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Country Music

MEL STREET SPENT THE 1970S SINGING ABOUT CHEATING, LONELINESS, AND MEN WHO COULDN’T HOLD THEIR LIVES TOGETHER. THEN, JUST AS MERCURY GAVE HIM HIS BIGGEST LABEL OPPORTUNITY, HE DIED ON HIS BIRTHDAY. Mel Street had taken a long route to Nashville. Raised in southwestern Virginia, he worked as a radio-tower electrician, sang in clubs around Niagara Falls, then returned to West Virginia and opened an auto-body shop. From 1968 to 1972, he also hosted a local television show in Bluefield. His breakthrough came from a song he had written himself. “Borrowed Angel” was first recorded for a small regional label and later picked up for wider release. In 1972, it reached the country Top 10, giving Street his first national hit. “Lovin’ on Back Streets” followed and became his biggest chart record, reaching No. 5. The songs established his territory. Street specialized in men already standing on the wrong side of a decision: affairs, guilt, secret meetings, marriages breaking down, and the loneliness left afterward. “I Met a Friend of Yours Today,” “Forbidden Angel,” and “If I Had a Cheating Heart” kept that voice on country radio through the middle of the decade. But touring and family pressure were taking a toll. Accounts of Street’s final years describe serious depression and alcohol problems even as his career continued moving forward. In 1978, he signed a new contract with Mercury Records, a major opportunity that suggested another step up was still possible. On October 21, 1978—his birthday—Mel Street died by suicide at his home in Tennessee. Contemporary and later sources disagree over his exact birth year, but not the date: he died on the same calendar day on which he had been born. His career did not stop immediately on the charts. “Just Hangin’ On” and other recordings appeared posthumously, while “Borrowed Angel” continued growing into a honky-tonk standard. Street never reached the level of fame that George Jones, Merle Haggard, or Conway Twitty did. But his best records shared something with theirs: they did not ask whether the man in the song deserved sympathy. They simply put him in the room, closed the door, and let the consequences stay with him.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MEL STREET SPENT THE 1970S SINGING ABOUT CHEATING,…

Country Music

MARTY ROBBINS WAS RECORDING “DON’T WORRY” WHEN A CHANNEL IN THE NASHVILLE CONSOLE MALFUNCTIONED. GRADY MARTIN’S CLEAN SIX-STRING BASS CAME BACK AS A HARSH BUZZ—AND THEY KEPT IT. By 1960, Grady Martin was already one of Nashville’s most trusted session musicians. He had played the elegant Spanish-style guitar on Marty Robbins’s “El Paso,” worked with Johnny Horton, Patsy Cline, Conway Twitty and countless others, and belonged to the group of studio players later known as Nashville’s A-Team. Then one malfunction changed the sound of popular music. During a July 1960 session for Robbins’s “Don’t Worry” at the Quonset Hut, Martin plugged his Danelectro six-string bass directly into the recording console. One of the console’s transformers failed while he played, turning the normally clean instrument into a thick, distorted growl. When engineer Glenn Snoddy and producer Don Law heard the playback, they did not erase it. They kept the damaged sound in the record. Released in 1961, “Don’t Worry” went to No. 1 country and No. 3 pop. Suddenly musicians were asking Nashville studios how they could get that strange distortion for themselves. Martin went back through the same faulty circuit for instrumentals including “The Fuzz.” But eventually the broken channel died completely. Snoddy then set out to reproduce the accident deliberately. Working with engineer Revis Hobbs, he built a transistor circuit that imitated the distorted signal and sold the design to Gibson. In 1962, Gibson introduced it as the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone. At first, the pedal barely sold. Three years later, Keith Richards used a Maestro Fuzz-Tone for the riff on the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” Sales exploded, and fuzz became one of electric guitar’s defining effects. Grady Martin never needed the accident to establish his career; he was already one of Nashville’s elite musicians. But hidden inside a Marty Robbins country ballad was a sound that rock guitarists would spend the next several decades pushing louder, dirtier and further from the clean note Martin had originally intended to play.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MARTY ROBBINS WAS RECORDING “DON’T WORRY” WHEN A…

