Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

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HE TOLD HIS PRODUCER HE DIDN’T EXPECT TO SEE FIFTY. THAT’S WHY HE NEVER STOPPED RECORDING. Jim Reeves was the youngest of nine children. His father died when Jim was still a baby — at forty-two — and the older brothers left school to keep the family fed. The men in that family did not get old, and everybody in it knew the number. Then his own body started arguing with him. The military turned him down in 1941 because of an enlarged heart. He had high blood pressure on top of it. Almost none of his audience knew any of this. Chet Atkins produced him at RCA and heard the reasoning firsthand. Jim didn’t think he’d live much past fifty, so he wanted to get as much down on tape as he could in whatever he’d been allotted. Atkins said so in an interview near the end of his own life: that was why the man recorded the way he did. He was building a stockpile. On July 29, 1964, Reeves cut a session in the private studio at his house in Madison, Tennessee. Two days later his plane came down outside Nashville. He was forty. He hadn’t been wrong about dying early. He’d been wrong by ten years, in the wrong direction. The tapes went out without him. Records he had already finished kept reaching the charts long after there was anyone left to promote them.

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Jim Reeves and the Recordings He Left Behind Jim Reeves lived with a quiet kind of urgency. He was the…

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“BECAUSE, MAN, I WAS GENE AUTRY.” He was ten or eleven, outside Glendale, Arizona, and he had earned the money to see the Saturday picture. The walk home came after, in the dark, across ground he later described as full of rattlesnakes and scorpions and sidewinders. It never bothered him. He had just spent two hours being a singing cowboy, and the snakes, he figured, would not dare. That is the first fact about Marty Robbins. The rest run out of it. In 1959 he talked Columbia into letting him cut an album of western songs, and said afterward he’d had no idea there was a market for them. It gave him “El Paso” — a cowboy who kills a man over a girl in a cantina, runs for the badlands, then turns his horse around and rides back into the town where he knows the guns are waiting. Four minutes and thirty-eight seconds. Radio said nobody would play something that long. It went to number one on the country chart and the pop chart and became the first country record to win a Grammy. A heart attack nearly killed him in 1970, at forty-four. The wrecks came after. At Talladega in 1972 he ran with the restrictor knocked out of his carburetor, passed Richard Petty, waved — then drove to the impound area and told the officials to check his car. Last place, and a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine. At Charlotte in 1974 he came down the front stretch at a hundred and sixty into four cars stopped sideways, and put himself into the wall rather than into the door of Richard Childress. Broken ribs, broken tailbone, thirty-seven stitches in his face. He ran his last race at Atlanta in the fall of 1982 and died in Nashville on December 8, thirty-one days later, at fifty-seven. Nothing ever came out of the bushes after him. He never stopped giving it the chance.

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Because, Man, I Was Gene Autry. When Marty Robbins was a boy outside Glendale, Arizona, he learned something that would…

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SHE RECORDED IT TWICE, FIFTY YEARS APART. THE SECOND TIME, SHE DIDN’T SING. She wrote it herself. A song about her father, the mine, the hollow in Kentucky she came out of — the kind of thing nobody else could have written for her. She cut it in 1970, in her thirties, at the height of what her voice could do. She cut it again in 2020. By then she had recorded it in several arrangements over the years, but never like this: no singing at all. She spoke the words. The instruments behind her were kept to almost nothing. Look at who was in the room. Her daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell, was producing. So was John Carter Cash, Johnny’s son. They made it in Cash Cabin, the studio his father built. Legacy released the recitation as a single on January 4, 2021, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the album that made her. Still Woman Enough followed on March 19. It was the last solo record she ever put out. She died on October 4, 2022, in her sleep, at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. She was ninety. Fifty years between the two takes. The first one is a young woman telling you where she’s from. The second is the same woman, in a room run by her own daughter, saying the words instead of singing them — and not needing the melody to make them land.

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Loretta Lynn’s Second Coal Miner’s Daughter Some songs feel finished the first time they are recorded. Others keep living, changing…

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THE GRAND OLE OPRY SPENT THREE HOURS DECIDING WHETHER LORETTA LYNN COULD SING A SONG SHE HAD ALREADY SUNG THREE TIMES THAT NIGHT. In 1975, Loretta Lynn sang “The Pill” three times in one night at the Grand Ole Opry. A week later she learned that the Opry had held a three-hour meeting about whether to let her do it. Told about it afterward, she said that if they hadn’t let her sing it, she would have told them to shove the Grand Ole Opry. Sixty radio stations refused to play it. A preacher in her home state of Kentucky gave a whole sermon against it. Male country singers were putting out records about sex and strangers that year, and nobody scheduled anything about those. The ban worked backwards. Kept off country radio, the record crossed to pop stations instead and reached number seventy — the highest a solo Loretta Lynn single ever went on that chart. In the counties she came from, doctors thanked her, because the song was getting to women no clinic had reached. The meeting was the third try. MCA had recorded the song in December 1972 and held it in a drawer for over two years, afraid of it. Radio was afraid of it. Then a woman who had been an Opry member since 1962 — married at fifteen, four children by twenty — walked out and sang it three times before anyone thought to convene. Three hours was not how long it took them to understand the song. It was how long it took them to work out what to do about someone who had stopped asking.

