Country Music

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SHE CUT 12 SONGS IN FOUR NIGHTS AND WEPT THROUGH THE SESSIONS. THE ALBUM WAS SET FOR LATE MARCH. SHE DIED ON MARCH 5. “Well, here it is. The first and the last.” — Patsy Cline, holding up the pressed record (Jan Howard’s account) February 5, 1963. Bradley Studios, ten violins, Owen Bradley at the board. She sang “Sweet Dreams.” Bradley assumed she’d fought with her husband and kept Charlie out so the mood wouldn’t break. A month later she flew to Kansas City for a benefit for a disc jockey killed in a car wreck. The plane came down near Camden, Tennessee, on the way home. She was 30. Two number ones. Zero Grammys. “Sweet Dreams” reached No. 5 without her. Nashville took ten more years to vote her in.

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GRETCHEN WILSON SANG “REDNECK WOMAN” WITH MIRANDA LAMBERT AND LAINEY WILSON — THEN CHANGED ONE LINE FOR THE WOMAN STANDING BESIDE HER. Tuesday night at the Full Throttle Saloon in Sturgis, Miranda Lambert turned her headlining set into something country fans did not expect. She brought out Gretchen Wilson and Lainey Wilson, and the three women launched into Gretchen’s 2004 anthem “Redneck Woman.” Gretchen took the lead. Miranda and Lainey backed her up. Then came the moment people remembered. Instead of the familiar lyric about knowing every word to Tanya Tucker songs, Gretchen sang that she knew every word to every Lainey Wilson song — with Lainey standing right beside her. Lainey smiled. The crowd roared. Later, Lainey joined Miranda again for “Good Horses.” Three generations of country women shared one stage, but one changed lyric made the whole night feel like a passing of the torch.

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FORGET THE HALL OF FAME. FORGET THE AWARDS. COUNTRY RADIO BANNED FOURTEEN OF HER SONGS — AND SHE WAS RIGHT ABOUT EVERY ONE. In 1972, Loretta Lynn became the first woman ever named CMA Entertainer of the Year. She beat Merle Haggard and Charley Pride to do it. Her husband missed the whole thing. He’d gone hunting. Three years later she released “The Pill.” Sixty stations refused to play it. A Kentucky preacher denounced her from the pulpit. The Opry held a three-hour meeting about whether to let her sing it — she said she’d have told them where to shove the Grand Ole Opry. Then the letters came. Rural doctors told her that one song had done more to tell women birth control existed than every pamphlet they’d ever handed out. Radio decided what country music would play. Loretta Lynn decided what it would say. Play it today — and think of every woman in your family who lived that song years before anybody would sing it.

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IN JANUARY 1970, A 44-YEAR-OLD SINGER REFUSED TO LET SURGEONS OPEN HIS CHEST UNTIL THEY PROMISED HIM ONE THING — THAT HE COULD STILL RACE STOCK CARS. THEY PROMISED. IT BOUGHT HIM TWELVE YEARS. He spent all twelve of them going too fast. Marty Robbins was born in Glendale, Arizona, in 1925 — a twin, poor, self-taught. In 1959 he wrote a song about a cowboy who gets away clean, then turns his horse around and rides back toward the guns, because the woman he loves is standing there. “El Paso” won the first Grammy ever given a country entertainer. Nine months after the bypass, he was back on a racetrack. On December 2, 1982, his heart went again. The surgery was a quadruple bypass. He came out of it, smiled, squeezed a nurse’s hand — and the doctors put him at fifty-fifty. Marizona had been his wife for thirty-four years. She was there six nights later, at 11:15 p.m., with Ronny and Janet, when the fifty-fifty ran out. His last single that year was called “Some Memories Just Won’t Die.”