Country Music

WITH LESS THAN AN HOUR LEFT IN TAMMY WYNETTE’S 1968 RECORDING SESSION, BILLY SHERRILL TOOK HER UPSTAIRS WITH A FEW UNFINISHED LINES. ABOUT 15 MINUTES LATER, THEY CAME BACK DOWN WITH “STAND BY YOUR MAN.” By 1968, Billy Sherrill had already found the singer he believed could carry his most ambitious productions. Tammy Wynette had arrived at Epic two years earlier after working as a beautician and singing on local television. Sherrill signed her, helped rename Virginia Wynette Pugh as Tammy Wynette, and guided hits including “Your Good Girl’s Gonna Go Bad,” “I Don’t Wanna Play House,” and “D-I-V-O-R-C-E.” But her signature song did not arrive through weeks of careful writing. On August 28, 1968, Wynette was in a CBS recording session when Sherrill suggested they use a break to finish an idea he had started. He carried a few lines upstairs to his office. Wynette later recalled that they finished the song in no more than twenty minutes, then returned to the studio and recorded it. The song was “Stand by Your Man.” Sherrill built the record around Wynette’s emotional range: restrained verses giving way to a chorus that forced her voice upward into one of country music’s most recognizable vocal climaxes. His production used the lush strings and layered sound that had already begun separating his records from harder traditional country. Epic released the single in September. Five weeks later, it was No. 1 country. It stayed there three weeks, crossed to No. 19 on the Hot 100, and eventually sold more than two million copies. Then the argument began. Released as the women’s liberation movement was gaining national force, the lyric was attacked by some listeners as an endorsement of female submission. Epic itself intensified the reaction by marketing the record as Wynette’s answer to women’s liberation. Wynette repeatedly defended the song as being about loyalty rather than blind obedience. The controversy never left it. Neither did the record disappear. “Stand by Your Man” became Wynette’s defining song and eventually entered the Library of Congress National Recording Registry. Sherrill went on to shape dozens of major records for Wynette, George Jones, Charlie Rich, Johnny Paycheck and others, pushing country production toward a larger, more dramatic sound. The striking part is not only that the song took roughly fifteen minutes to finish. It is that Sherrill understood exactly what to do with those fifteen minutes once the musicians came back from break: build a record big enough that Nashville would still be arguing about it decades later.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” WITH LESS THAN AN HOUR LEFT IN TAMMY…

Country Music

“THIRD RATE ROMANCE” WAS ON A JESSE WINCHESTER ALBUM BEFORE THE AMAZING RHYTHM ACES EVEN HAD THEIR HIT VERSION. TWO OF WINCHESTER’S SIDEMEN THEN LEFT, BUILT A NEW BAND AROUND RUSSELL SMITH — AND TOOK THE SONG TO BOTH COUNTRY AND POP RADIO. In the early 1970s, bassist Jeff Davis and drummer Butch McDade were working with Jesse Winchester in Canada as members of his backing group, the Rhythm Aces. Winchester was still living outside the United States after leaving for Canada in 1967 rather than submit to the military draft. Unable to freely build a conventional American touring career, he developed his music north of the border with musicians around him who would eventually create a story of their own. In 1974, Russell Smith joined them in Montreal during the sessions for Winchester’s Learn to Love It. Smith brought songs. Two of them ended up on the album: “Third Rate Romance” and “The End Is Not in Sight.” Smith even sang “Third Rate Romance” on Winchester’s recording. Then the personnel began moving in another direction. Davis and McDade left Winchester’s orbit and joined Smith, keyboardist Billy Earheart, multi-instrumentalist Barry “Byrd” Burton and pianist James Hooker in Memphis. The new group mixed country with rock, blues, R&B and Southern soul. They became The Amazing Rhythm Aces. For their 1975 debut album, Stacked Deck, they went back to Smith’s “Third Rate Romance.” This time it carried their own name. The band did not expect much. In a 1976 interview, they recalled hoping the record might receive some regional attention. Instead, it escaped Memphis. “Third Rate Romance” reached No. 11 country and No. 14 on the Billboard Hot 100, an unusual crossover for a band that did not fit cleanly into either format. In Canada it went all the way to No. 1 on both the country and general singles charts. Their next single, “Amazing Grace (Used to Be Her Favorite Song),” reached the country Top 10. Then they returned to another Russell Smith song that had already appeared with Winchester: “The End Is Not in Sight (The Cowboy Tune).” Their recording earned the Amazing Rhythm Aces a Grammy for country vocal performance by a group. The band never became easy for the industry to classify. Their records could sound country, Memphis soul, blues or rock within the same album. Later releases earned critical respect without reproducing the commercial breakthrough, and the original run eventually ended in the early 1980s. But “Third Rate Romance” still had another trip ahead. In 1994, almost twenty years after the Aces’ version, Sammy Kershaw recorded it again and carried the Russell Smith song back onto country radio. A song that had passed through Jesse Winchester’s Canadian exile, a Memphis band and 1970s crossover radio had found its way into another generation of country music.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” “THIRD RATE ROMANCE” WAS ON A JESSE WINCHESTER…

