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Country Music

After the Crash, Bill Anderson Had to Learn the Woman His Wife Had Become On October 13, 1984, a truck carrying irrigation pipe crossed into Becky Anderson’s path. The collision left her with permanent brain damage, memory loss and no sense of taste or smell. Bill Anderson soon discovered that survival did not mean returning home to the life they had left that morning. Bill and Becky had married in 1970 and were raising their son alongside Bill’s two daughters from his previous marriage. By 1984, the family had settled into the rhythms surrounding his Grand Ole Opry career. Then hospital rooms, rehabilitation and medical assessments replaced the familiar calendar. Becky recovered beyond the bleakest early expectations, but the injury altered how she experienced the world. A psychiatrist later testified that she had lost part of her normal emotional range. Becky described feeling “flat,” without the peaks and valleys she had known before. The family could see her, speak to her and bring her home, while also adjusting to changes no photograph could show. Two years after the crash, the Andersons faced the driver in court. He acknowledged drinking twelve or thirteen beers before the collision. Bill’s testimony included a sentence stripped of the language he normally shaped so carefully: Becky was no longer the woman he had married. He was not saying that she had ceased to be his wife. He was trying to explain an injury that had left much of her outward appearance intact while changing memory, sensation and emotion. A jury awarded the couple $1.2 million, but the verdict could only assign money to a life that now had to be organized differently. Bill later built his 1989 autobiography around two versions of himself—the man he had been before the accident and the man formed by its aftermath. Becky’s recovery had changed more than her own future. Their marriage continued until their divorce in 1997. Bill did not reduce those thirteen intervening years to an easy lesson, and the public record does not justify doing it for him. What remains is the family’s more difficult achievement: after the hospital, the testimony and the settlement, they kept living inside a home where the person who returned was familiar, altered and still Becky.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE WOMAN WHO CAME HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL…

Country Music

Roy Acuff Built a Second Career in the Place Where Songs Became Property In 1942, Roy Acuff was earning more money than most country performers had imagined possible. His records were selling, roads jammed when his touring show came to town, and the Grand Ole Opry had placed him near the center of its growing star system. That same year, Acuff put his name on a business with no audience, applause or visible stage. Acuff-Rose Publications began with Acuff and songwriter Fred Rose. Nashville had singers, radio programs and recording sessions, but it did not yet possess a major country publishing company capable of keeping songs—and their long-term earnings—inside the city. Performers and writers regularly surrendered copyrights to distant firms or sold songs outright without understanding what later recordings might be worth. Acuff supplied money, stature and the needs of a working performer. Rose understood song structure, copyright administration and the larger publishing world. Their company initially gave Acuff control over his own material, then opened its doors to other writers. On April 12, 1948, Hank Williams signed an exclusive agreement with Acuff-Rose. Rose became his editor, publisher and producer, helping bring discipline to songs whose language remained unmistakably Williams’s own. The resulting catalog continued producing income long after the singer’s death. Other writers followed: Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, Don Gibson, Roy Orbison and many more. Their songs traveled through recordings by artists far beyond Nashville, but the paperwork returned royalties to a company based there. Acuff’s recording career eventually cooled. Honky-tonk and smoother country voices moved ahead of his older string-band sound. The publishing company kept growing. By then, Acuff had helped establish a principle that would shape Music Row: Nashville did not have to supply talent while New York, Chicago or Hollywood owned what the talent created. A song written in Tennessee could be registered, promoted, licensed and paid from Tennessee. Audiences remembered Acuff standing beneath the Opry lights with a fiddle nearby. Much of his lasting power, however, rested in an office where someone opened an envelope, read a royalty statement and entered another song into the ledger.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” ROY ACUFF HELPED NASHVILLE LEARN THAT A SONG…

