Country Music

CHARLEY PRIDE SANG ON NATIONAL TV AT 86 — IT WAS HIS LAST PERFORMANCE EVER. On November 11, 2020, Charley Pride stood on the CMA stage in Nashville and accepted the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award. Then he sang “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'” one more time. The man with 29 No. 1 hits. The first Black member of the Grand Ole Opry. Still steady. Still smiling. Still that voice. One month later, on December 12, 2020, Charley Pride died at 86 from complications of COVID-19. That night in November was the last time anyone saw him sing. “Kiss an angel good mornin’.” A goodbye nobody knew they were hearing. Did you watch him perform that night? What did you feel?

Charley Pride’s Final Song: A Last Goodbye on National Television On November 11, 2020, Charley Pride walked onto the CMA…

Uncategorized

IN 1961, JIMMY DEAN ENDED “BIG BAD JOHN” WITH A LINE ABOUT ONE HELL OF A MAN. NEARLY FIFTY YEARS LATER, THOSE WORDS FOLLOWED HIM TO HIS OWN GRAVE. “Big Bad John” made Jimmy Dean a star. The song told the story of a giant miner who saved twenty men after a mine collapse, then disappeared beneath the rubble. At the end came the line people never forgot: “At the bottom of this mine lies one hell of a man.” Jimmy lived almost five more decades after that record. He became a television host, businessman, and one of the most recognizable names in country entertainment. When he died on June 13, 2010, at 81, he was buried on his property in Virginia overlooking the James River. His resting place was built in the shape of a piano. And on it were words drawn from the song that had changed his life: “Here Lies One Hell of a Man.” A line Jimmy Dean once wrote for Big John had become the final description of Jimmy Dean himself.

No Comments

How Jimmy Dean’s Biggest Song Became His Final Epitaph In 1961, Jimmy Dean released a song that seemed larger than…

Uncategorized

FORGET THE GRAMMY. FORGET THE HALL OF FAME. GEORGE JONES SAID NOBODY WOULD BUY THE GREATEST COUNTRY SONG EVER RECORDED. In 1980 he was 49, broke, and known around Nashville as No Show Jones. Billy Sherrill handed him a ballad about a man who loved a woman until the day he died. Jones called it too morbid to sell and walked out of the studio. It became his first No. 1 in six years. It won the Grammy. It took CMA Song of the Year twice — 1980 and 1981. Alan Jackson sang it at his funeral. Garth Brooks sang it at the Opry’s 100th and called it the greatest country song ever written. George Jones was wrong about one song in his life. It was the only one that mattered. Play it today. You already know which line breaks you — go find out if it still does.

No Comments

George Jones and the Song He Thought Nobody Would Buy Before George Jones became a legend, he was a man…

Uncategorized

WILLIE NELSON’S VERSION DIED AT #62. GEORGE JONES AND MERLE HAGGARD TOOK THE SAME SONG TO #1. Two men, two guitars, and no reason to hurry. “The Way I Am.” “Yesterday’s Wine.” “I Must Have Done Something Bad.” Merle Haggard and George Jones singing them live, trading lines like they’d done it a thousand times around somebody’s kitchen table. Merle always said George was the finest singer he’d ever heard. But the way he described that voice wasn’t what you’d expect. They met in 1961, at the Blackboard Café in Bakersfield. Merle was onstage. George walked in drunk, kicked the office doors open, and asked who that was singing. Twenty-one years went by before the two of them finally made a record together. “Yesterday’s Wine” wasn’t even theirs. Willie Nelson wrote it in 1971 and the single died at #62. Nobody paid attention. Then George and Merle cut it in 1982, and on October 9 it went to #1 — a song about two old friends running into each other in a bar, sung by two old friends. “The Way I Am” had been Merle’s, #2 back in 1980. “I Must Have Done Something Bad” was Merle’s too, and George liked it enough to record his own version years later. And that description? Merle said George’s voice was like a Stradivarius violin. One of the greatest instruments ever made. Their first duet album came out in 1982. The next one took 24 years.

No Comments

Two Old Friends, One Song, and No Reason to Hurry There are songs that arrive quietly and disappear before anyone…

Uncategorized

THEY PAID HIM $10 TO SING THE ANTHEM — THE SAME AMOUNT THEY PAID HIM TO PITCH. Charley Pride was the fourth of eleven children born to sharecroppers near Sledge, Mississippi. He picked cotton beside his parents and ordered a $10 Silvertone guitar from the Sears catalog at fourteen. Baseball took him north. By 1960 he was loading coal into a smelter furnace in East Helena, Montana, for a hundred dollars a week and pitching for the company team. When the manager heard him sing, he added ten dollars a game for fifteen minutes before first pitch. Attendance went up. Twenty-nine No. 1 hits. Fifty-two Top 10s. Country Music Hall of Fame, 2000. He batted .444 that first Montana summer. Baseball was what he came for. The ten dollars was what stayed.

No Comments

They Paid Charley Pride $10 to Sing the Anthem — The Same Amount They Paid Him to Pitch Charley Pride…

Uncategorized

REBA McENTIRE SANG IT AS A DAUGHTER WHO NEVER REALLY KNEW HER FATHER. THE MAN WHO WROTE IT HAD LOST HIS OWN FATHER BEFORE HE WAS THREE. Richard Leigh was only two and a half when both of his parents were killed in an accident. He spent the following years moving among relatives before eventually finding a permanent home and being adopted. Years later, Leigh found a clipping of his father’s obituary. That small piece of paper helped inspire one of the most personal songs he would ever write. With Layng Martine Jr., he turned that feeling into “The Greatest Man I Never Knew” — a song about a father and child living under the same roof, yet never truly saying what they felt. Reba recorded it for For My Broken Heart. Released as a single in 1992, it climbed to No. 3 on Billboard’s country chart. Reba sang the story as a daughter. But behind it was a songwriter who had barely been given the chance to know his own father at all.