Country Music

JOHNNY BUSH HAD JUST RELEASED “WHISKEY RIVER” AND WAS MOVING TOWARD A NATIONAL BREAKTHROUGH. THEN, ON APRIL 15, 1972, THE MAN THEY CALLED “THE COUNTRY CARUSO” OPENED HIS MOUTH ONSTAGE—AND THE HIGH NOTES WOULD NOT COME OUT. Johnny Bush had spent years preparing for that moment. A Texas honky-tonk veteran and longtime friend of Willie Nelson, he had played drums with Nelson in Ray Price’s Cherokee Cowboys before leaving the band to pursue his own career. By the late 1960s, songs such as “Undo the Right” and “You Gave Me a Mountain” were establishing him as one of Texas country’s strongest voices. His range earned him the nickname “Country Caruso.” Then RCA signed him. The label encouraged Bush to write, something he initially found almost absurd in a town filled with writers like Willie Nelson, Harlan Howard and Bill Anderson. With his friend Paul Stroud, he came up with “Whiskey River,” reportedly beginning the lyric on a paper sack during a bus trip from Nashville to Texas. Released in 1972, Bush’s recording reached No. 14 on Billboard’s country chart and became a major Texas hit. Willie Nelson recorded it the following year and eventually made it the song that opened countless concerts. But while “Whiskey River” was climbing, Bush’s voice began failing. He remembered the exact night: April 15, 1972, in Weslaco, Texas. Suddenly he could not reach the high notes. The sensation felt as though his throat were choking them off. Soon he lost much of his vocal range and sometimes struggled even to speak. Doctors could find nothing visibly wrong with his vocal cords. Bush tried medication, psychologists, chiropractors, acupuncture and hypnosis. At one point he was told the problem might be psychosomatic. Meanwhile, the career RCA had invested in stalled, and after three albums his major-label opportunity disappeared. Only in 1978 did doctors identify the real cause: spasmodic dysphonia, a rare neurological disorder that causes involuntary spasms in the muscles controlling the voice. Treatment and vocal work eventually allowed Bush to regain enough control to perform again. By the late 1990s and 2000s, he was recording and touring once more, no longer chasing the national stardom that had nearly arrived in 1972 but welcomed as an elder statesman of Texas honky-tonk. The comeback did not restore the career exactly where it had stopped. It gave Johnny Bush something stranger: decades later, he could stand onstage again with a voice permanently altered by what had happened—and still make it belong to him.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOHNNY BUSH HAD JUST RELEASED “WHISKEY RIVER” AND…