Country Music

Jeannie C. Riley Sang About a Woman Being Judged—Then Nashville Turned Her Into That Woman Jeannie C. Riley had a husband and a young daughter when “Harper Valley P.T.A.” made her famous in 1968. Her record company preferred that audiences not hear much about them. The song described a widowed mother accused of wearing her dresses too high and behaving improperly around town. She answers by walking into the PTA meeting and naming the private hypocrisy of the people judging her. Riley did not write the song. She was a twenty-two-year-old Texas singer working as a Nashville secretary when producer Shelby Singleton placed Tom T. Hall’s composition in front of her. She did not initially consider it the best song available. Once recorded, it moved with astonishing speed. “Harper Valley P.T.A.” reached No. 1 on both the country and pop charts, making Riley the first woman to take the same single to the top of both. A Grammy and the CMA Single of the Year award followed. Then the woman singing the story began to disappear behind its central character. The label put Riley in miniskirts and boots resembling the clothes described in the lyric. She later said interviewers were discouraged from mentioning her husband. Promotional decisions presented her as a free, provocative “Harper Valley” woman rather than a married young mother trying to establish herself as a singer. Riley continued making records, including additional country hits, but producers repeatedly searched for another song filled with small-town confrontation. When she began writing material of her own, she found little room for it. She later described herself as a robot whose songs and public appearance had been chosen by other people. In the 1970s, she moved toward gospel music and eventually published an autobiography titled From Harper Valley to the Mountain Top. She never fully escaped the request for the song, nor did she permanently remove it from her performances. “Harper Valley P.T.A.” had given a fictional woman the freedom to confront everyone who had reduced her to an image. The singer who gave her a voice spent years asking for the same freedom.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE SONG THAT MADE JEANNIE C. RILEY FAMOUS…

Country Music

Johnny Cash’s Missing Years Were Waiting in His Manager’s Storage Locker Eight months after his father died in 2005, Jonathan Holiff received a key from his mother. It opened a storage locker in British Columbia filled with the life Saul Holiff had rarely explained to his sons: letters, contracts, telephone recordings, gold records and roughly sixty hours of audio diaries. Johnny Cash was everywhere inside. Saul had begun promoting Cash’s Canadian appearances in the late 1950s and managed him from 1961 until 1973. Those years contained the narcotics arrests and cancelled engagements, but also Cash’s passage from country star to American institution. Saul placed June Carter in the touring show, pushed his client toward larger stages and worked through the period that produced the Folsom and San Quentin albums, “A Boy Named Sue” and The Johnny Cash Show. The job also followed Saul home. Jonathan grew up believing that Cash received the attention his father withheld from his own family. The son and father eventually became estranged for about twenty years. When Saul died by suicide at eighty, Jonathan was left without a note or a final conversation. He entered the locker partly to see whether his father had kept anything about him. What he found instead was a parallel record of country history. Saul had preserved hundreds of letters, recorded business calls and spoken privately into a reel-to-reel machine about the artist he spent thirteen years trying to manage. His papers documented the labor beneath Cash’s public mythology: damaged tours repaired, contracts negotiated, prison appearances developed and crises handled beyond the view of an audience. Jonathan spent more than six years turning the material into the documentary My Father and the Man in Black. The project restored Saul to Cash’s history, but it also allowed a son to meet his father after direct conversation was no longer possible. The collection eventually went to the University of Victoria, where scholars can now examine more than 5,000 items from the partnership. Jonathan had opened the locker hoping to learn whether there was room for his childhood among the things Saul considered worth keeping. He found a country legend in the boxes—and his father’s voice on the tapes.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE MAN WHO CARRIED CASH LEFT HIS LIFE…