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The Night Loretta Lynn Sang “The Pill” Three Times at the Grand Ole Opry In country music, some moments are…

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ON DECEMBER 8, 1982, A 57-YEAR-OLD MAN DIED IN A NASHVILLE HOSPITAL — EIGHT WEEKS AFTER COUNTRY MUSIC PUT HIM IN ITS HALL OF FAME, AND FOUR WEEKS AFTER HE LAST DROVE A STOCK CAR AT SPEED. Marizona had been his wife since 1945. Ronny and Janet were at the hospital. He was born near Glendale, Arizona, in 1925, a twin, into a house with nothing in it. He quit school in his teens, went into the Navy, and learned guitar in the Pacific. In 1959 he wrote a song about a cowboy who runs, gets clear, and then turns his horse around and rides back into the town where he knows he will be shot, because the woman is there. “El Paso” won the first Grammy ever given to a country record. His first heart attack came in August 1969. In January 1970 he took a coronary bypass while the operation was still experimental. Before he would sign for it, he made his doctors promise he could go back to racing. They promised. He was back on the track that October. He kept going through three bad wrecks in the mid-seventies, quit, and returned again. His last NASCAR start was November 7, 1982. He was admitted on December 2 with chest pain. He died six days later. He had written the ending twenty-three years earlier.

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He Wrote the Ending Long Before the Road Took Him Home On December 8, 1982, Marty Robbins died in a…

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EVERYBODY TELLS THE SAME STORY ABOUT JOHNNY RODRIGUEZ: HE STOLE A GOAT, SANG IN A JAIL CELL, AND A TEXAS RANGER MADE HIM A STAR. THE RANGER HIMSELF SAID IT WAS JUST AN UNPAID FINE. The goat got repeated so many times it became fact. David Allan Coe believed it and wrote it into one of his own songs. And it worked — it made Johnny a curiosity. The kid from the cell. Nashville’s lucky accident. Here’s what that legend buried. He came to Music City at 21 with a guitar and fourteen dollars. Tom T. Hall walked him unannounced into a producer’s office at Mercury and told him to sing. So Johnny sang “I Can’t Stop Loving You” — half in English, half in Spanish. In a Nashville record office. In 1971. The producer signed him before he finished. Then he asked Tom T. Hall what he wanted for the find. Hall said he didn’t want anything. He just thought the kid could sell records. Six No. 1s followed. He became the first Mexican American star country music ever had. Not because a Ranger heard him. Because he walked in and refused to sound like anybody else. He died last year. Which story do you think he’d rather be remembered for?

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The Story Johnny Rodriguez Left Behind Was Bigger Than the Goat Tale Everybody loves a legend that sounds half true…

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FOURTEEN OF LORETTA LYNN’S SONGS WERE BANNED FROM COUNTRY RADIO. SHE USED TO JOKE THAT COUNTING THE STATIONS THAT BANNED A RECORD TOLD HER HOW WELL IT WOULD SELL. That joke is exactly what her critics point to. Here was a woman who figured out early that scandal moved units, and then spent fifteen years manufacturing it — the drunk husband, the other woman, the divorcee, the birth control pill. A shock act in gingham. Provoke the preachers, watch the sales climb, repeat. The ledger even backs it up. MCA buried “The Pill” for years, afraid of it. Sixty stations refused to touch it. It sold fifteen thousand copies a week and became the highest-charting single she ever had. But the timeline breaks the theory. The first song they banned, in 1966, was also her first No. 1 — she wasn’t gaming a system she hadn’t entered yet. And Harold Bradley had already explained her, years before any of it, after her very first session in the studio: whatever’s in that woman’s heart comes out of her mouth. That’s all it ever was. Married at fifteen, four children by twenty, a husband who drank and cheated. She didn’t research those songs. She lived them, then said them out loud in a business where women were expected to sing about being left, not about being fed up. As she put it, she was the first one to write it the way the women lived it. Sixty stations can tell you how loud that was.