Country Music

GRAM PARSONS WANTED COUNTRY MUSIC TO WEAR A NEW FACE. SO HE PUT ON A WHITE NUDIE SUIT COVERED WITH PILLS, WEED, POPPIES, NAKED WOMEN, AND A CROSS. Before Nashville knew what to do with Gram Parsons, he was already trying to break its mirror. He did not want country music to stay locked inside clean rhinestone respectability. He heard something bigger in it — gospel ache, soul confession, rock-and-roll electricity, Bakersfield bite, and old hurt sung plainly enough for a barroom to understand. He called it Cosmic American Music. But ideas were not enough. Parsons wanted the image to fight too. After leaving The Byrds and helping pull Sweetheart of the Rodeo toward country-rock, he formed the Flying Burrito Brothers with Chris Hillman. Their 1969 debut, The Gilded Palace of Sin, became one of the key country-rock records, but it did not arrive dressed like a traditional country album. It arrived wearing provocation. Parsons took the band to Nudie Cohn, the famous cowboy tailor whose rhinestone suits had already helped shape country’s visual language. Then Parsons pushed the costume past decoration. His own white suit, designed by Manuel Cuevas, was covered with the things polite country was not supposed to show: marijuana leaves, pills, poppies, naked women, and a cross. It looked like a confession stitched into stagewear. The suit did not hide the danger around him. It advertised it. That was the strange brilliance of it. Parsons was not mocking country music from the outside. He loved the form deeply. But he also understood that the old cowboy image had always carried violence, sin, longing, loneliness, and death underneath the shine. He simply dragged those hidden things onto the fabric. The album itself was just as conflicted. The Gilded Palace of Sin mixed country, soul, rock, gospel feeling, and late-1960s looseness into something Nashville could not claim and rock radio could not fully sell. It earned respect, but not success. The record failed commercially in its first life, even as later listeners came to see it as a landmark of country-rock. That was Gram Parsons’ curse in miniature. He could see the bridge before the crowd could see the road. He dressed country music in its own secret sins, sang heartbreak like it belonged to both hippies and honky-tonks, and still watched the world mostly pass him by. Years later, the music survived the flop. The suit survived too. Today, that white Nudie suit feels less like a costume than evidence: a young man trying to force country music, rock music, and his own self-destruction into the same frame. The pills were there. The cross was there. The beauty was there. The warning was there. Gram Parsons did not just wear the future of country-rock. He wore the things that were going to kill him

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GRAM PARSONS WANTED COUNTRY MUSIC TO WEAR A…

Country Music

JACK GREENE STARTED BEHIND ERNEST TUBB AS A DRUMMER. FOUR YEARS LATER, “THERE GOES MY EVERYTHING” MADE HIM COUNTRY’S TOP MALE VOCALIST AND HELPED SWEEP THE FIRST CMA AWARDS. Jack Greene had spent years working clubs and small Southern stages before joining Ernest Tubb’s Texas Troubadours in 1962. He came in as a drummer, but Greene could also play guitar and sing. Tubb gradually gave him more room at the microphone, first in the band’s shows and then as an opening vocalist. That mattered because the Texas Troubadours were more than a backing band. Tubb’s road organization had become a training ground for musicians who learned hard country night after night in dance halls, theaters and radio appearances. Steel players, guitarists and singers passed through the group, and Tubb had little interest in keeping talented men hidden simply because they made his own show stronger. Greene’s voice became increasingly difficult to hide. Where Tubb sang with a rough, conversational edge, Greene had a smooth baritone capable of carrying long notes without losing the weight of traditional country. Audiences began responding to him as a singer rather than merely the man behind the drums. Tubb encouraged him to try a solo career. Greene left the band and signed with Decca, where producer Owen Bradley put that voice at the center. In 1966, he recorded Dallas Frazier’s “There Goes My Everything.” The record changed everything. “There Goes My Everything” spent weeks at No. 1 and became one of the biggest country hits of the period. At the inaugural CMA Awards in 1967, Greene was named Male Vocalist of the Year. The single won Single of the Year, the album built around it won Album of the Year, and Frazier’s composition took Song of the Year. More hits followed, including “All the Time,” “You Are My Treasure” and “Statue of a Fool.” Greene joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1967 and remained part of its family for decades. His success also revealed something important about Ernest Tubb. Many stars protected the people who made their bands work. Tubb repeatedly treated his musicians differently. If someone beside him developed enough talent to build a career of his own, Tubb often helped make the separation possible. That culture outlived any single lineup of the Texas Troubadours. By the time Jack Greene died in 2013, the band he had once joined as a drummer had already sent generations of steel players, guitarists and singers into the wider country world. One of Ernest Tubb’s greatest contributions was not a record. It was knowing when the man beside him no longer needed to stay there.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JACK GREENE WAS ERNEST TUBB’S DRUMMER. FOUR YEARS…

