Uncategorized

ONE MONTH BEFORE THE PLANE CRASH, PATSY CLINE RECORDED “FADED LOVE” DURING HER FINAL STUDIO SESSIONS. AFTER HER DEATH, IT BECAME A TOP 10 HIT. On February 4, 1963, Patsy entered Owen Bradley’s Nashville studio and recorded “Faded Love,” an old Bob Wills song about two people slowly drifting apart. Patsy did not know she was beginning the final recording sessions of her life. Over the next four days, she recorded 12 songs, including “Sweet Dreams,” “Always” and “I’ll Sail My Ship Alone.” Then she returned to the road. On March 5, Patsy was flying home from a benefit concert when her plane crashed near Camden, Tennessee. She was 30 years old. “Faded Love” was released after her death and reached No. 7 on Billboard’s country chart. Her voice sounded controlled and clear, but the words now carried a meaning no one had intended. Patsy had recorded a song about love disappearing. Instead, it became another reminder that her own voice never would.

No Comments

The Final Studio Sessions of Patsy Cline and the Quiet Power of “Faded Love” On February 4, 1963, Patsy Cline…

Uncategorized

GEORGE JONES HAD SPENT YEARS LIVING AS IF ALCOHOL AND COCAINE WOULD KILL HIM. NANCY DID NOT JUST HELP HIM GET SOBER. SHE HELPED HIM LIVE LONG ENOUGH FOR THEM TO HAVE 30 YEARS TOGETHER. Nancy Sepulvado met George Jones on a blind date in November 1981. By then, George was already one of country music’s greatest singers. But his private life was collapsing. Drinking, cocaine and missed concerts had earned him the name “No Show Jones.” His money was disappearing. His health was failing. Friends, doctors and family members had tried to help, but George kept returning to the same darkness. Nancy saw something beneath it. They married on March 4, 1983. She did not magically cure him. There were relapses, hospital stays and nights when George was still dangerous to himself. But Nancy stayed involved. She helped straighten out his finances, guarded him from the people feeding his addictions and pushed him back toward the stage. George slowly began rebuilding his life. He showed up for concerts again. He repaired his reputation and gave fans decades of performances they once feared they would never see. Even after a near-fatal alcohol-related crash in 1999, Nancy remained beside him as he finally gave up drinking for good. George later credited many people with trying to save him. But he said the love of one woman finally made the difference. He died on April 26, 2013, at 81. He and Nancy had been married for 30 years and 53 days. Nancy did not simply help George Jones become sober. She helped him live long enough to come home.

No Comments

Nancy Sepulvado and George Jones: The Love Story That Helped Bring Him Home By the time Nancy Sepulvado met George…

Uncategorized

DON WILLIAMS NEVER RAISED HIS VOICE, AND IT STILL TRAVELED FURTHER THAN ALMOST ANY OTHER IN NASHVILLE. He put fifty-six songs on the country chart and sent seventeen of them to number one, with at least one major hit every single year from 1974 through 1991. “Tulsa Time,” “You’re My Best Friend” and “I Believe in You” lived in kitchens and pickup trucks for twenty years running. He avoided industry parties, gave very few interviews, and deliberately cut his own touring back so he could be home on the farm with his family. He once said the word superstar only felt right to him when somebody told him his music had helped them through a hard stretch of life. In February 2010 the Country Music Association voted him into the Hall of Fame, and the medallion ceremony came that October 24. Alison Krauss sang “I’m Just a Country Boy.” Del McCoury and his band took “Lord, I Hope This Day Is Good.” Chris Young sang “I Believe in You.” His sons Tim and Gary were there with their families. Don was not. Bronchitis had settled in that week. He had told sold-out Ryman crowds on Wednesday and Thursday that he was struggling, and on Friday he was taken to a Kentucky hospital, though not admitted. His manager accepted the medallion for him. A room full of singers spent that Sunday night on his catalog, and the one voice that made those songs famous was the only one missing.

