Country Music

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Country Music

“THEY CALLED IT NOTHING — BUT IT BECAME HIS FIRST NO.1.”Waylon Jennings wrote that song during a rough stretch in his life, the kind of days when nothing feels steady. His producer brushed it off and left the tape sitting on a shelf, like it didn’t matter. Years later, inside the dim corners of Hillbilly Central, Waylon found the tape again. His first instinct was to toss it. But Richie Albright stopped him, and Willie Nelson stood in the control room, listening quietly. They cut the song in one take — no fuss, no shine. And the track everyone once called “no good” became Waylon’s first No.1. Funny how the world changes its mind.

About the Song

Waylon Jennings had been with RCA Victor for nine years before he finally earned his first official Billboard number-one hit with “This Time.”
Interestingly, his very first recording contract wasn’t with RCA at all—it was with Herb Alpert’s A&M Records in 1963. That partnership produced only a single album and failed to gain national traction. Alpert envisioned Jennings as a pop-style vocalist similar to Al Martino, a creative mismatch that ultimately held them back.

Waylon’s career took a turn when Bobby Bare caught his performance at JD’s Club in Phoenix, Arizona. Bare encouraged Chet Atkins to sign Jennings to RCA, and although Waylon joined the label in 1965, progress came slowly. His debut single, “That’s the Chance I’ll Have to Take,” peaked modestly at #49. It wasn’t until his fifth RCA release, “(That’s What You Get) For Lovin’ Me,” that he finally broke into the Billboard Top Ten.

Over the following years, Jennings secured a dozen more Top Ten singles. One standout moment came in 1968 when “Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line” held the #2 spot for five weeks. Unfortunately for Waylon, classics like Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” and Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA” climbed above him, preventing a #1 victory. Even so, Jennings earned a Grammy in 1970 for his collaboration with The Kimberlys on “MacArthur Park,” though its pop-leaning style only reached #23 on the country chart.

During his early RCA years, Waylon worked mainly under Chet Atkins’ production style, but he frequently voiced frustration with Nashville’s traditional recording methods. Everything changed in November 1972 when attorney Neil Reshen found a loophole in Jennings’ contract. This allowed Waylon not only greater financial leverage but also creative control over his music. Once Jennings began producing his own work, his artistic freedom paved the way for his long-awaited first number-one single.

Nineteen months after gaining creative control, Waylon finally achieved that milestone with “This Time,” a song he had actually written five years earlier. Most of the album was co-produced by Jennings and Willie Nelson, though Nelson did not participate in the recording of the title track.

Interestingly, “This Time” almost never made it onto the album at all. During the recording session, Waylon casually said, “Hey, let me try this one,” and began working on the song. However, he stopped partway through, frustrated with its tricky rhythm. “Aw, this ain’t no good,” he said, ready to toss it aside. At that moment, drummer Richie Albright stepped in and urged him to try again: “No, do it one more time. I think it’ll work.” Waylon gave it another shot—and the final result became his first chart-topping hit.

On June 22, 1974, “This Time” reached #1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Singles chart, marking a major turning point in Jennings’ career.

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Country Music

FROM THE KITCHEN TABLE TO COUNTRY LEGEND. In the late 1950s, Loretta Lynn wasn’t chasing fame — she was escaping silence. A young wife, a young mother, carrying stories heavier than any guitar. Her voice was rough, almost fragile, but it held something dangerous: truth with no filter. When Honky Tonk Girl slipped out of her kitchen and into a studio, it didn’t sound like a debut — it sounded like a confession. No polish. No pretending. Just a woman daring to sing the life she was living. Nashville didn’t know whether to flinch or listen. What happened next would quietly redraw the rules of country music… and change who was allowed to speak.

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“THE GREATEST FEMALE LOVE VOICE IN COUNTRY MUSIC.” On March 5, 1963, country music lost the woman many called the heart of a broken love song. Patsy Cline was only 30 when a plane crash ended a career that was still rising. She wasn’t fading out. She wasn’t finished. Her voice was still climbing the charts, still teaching heartbreak how to sound beautiful. When the news spread, radios didn’t go quiet — they turned to her. “Crazy.” “I Fall to Pieces.” “She’s Got You.” Those songs didn’t feel like hits anymore. They felt like messages she never got to finish. Patsy didn’t sing about love as a promise. She sang it as something already slipping away. Every note carried goodbye inside it, even when the words said stay. And sometimes, when “Crazy” comes on late at night, it doesn’t feel like a record from 1963 at all — it feels like a voice still trying to tell someone the truth, one last time. Was that love song meant to be her final goodbye?

Country Music

SOME CALLED HIM TOO SMOOTH — SHE CALLED HIM “HER LAST SONG.” They say every great country ballad begins with a voice that knows how to leave without slamming the door — and Jim Reeves proved it again and again. He didn’t sing about wild nights or burning bars. He sang about the quiet ache that lingers after love has already packed its bags. Rumor has it the idea for one of his softest heartbreak songs came after a late drive outside Nashville. Jim pulled his car over, listening to the engine tick in the dark, thinking about a woman who never raised her voice — but never stayed either. “Some folks shout when they leave,” he once told a friend. “Others just disappear. That’s the kind that hurts the most.” When his songs reached the radio, they didn’t crash into the room — they floated in. Lines wrapped in velvet, sadness dressed in manners. Behind that calm baritone was a man who believed pain didn’t need to scream to be real. And maybe that’s why Jim Reeves still sounds like the goodbye you never got to finish — gentle, honest, and impossible to forget. What if Jim Reeves’s softest songs weren’t love songs at all — but quiet goodbyes hidden inside a voice too gentle to scream?