Country Music

NASHVILLE HAD ALREADY MADE WAYLON JENNINGS A STAR. BY 1972, HE WAS READY TO WALK AWAY FROM IT — UNLESS RCA STOPPED TELLING HIM WHAT TO RECORD, WHO COULD PLAY ON IT, AND HOW HIS RECORDS SHOULD SOUND. Waylon Jennings arrived at RCA Victor in the mid-1960s with one of the most recognizable voices in country music, but Nashville’s recording system frustrated him. RCA producer Chet Atkins helped establish his career, yet Waylon was generally expected to work inside the Nashville system: producers chose much of the material, sessions relied heavily on studio musicians, and the finished records often sounded more polished than the music Jennings wanted to make. The records sold. Waylon grew increasingly unhappy. By the early 1970s, years of touring and financial pressure had compounded the problem. He was earning substantial money but later recalled still ending up deeply in debt. At the same time, hepatitis forced him off the road in 1972 and gave him an opportunity to reconsider whether he wanted to keep working under the same arrangement. His RCA contract was approaching its end. This time, Waylon had leverage. New manager Neil Reshen approached the negotiations differently from the way Nashville normally handled artists. Jennings wanted control over his recordings: his own musicians, his own choice of material, his own producer and greater authority over the finished records. RCA agreed to terms that gave him substantially more creative freedom. Then the records changed. Instead of leaving his road band outside while Nashville session players made the albums, Jennings increasingly brought his own musical world into the studio. Albums such as Lonesome, On’ry and Mean and Honky Tonk Heroes followed in 1973. The second contained almost an entire album’s worth of songs written by another Texas outsider: Billy Joe Shaver. The change was bigger than longer hair or the word “outlaw.” Waylon had demonstrated that a major Nashville artist could demand control over how his records were made and still sell them. Willie Nelson was simultaneously pursuing his own independence in Texas, and the commercial breakthrough of that approach soon became impossible for Nashville to dismiss. In 1976, RCA repackaged earlier recordings by Waylon, Willie Nelson, Jessi Colter and Tompall Glaser as Wanted! The Outlaws. It became country music’s first platinum-certified album. By then, the argument Waylon had been having inside RCA offices was no longer merely about his own records. Other country artists had begun asking for the same thing: control.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” NASHVILLE HAD ALREADY MADE WAYLON JENNINGS A STAR.…