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Loretta Lynn, the Songs They Banned, and the Woman Behind the Noise Loretta Lynn never sounded like she was asking…

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IT’S THE MOST SELF-PITYING SONG IN COUNTRY MUSIC. A DEAD MOTHER, A FATHER’S BLAME, A WIFE WHO TOOK THE BOY. MISERY STACKED ON MISERY. EXCEPT MARTY ROBBINS DIDN’T WRITE ANY OF IT ABOUT HIMSELF. That’s the complaint people make about “You Gave Me a Mountain,” and you can see why. One sorrow, then another, then another, until a man is standing in front of God saying this one is too big. But it wasn’t a diary. It was a gift. Robbins wrote it for Frankie Laine — a friend whose career had gone quiet, a man in his fifties nobody was writing songs for anymore. Then he spent years trying to get it into his hands. Years. He finally managed it in late 1968, and Laine had his last big pop hit at 55. Laine wrote about it afterward. He said he wished Marty had been faster — that there’d been times in the sixties he’d been aching for a song that good. Then Elvis found it. He never once cut it in a studio. He just sang it on stage, over and over, while his own marriage came apart. It ended up on fifteen of his albums. A song about a mountain, written for someone else to climb. Who do you hear singing it — Marty, Frankie, or Elvis?

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The Mountain Marty Robbins Gave the World People often call “You Gave Me a Mountain” the most self-pitying song in…

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IN 1984, LORETTA LYNN WAS ON TOUR WHEN HER OLDEST SON DROWNED IN THE RIVER BEHIND HER HOUSE. SHE COLLAPSED UNCONSCIOUS BEFORE ANYONE COULD TELL HER. HER HUSBAND HAD TO FLY 600 MILES TO DELIVER THE NEWS IN PERSON. “He was her favorite. She never said it out loud. She didn’t have to.” At the time, Loretta was country music’s most beloved daughter — Coal Miner’s Daughter had been a No. 1 album, a Sissy Spacek Oscar, a household name. She’d already buried Patsy Cline. She’d already raised six kids on the road, written songs about pills and birth control and cheating husbands when nobody else would. Then July. Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. The ranch. Jack Benny was 34. He tried to cross the river on horseback. He hit his head on a rock. The rescue team pulled his body from the water on his mother’s own property. Loretta was on stage in Illinois when her body gave out. She woke up in a hospital, exhausted, with no idea why Doolittle had flown across two states to sit at her bedside. He told her in the room. Friends said something in her shifted that day and never came back. The migraines got worse. She’d had them since 17, bad enough to make her pull out her own hair, bad enough that one night the pain had pushed her close to taking her own life. After Jack Benny, the headaches stopped feeling like an illness. They started feeling like grief with nowhere to go. She kept performing. She kept writing. She buried her daughter Betty Sue years later, then her grandson, then Doolittle himself. But Loretta never talked much about that hospital room in Illinois. About what it felt like to wake up not knowing your son was already gone. About the days between collapsing on stage and finding out why. Those closest to her always wondered what part of her stayed behind in that river…

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Loretta Lynn and the Summer That Changed Everything In 1984, Loretta Lynn was already a giant in country music, a…

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FORGET HANK WILLIAMS. FORGET JOHNNY CASH. ONE SONG OF MARTY ROBBINS WAS TOO LONG, TOO STRANGE, AND TOO CINEMATIC FOR RADIO — AND IT BECAME THE FIRST NO. 1 HIT OF THE 1960s. When people talk about the golden age of country music, they reach for the men who kept it simple. Three chords. Three minutes. The plain truth and nothing more. But Marty Robbins wasn’t trying to write a song. He was trying to make a movie. He wrote the whole thing in his head — no paper, no guitar, no desk — sitting in the back seat of a car on the long highway drive his family took between Phoenix and West Texas. By the time they pulled into Phoenix, it was finished. He even named the woman in it after a girl he’d sat beside in the fifth grade. Then Columbia Records heard it and panicked. Four minutes and thirty-eight seconds. Spanish guitars on a country record. A love story, a killing, and a death — in one take. They pressed a shortened version just in case no station would touch the real one. America chose the long one. It hit No. 1 on both the country and pop charts. It won the first Grammy ever given to country music. And the cantina he invented in his head turned out to be a real bar in El Paso — still standing there today, on the same street, with the same name. Hank wrote what men felt. Cash wrote what men did. Marty Robbins wrote what men saw when they closed their eyes. Some songs get played on the radio. This one was too big for it — so radio changed instead. Do you know which song of Marty Robbins that is?