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HOLLYWOOD OFFERED TO CUT A ROAD UP THE HILL TO FILM LORETTA LYNN’S CHILDHOOD HOME. HER FAMILY SAID NO. SO THE STUDIO BUILT A FAKE CABIN INSTEAD — AND THE FAKE ONE IS THE ONE THAT BURNED DOWN. There’s a cynical way to tell the Butcher Holler story, and people tell it. Poverty as a brand. Sixty years of selling a coal camp childhood to Nashville, then charging five dollars a head to walk through it. A hollow turned into a gift shop, with RC Cola and MoonPies at the register. The five dollars is real. So is the store. It’s the most visited attraction in eastern Kentucky. But look at who was collecting it. For more than thirty years the man giving the tours was her younger brother, Herman Webb, walking strangers through his own childhood until he died in 2018. He’s the reason there’s a house at all — by 1980 it was falling in, and he rebuilt it himself. His daughter still tells visitors that without her father, nothing would be standing on that hill. Nothing in it is staged. The butter churn is the one their mother used. The well outside is the one Loretta drew water from. There’s still no heat and no plumbing, in the number one tourist stop in the region. A movie studio wanted a road cut into that hillside. The family refused, and Hollywood built its own version a county away. That one’s gone now. The real one is still up the dirt lane, five dollars, no reservations.

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COUNTRY RADIO BANNED “RATED X” BEFORE ANYONE THERE HAD HEARD IT. THE TITLE WAS ENOUGH. AT LEAST 60 STATIONS REFUSED TO PLAY IT. They assumed it was filth. It wasn’t. Loretta Lynn wrote it about a divorced woman — the way other women whisper about her, the way men assume she’s suddenly available, the scarlet letter a community pins on her for the crime of a marriage that ended. Then came the strange part. The angry letters didn’t just come from radio programmers. They came from divorced women. They wrote in saying the song insulted them. The very people she was defending thought she was throwing stones. That’s the read the critics still reach for: bitter, man-hating, a woman airing grievances. They make the same mistake her own fans made in 1972. She wasn’t condemning divorced women. She was standing in front of them. She said so plainly in her book — if they’d listened close, they’d have gotten the story right. She was taking their side. And here’s the thing that makes it remarkable. Loretta Lynn was never divorced. Nearly fifty years with Doolittle, through the drinking and the cheating, and she never left. She wrote the loneliest song about divorce in country music about a life she chose not to live. It went to No. 1. Decades later Jack White was still putting it in his sets. Some folks still call that song bitter. What do you call it?

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A WHOLE GENERATION KNOWS “BIG IRON” BY HEART AND MOST OF THEM NEVER TOUCHED A COUNTRY RECORD. THEY LEARNED IT FROM A VIDEO GAME. SOME COUNTRY FANS HAVE NEVER FORGIVEN THAT. The song is from 1959 — a spoken-tempo cowboy ballad about a ranger who rides into a town called Agua Fria to face down an outlaw named Texas Red. Marty Robbins wrote it and cut it in a single eight-hour session, one track among many on an album whose real star was “El Paso.” To the purists, that’s the whole problem now. A new audience found it through Fallout: New Vegas, where it loops on the in-game radio, and turned it into a meme — remixes, parodies, kids who couldn’t name another country song reciting every verse. They call that a punchline. A classic reduced to a joke, loved by people who don’t know what they’re loving. Here’s what that misses. The song survived seventy years and jumped clean over a medium that didn’t exist when it was written — and it did that because the writing holds. A stranger, a doomed duel, a town certain the wrong man will die. It’s a three-minute movie. The kids memorizing it aren’t laughing at it. They’re doing exactly what people did in 1960: they can’t get it out of their heads. The album it came from is now in the Library of Congress. Marty didn’t need it to trend to matter — but it’s still out there mattering, to people he never met, in a future he never saw. Some folks say a game cheapened a classic. What do you call it?

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SHE WAS 28, A MOTHER OF FOUR, AND SHE SPENT THE NIGHT BEFORE HER GRAND OLE OPRY DEBUT ASLEEP IN A PARKED CAR. Loretta Lynn wrote her first single in about twenty minutes on a seventeen-dollar guitar her husband had given her for their anniversary. A small label cut it in Hollywood in February 1960. Nobody was going to promote it, so they promoted it themselves. She sewed her own fringed cowgirl outfit. They mailed out 3,500 copies. Then they got in Doo’s old Mercury and drove east out of Washington State, stopping at every radio tower they passed to ask the DJ if he’d play it. By that summer it was number fourteen in the country. It got her an invitation to the Opry. They reached Nashville late and didn’t have money for a room, so Doolittle parked across the street from the Ryman and they slept in the car. She woke up looking at the old tabernacle, and he came back with a box of donuts. October 15, 1960. She sang “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.” Years later, the only thing she could remember about it was tapping her foot the whole way through. They asked her back seventeen weeks in a row.