No Comments

Don Williams Never Raised His Voice, and It Still Traveled Farther Than Almost Anyone in Nashville Don Williams built a…

Uncategorized

VERN GOSDIN DIDN’T GET A RECORD DEAL UNTIL HE WAS FORTY-ONE. HIS BIGGEST SONG WAS ABOUT A MAN STANDING AT A GRAVE. HE IS UNDER A STONE OF HIS OWN NOW, IN NASHVILLE — NOT IN ALABAMA. Vern Gosdin died on the evening of April 28, 2009, at a Nashville hospital. He was 74. A stroke had hit him three weeks before. He was in hospice by then, but he had put out a box set in December, and he had his tour bus in the shop, being fixed up for a June date at the CMA festival. The world called him The Voice. Tammy Wynette said he was the only singer who could stand next to George Jones. George Strait said Gosdin carried him through his first tour. Woodland, Alabama knew him as one of the Gosdin boys out of a gospel-singing family. He went west with his brothers Rex and Ray in 1961 and sang on the edges of the California country-rock scene. It came to little. He moved to Atlanta. He did not sign a record deal until 1976, at forty-one. His first Top 10 came the year after. The No. 1s came in his fifties. “Chiseled in Stone” was Song of the Year in 1989. In it, an old man tells a young one he hasn’t learned what lonely is yet. They buried him at Mount Olivet in Nashville, with his name chiseled in stone.

No Comments

Vern Gosdin: The Voice That Found Its Place at Last Vern Gosdin did not arrive in country music quickly, and…

Uncategorized

DONNA FARGO HAD HER OWN TELEVISION SHOW AND A CAREER FULL OF COUNTRY HITS. THEN, IN 1978, DOCTORS TOLD HER SHE HAD MULTIPLE SCLEROSIS. The illness attacked the nervous system that allowed her to walk, perform and live independently. At the height of her success, Donna was forced to step away from the road and face a future no doctor could clearly predict. Her husband and manager, Stan Silver, stayed beside her as she received treatment and slowly rebuilt her strength. Donna did not return to the demanding schedule she once knew. But she did return. In 1979, she began performing on a limited basis and released another album. Its biggest single, “Daddy,” reached No. 14 on the country chart. Multiple sclerosis changed the course of Donna Fargo’s career, but it did not end her music. The woman who once sang about being the happiest girl in the whole U.S.A. returned with a quieter victory: she was still standing, still writing and still able to sing.

No Comments

Donna Fargo, the Road, and the Quiet Return Donna Fargo built a career on songs that felt bright, direct, and…

Uncategorized

HIS FINAL “NATIONAL ANTHEM” — A FAREWELL ON THE BASEBALL FIELD In July 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Charley Pride stood on the pitcher’s mound at the Texas Rangers’ brand-new Globe Life Field and sang the National Anthem at the opening game against the Colorado Rockies. It was a 60-year-old dream come true in its most perfect form: the boy from Sledge, Mississippi — who once pitched in the Negro Leagues because Major League Baseball wouldn’t accept Black players — now stood as a co-owner of this very stadium, singing his country’s anthem on an MLB field. That afternoon, there were no 40,000 cheering fans in the stands due to the pandemic. Only silence, and his rich, warm baritone voice echoing through an empty stadium. As if the universe had deliberately cleared the space for him to have his own private moment with the sport he had loved all his life. Those who were there that day swear they felt something in the air — something no one could quite explain until five months later. Five months later, he was gone. “Life can be remarkably generous sometimes — giving you exactly the quiet moment you need to say goodbye to the dream you never stopped loving.”

No Comments

His Final National Anthem: A Farewell on the Baseball Field On July 24, 2020, the Texas Rangers opened their first…

Uncategorized

SCHOOL COUNSELORS TOLD A BLIND YOUNG RONNIE MILSAP THAT CHOOSING MUSIC WOULD MAKE HIM A BURDEN ON THE STATE. THEN RAY CHARLES ASKED HIM TO SIT AT A PIANO — AND CHANGED HIS LIFE WITH ONE SENTENCE. Ronnie had studied classical music for years, but his advisers wanted him to follow a safer path. He had a college scholarship and planned to become a lawyer. Music was the life he wanted, but he feared they might be right. While still a student, Ronnie was taken backstage to meet Ray Charles, the blind musician he admired above everyone else. Ronnie explained his choice: law school or music. Ray asked him to play. Ronnie performed a song he had been writing. When he finished, the room went silent. Then Ray told him there was too much music in his heart to ignore, and that he should follow where his heart was leading him. Ronnie chose music. He eventually placed more than forty songs in the country Top Ten and entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2014. In May 2022, nearly sixty years after that backstage meeting, Ronnie stood inside the same Hall of Fame and formally inducted Ray Charles. The student who had needed permission to follow his dream was now there to honor the man who gave it to him.