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Marty Robbins’ “El Paso”: The Country Song That Played Like a Movie When people talk about classic country music, they…

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HE TOLD HIS PRODUCER HE DIDN’T EXPECT TO SEE FIFTY. THAT’S WHY HE NEVER STOPPED RECORDING. Jim Reeves was the youngest of nine children. His father died when Jim was still a baby — at forty-two — and the older brothers left school to keep the family fed. The men in that family did not get old, and everybody in it knew the number. Then his own body started arguing with him. The military turned him down in 1941 because of an enlarged heart. He had high blood pressure on top of it. Almost none of his audience knew any of this. Chet Atkins produced him at RCA and heard the reasoning firsthand. Jim didn’t think he’d live much past fifty, so he wanted to get as much down on tape as he could in whatever he’d been allotted. Atkins said so in an interview near the end of his own life: that was why the man recorded the way he did. He was building a stockpile. On July 29, 1964, Reeves cut a session in the private studio at his house in Madison, Tennessee. Two days later his plane came down outside Nashville. He was forty. He hadn’t been wrong about dying early. He’d been wrong by ten years, in the wrong direction. The tapes went out without him. Records he had already finished kept reaching the charts long after there was anyone left to promote them.

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“BECAUSE, MAN, I WAS GENE AUTRY.” He was ten or eleven, outside Glendale, Arizona, and he had earned the money to see the Saturday picture. The walk home came after, in the dark, across ground he later described as full of rattlesnakes and scorpions and sidewinders. It never bothered him. He had just spent two hours being a singing cowboy, and the snakes, he figured, would not dare. That is the first fact about Marty Robbins. The rest run out of it. In 1959 he talked Columbia into letting him cut an album of western songs, and said afterward he’d had no idea there was a market for them. It gave him “El Paso” — a cowboy who kills a man over a girl in a cantina, runs for the badlands, then turns his horse around and rides back into the town where he knows the guns are waiting. Four minutes and thirty-eight seconds. Radio said nobody would play something that long. It went to number one on the country chart and the pop chart and became the first country record to win a Grammy. A heart attack nearly killed him in 1970, at forty-four. The wrecks came after. At Talladega in 1972 he ran with the restrictor knocked out of his carburetor, passed Richard Petty, waved — then drove to the impound area and told the officials to check his car. Last place, and a two-hundred-and-fifty-dollar fine. At Charlotte in 1974 he came down the front stretch at a hundred and sixty into four cars stopped sideways, and put himself into the wall rather than into the door of Richard Childress. Broken ribs, broken tailbone, thirty-seven stitches in his face. He ran his last race at Atlanta in the fall of 1982 and died in Nashville on December 8, thirty-one days later, at fifty-seven. Nothing ever came out of the bushes after him. He never stopped giving it the chance.

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SHE RECORDED IT TWICE, FIFTY YEARS APART. THE SECOND TIME, SHE DIDN’T SING. She wrote it herself. A song about her father, the mine, the hollow in Kentucky she came out of — the kind of thing nobody else could have written for her. She cut it in 1970, in her thirties, at the height of what her voice could do. She cut it again in 2020. By then she had recorded it in several arrangements over the years, but never like this: no singing at all. She spoke the words. The instruments behind her were kept to almost nothing. Look at who was in the room. Her daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell, was producing. So was John Carter Cash, Johnny’s son. They made it in Cash Cabin, the studio his father built. Legacy released the recitation as a single on January 4, 2021, timed to the fiftieth anniversary of the album that made her. Still Woman Enough followed on March 19. It was the last solo record she ever put out. She died on October 4, 2022, in her sleep, at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. She was ninety. Fifty years between the two takes. The first one is a young woman telling you where she’s from. The second is the same woman, in a room run by her own daughter, saying the words instead of singing them — and not needing the melody to make them land.

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THE GRAND OLE OPRY SPENT THREE HOURS DECIDING WHETHER LORETTA LYNN COULD SING A SONG SHE HAD ALREADY SUNG THREE TIMES THAT NIGHT. In 1975, Loretta Lynn sang “The Pill” three times in one night at the Grand Ole Opry. A week later she learned that the Opry had held a three-hour meeting about whether to let her do it. Told about it afterward, she said that if they hadn’t let her sing it, she would have told them to shove the Grand Ole Opry. Sixty radio stations refused to play it. A preacher in her home state of Kentucky gave a whole sermon against it. Male country singers were putting out records about sex and strangers that year, and nobody scheduled anything about those. The ban worked backwards. Kept off country radio, the record crossed to pop stations instead and reached number seventy — the highest a solo Loretta Lynn single ever went on that chart. In the counties she came from, doctors thanked her, because the song was getting to women no clinic had reached. The meeting was the third try. MCA had recorded the song in December 1972 and held it in a drawer for over two years, afraid of it. Radio was afraid of it. Then a woman who had been an Opry member since 1962 — married at fifteen, four children by twenty — walked out and sang it three times before anyone thought to convene. Three hours was not how long it took them to understand the song. It was how long it took them to work out what to do about someone who had stopped asking.