which one do you think history remembers?