No Comments

Reba McEntire Sang a Daughter’s Silence, While the Songwriter Heard His Own Childhood Some country songs feel personal from the…

Uncategorized

LORETTA LYNN SURVIVED A STROKE AT 85 — THEN RELEASED HER 50TH ALBUM AND CALLED IT “STILL WOMAN ENOUGH.” In 2017, a stroke took her off the road. A broken hip followed a year later. Nashville quietly assumed the Coal Miner’s Daughter was done. She wasn’t. In March 2021, at 88, Loretta Lynn released her 50th studio album — sixty-one years after her first single. She titled it “Still Woman Enough.” She was still writing. Still recording. Still proving everyone wrong. Then, on October 4, 2022, Loretta Lynn died in her sleep at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. She was 90. The title of that last album suddenly meant something else entirely. How did it feel the day you heard she was gone?

No Comments

Loretta Lynn and the Lasting Power of Still Woman Enough There are artists who fade quietly when life gets hard,…

Uncategorized

HER MOTHER DROVE HER TO NASHVILLE AT 18. SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER, HER MOTHER GOT TO TELL HER SHE’D MADE IT. In 1987, Linda Clark and her best friend packed Terri into a Honda Civic in Medicine Hat and pointed it south. Asked at the border where they were headed, they said the Grand Ole Opry. Terri stayed. She sang at Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge, across the alley from the Ryman, working daytime shifts because Lower Broadway after dark was no place for an eighteen-year-old riding the city bus alone. On May 15, 2004, Steve Wariner stopped her mid-show at the Opry to say he had a surprise, and Linda walked out holding a sign: Grand Ole Opry, June 12. Marty Stuart inducted her four weeks later — fifty-four years after Hank Snow joined, and she remains the only Canadian woman ever to get there. Linda died of cancer in April 2010. She had always told her daughter that one honor stood above every other, the Order of Canada. Terri was appointed in January 2026. Her statement said simply that this one is for her mother.

No Comments

The Long Road from Medicine Hat to the Order of Canada In 1987, Terri Clark was 18 years old when…

Uncategorized

HE BUILT A REPUTATION ON THE SHOWS HE DIDN’T PLAY. AT THE END, HE KEPT SHOWING UP — UNTIL THE LAST SHOW ARRIVED WITHOUT HIM. They called him “No Show Jones.” During his worst years with alcohol and drugs, George Jones missed enough concerts that the nickname followed him everywhere. Eventually, he joked about it himself. But the man changed. After getting sober, Jones spent his later years doing the opposite of what the nickname suggested. He toured. He took dates. And even in his seventies, when age made the road harder, he kept walking back onto country stages. In 2012, at eighty-one, Jones announced his farewell tour. The final concert was scheduled for November 22, 2013, at Nashville’s Bridgestone Arena. Alan Jackson, Garth Brooks, Kenny Rogers and other country stars were preparing to join him. George never reached it. That April, after continuing to perform into the spring, he entered Vanderbilt University Medical Center with a fever. He died there on April 26, 2013. The sold-out November farewell still happened. After his death, it became a tribute with a painfully fitting name: “The Final No Show.” For years, “No Show Jones” had been a joke about the concerts he missed. In the end, the last one was the only show he truly had no choice but to miss.

No Comments

George Jones, the Man Who Kept Coming Back For a long time, George Jones carried a nickname that seemed impossible…

Uncategorized

TAMMY WYNETTE HADN’T HAD A TOP 40 POP HIT IN 22 YEARS. AT 49, A BRITISH DANCE BAND SHE HAD NEVER HEARD OF PUT HER BACK ON THAT CHART. By 1991, Tammy Wynette had placed 68 songs on Billboard’s country chart. But on the pop chart, she hadn’t reached the top 40 since 1969. Then the phone rang in Tennessee. It was Bill Drummond of the KLF, a British electronic dance duo. He wanted the First Lady of Country Music to sing on a house record about a place called Mu Mu Land. She said yes. Drummond rewrote a line for her: They called me up in Tennessee / They said, “Tammy, stand by the JAMs” — a nod to “Stand By Your Man.” Nashville did not know what to make of it. The rest of the world did. Released on November 25, 1991, “Justified & Ancient” reached No. 2 in Britain, kept from the top only by a re-release of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” It hit No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 — her first top 40 there in 22 years — and went to No. 1 in 18 countries.

No Comments

Tammy Wynette, The KLF, and the Song That Put Her Back on the Pop Chart By 1991, Tammy Wynette was…

You Missed

Merle Haggard Was on an Oxygen Hose Hours Before This Vegas Show. He Went On Anyway, for His Band.

The Night The Statler Brothers Faced the Loss of Lew DeWitt — And the Song That Kept His Memory Alive

Johnny Cash Wrote June a Love Letter in 1970. Nearly 50 Years Later, It Became a Song Filmed at the Ruins of Their Home

When Thousands Booed Sinéad O’Connor, Kris Kristofferson Stood Beside Her — Then Honored Her With a Song