No Comments

Ronnie Milsap, Ray Charles, and the Sentence That Changed a Life Long before Ronnie Milsap became a country music star,…

Uncategorized

PATSY CLINE DIED ON HER WAY HOME. THE PLANE CAME DOWN NINETY MILES SHORT OF NASHVILLE. FIVE DAYS LATER THEY CARRIED HER THE OTHER DIRECTION — BACK TO WINCHESTER, VIRGINIA. Patsy Cline was killed on March 5, 1963, when a small plane went down near Camden, Tennessee. She was 30. The world was still catching up to her. “Walkin’ After Midnight.” “I Fall to Pieces.” “Crazy.” Winchester had been listening for nine years. Before Nashville she sang wherever a room would hold her — churches, armories, American Legion halls, beer joints. She was a girl from South Kent Street who quit school at sixteen and worked the counter at Gaunt’s Drugstore. Her family did not bury her in Nashville. On March 10 the town came to a halt. The funeral home closed its doors on a thousand people still standing in the street. The casket stayed locked, a photograph of her on the lid. The hearse ran five miles to Shenandoah Memorial Park, and the road was lined the whole way. At the grave, mourners pressed against the tent and took the flowers to keep. She died on the road to Nashville, the city where she had become Patsy Cline. They buried her five miles from the drugstore counter she had worked at sixteen, in the town that had always known her as Virginia Hensley. Nashville had her for five years. Winchester kept her.

No Comments

Patsy Cline’s Last Journey Home Patsy Cline died on March 5, 1963, in a small plane crash near Camden, Tennessee,…

Uncategorized

IN 1968 A DOCTOR TOLD CHARLEY PRIDE HE’D BE ON MEDICATION FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE. HE SAID NO. IT TOOK HIM TWENTY-ONE YEARS TO SAY YES. He came off a USO tour that year and went into a hospital. He couldn’t sleep. He was seeing things that weren’t there. The diagnosis was manic depression, and the instruction was lifelong. He refused it and went back to work. He was RCA’s biggest seller after Elvis. Fifty-two top-ten records. CMA Entertainer of the Year. Nobody in those crowds knew. The symptoms came back in 1982, and he finally started taking lithium. Then he got a skin rash, decided the pills were the cause, and quit. Another episode hit in 1989. That was the one that ended the argument. He wrote all of it down in his 1994 autobiography — including the part where he admitted he still half wanted to deny it, and couldn’t, because Rozene could tell him exactly what he’d done when he went out of it. He met Rozene in Memphis, back when he was playing ball in the Negro leagues. The last thing he says about it in the book is the plainest: he’d been taking the lithium regularly for years, and the episodes had stopped. Charley Pride died of COVID-19 in December 2020. He was 86.

No Comments

Charley Pride, the Silence Behind the Spotlight In 1968, Charley Pride came off a USO tour and landed in a…

Uncategorized

LYME DISEASE DAMAGED THE NERVES THAT CONTROLLED SHANIA TWAIN’S VOICE. AFTER TWO OPEN-THROAT SURGERIES, SHE COULD SING AGAIN — BUT NEVER WITH THE SAME VOICE. In 2003, during her “Up!” tour, Shania was bitten by a tick and contracted Lyme disease. She suffered dizziness and brief blackouts onstage. Later, her singing voice began to weaken and slip beyond her control. Doctors eventually discovered that the nerves connected to her vocal cords had been damaged. Shania believed she might never sing again. In 2018, she underwent an operation while awake so surgeons could hear her voice as they worked. Gore-Tex supports were placed beside her weakened vocal cords, acting like braces inside her throat. She needed two procedures and years of rehabilitation. The surgery did not give Shania her old voice back. The new one was deeper and rougher. She had to learn how to sing with it from the beginning. Shania did not return because everything had been restored. She returned because losing the voice the world remembered was not enough to stop her from using the one she still had.

No Comments

Shania Twain’s Voice, Lost and Rebuilt There are stories in music that sound almost too dramatic to be true, yet…

Uncategorized

You Missed

Not “Me and Bobby McGee,” Not “Sunday Mornin’ Comin’ Down”: The Song Where Kris Kristofferson Stopped Pretending He’d Live Forever

The Statler Brothers Made America Smile for Decades. Then They Sang About a Mother at the Vietnam Wall

George Jones Walked Off a Knoxville Stage in April 2013 and Told His Wife He Had Just Played His Last Show

In 1994, 100,000 People Crowded Into a Virginia Town of 25,000 Because the Statler Brothers Never Left It