Country Music

GEORGE JONES HAD ALREADY RECORDED “CHOICES,” A SONG ABOUT LIVING WITH THE CONSEQUENCES OF YOUR DECISIONS. THEN, WHILE LISTENING TO THE RECORD IN HIS SUV, HE CRASHED INTO A BRIDGE — AND NEARLY DIED. By 1999, George Jones had survived enough trouble to fill several careers. The worst years of cocaine, alcohol, arrests and missed shows were largely behind him. He had married Nancy Sepulvado in 1983, credited her with helping rebuild his life, entered the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1992 and remained one of country’s most revered singers even as younger artists increasingly dominated radio. Then he recorded Cold Hard Truth. Among its songs was “Choices,” written by Billy Yates and Mike Curtis. Jones had recorded the album before the accident that would make its themes feel almost autobiographical. Producer Keith Stegall had already selected “Choices” as the first single. On March 6, 1999, Jones was driving his Lexus SUV near his home outside Nashville. According to contemporary accounts, he was listening to a rough mix of “Choices” and attempting to play it for his daughter over the phone when his vehicle left the road and slammed into a concrete bridge abutment. Investigators found alcohol in the vehicle, and Jones later pleaded guilty to a reduced impaired-driving charge and entered treatment. The crash nearly killed him. Jones suffered serious internal injuries, including a collapsed or punctured lung and damage to his liver. His recovery kept him hospitalized and away from performing. Then “Choices” reached radio. Suddenly a song Jones had recorded before the wreck sounded as though it had been written afterward. Cold Hard Truth arrived that summer, filled with songs about consequences, regret and looking backward at a damaged life. Even Jones acknowledged how strangely the album and accident seemed to fit together. The record gave him another late-career moment. “Choices” reached the country Top 30 and won Jones the Grammy for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. More importantly for Jones personally, the wreck became a dividing line. He later said it finally frightened him into giving up alcohol; the Country Music Hall of Fame also records that he quit alcohol and cigarettes following the accident. George Jones returned to touring. The man once nicknamed “No-Show Jones” continued performing into his eighties, collecting a Kennedy Center Honor in 2008 and eventually announcing a farewell tour in 2012. The strangest artifact of that March afternoon remained the recording already sitting in his vehicle. Jones didn’t need to return to the studio after the wreck and manufacture a song about what had happened. He had recorded it beforehand.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GEORGE JONES HAD ALREADY RECORDED “CHOICES,” A SONG…

Country Music

BILLY SHERRILL WAS PLAYING ROCK ’N’ ROLL FOR ABOUT $25 A WEEK WHEN A SONG HE HAD WRITTEN PUT A $4,000 ROYALTY CHECK IN HIS HAND. HE LOOKED AT THE MONEY, REALIZED HE WAS “IN THE WRONG END OF THIS THING” — AND MOVED TO NASHVILLE. Billy Sherrill did not come to Nashville as a country traditionalist. Raised in Phil Campbell, Alabama, he had played piano at his evangelist father’s revivals, listened to blues and country radio, and worked in rock and R&B bands. While earning roughly $25 a week as a musician, he sent a song called “Your Sweet Love” to Tree Publishing in Nashville. The song itself did not become the hit. But it landed on the B-side of one. Then a royalty check arrived. $4,000. Sherrill later remembered looking at that amount and realizing the economics immediately. Performing for $25 a week suddenly made much less sense than creating the songs and records being sold. He moved to Nashville. Sam Phillips hired him to work at his Nashville studio, giving Sherrill valuable engineering experience. When that operation ended, Epic Records hired him as a staff producer in 1963. At first, he was handed acts other producers were not particularly interested in working with. Then the records started hitting. Sherrill and Glenn Sutton wrote “Almost Persuaded” for David Houston. It spent nine weeks at No.1 and won major Grammys in 1967. Suddenly the former Alabama band musician had real leverage inside Epic. Then Virginia Wynette Pugh walked into his office. She had worked as a waitress and hairdresser and had been trying repeatedly to break into Nashville. Sherrill signed her, changed her professional name to Tammy Wynette, and began a partnership that produced twenty No.1 country hits, including “I Don’t Wanna Play House” and “Stand By Your Man.” George Jones followed Sherrill to Epic in the early 1970s. Sherrill put strings and elaborate arrangements around one of country’s hardest voices, despite criticism from traditionalists. With Jones he produced “The Grand Tour,” “The Door” and eventually “He Stopped Loving Her Today” — the song Jones initially believed was too morbid to sell. It instead helped revive his career. Sherrill went on to work with Charlie Rich, Johnny Paycheck, Tanya Tucker, David Allan Coe and others, becoming one of the central architects of Nashville production in the 1960s and 1970s. Decades after that first royalty check changed his direction, Sherrill explained why he had stayed behind the glass rather than chasing the spotlight himself. He liked making records because he could make something that would outlive him. In 2010, Nashville put the producer behind those records into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

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BILLY SHERRILL WAS PLAYING ROCK ’N’ ROLL FOR ABOUT $25 A WEEK WHEN A SONG HE WROTE PUT A $4,000…

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