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SOMEONE SMASHED BILL MONROE’S MANDOLIN INTO SPLINTERS. THE MAN ASKED TO SAVE IT REFUSED TO REPLACE ITS SCARS. On November 13, 1985, Bill Monroe’s wife, Della, returned home and found two mandolins broken near the fireplace. The worst damage was to the instrument Monroe had carried through nearly four decades of music: a 1923 Gibson F-5 signed by master craftsman Lloyd Loar. A fireplace poker had been driven through its carved spruce top. Its body lay in pieces small enough to make repair appear unreasonable. No one was arrested, and the circumstances remained unresolved. The mandolin went back to Gibson in a box. Charlie Derrington received it there. Derrington was a musician and repairman who understood that replacing the ruined sections might produce a cleaner instrument while destroying the object Monroe wanted back. He began sorting the fragments. Large pieces were fitted first. Then came slivers. Accounts of the repair describe him gluing back pieces scarcely larger than toothpicks. For roughly three months, Derrington devoted much of his working week to the instrument. Internal supports held the fractured wood while glue dried. Missing areas were limited wherever possible. The goal was not to make the attack disappear. It was to recover enough of Monroe’s original mandolin for it to remain itself. On February 25, 1986, Monroe returned to Gibson. The repaired F-5 still carried visible damage. Its finish could not conceal every break, and its top had been penetrated and reassembled. Monroe took it in his hands and played it. He continued using the mandolin until his death in 1996. By then, the instrument had already shaped bluegrass history. Monroe’s hard, percussive attack had helped move the mandolin from a supporting role to the front of a new American music. The repaired wood now carried another part of that history—not only the sound Monroe had drawn from it, but the work required to let that sound continue. The F-5 eventually entered the permanent collection of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Visitors can see the cracks. Derrington could have hidden more of them by replacing more of the mandolin. Instead, he left the older wood in place and returned the instrument to the man whose hands had worn it. Monroe did not retire it. He tuned it and went back to work.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE MANDOLIN CAME BACK TO BILL MONROE IN…

Country Music

Buck Owens Made Capitol Give the Records Back In 1970, two Capitol Records representatives entered Buck Owens’s dressing room in Reno expecting to renew the contract of one of country music’s most profitable singers. Owens had another offer with him. Columbia Records was prepared to pay a reported $500,000 signing bonus. He was not certain he wanted the deal, but it gave him leverage over something more valuable than another advance: the recordings he had already made. At the time, master recordings generally remained with the record company. An artist could sing, choose musicians, shape arrangements and spend years promoting the finished records without ever owning the physical tapes from which future copies would be made. Owens understood that arrangement better than most performers. He had grown up poor, played marathon shifts in Bakersfield clubs and watched musicians earn money one night at a time. Success had taught him to build structures that could keep working when the applause stopped. He created Blue Book Music, invested in radio, formed a booking agency and maintained unusual control over the clear, hard-driving sound of the Buckaroos. The Capitol negotiation extended that control into the future. Owens agreed to remain with the label, but the contract provided for his Capitol masters—recordings stretching from 1957 to 1975—to return to him after the company’s remaining manufacturing period ended around 1980. The tape boxes contained “Act Naturally,” “Together Again,” “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” and the records that had carried the Bakersfield Sound far beyond California. Once they returned, Owens could decide how they were licensed, reissued and presented. He also retained masters from his syndicated television program, preserving performances by artists who had passed through The Buck Owens Ranch Show. Later generations would debate master ownership in public, often after discovering how little control even successful performers possessed. Owens had confronted the problem while his records were still selling. The men from Capitol came to Reno hoping to keep their star. Buck Owens made them negotiate with the future owner of the tapes.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE NIGHT BUCK OWENS NEGOTIATED FOR THE MUSIC…

Country Music

The musicians could hear Jim Reeves through their headphones, but there was no singer standing on the other side of the studio glass. Behind the console sat Chet Atkins, songwriter Cindy Walker, Walker’s mother and Mary Reeves. The voice coming from the tape had been recorded years earlier, when Jim made a simple demonstration of Walker’s “Distant Drums.” RCA had passed on the song. Jim recorded it anyway so Cindy and her mother could hear how he thought it should sound. It was never intended to become one of his defining records. After Reeves died in 1964, the tape remained. Mary had been involved in his career long before she became responsible for his estate. She and Jim read contracts together, discussed songs at home and operated publishing companies. Now she and Atkins had to decide whether a private, unfinished performance could become a commercial Jim Reeves recording without Jim there to approve it. In 1966, Atkins brought musicians into the studio and constructed an orchestral arrangement around the preserved vocal. The players followed Reeves’s timing, left space for his phrasing and supplied the finished surroundings the demonstration had never possessed. “Distant Drums” reached No. 1 on the American country chart. In Britain, it remained at No. 1 for five weeks and became the largest UK hit of Reeves’s career. The record opened a much longer posthumous chapter. Mary worked with RCA, Atkins and other Nashville musicians to locate demos and unused performances, add new accompaniment and maintain a stream of releases. Reeves continued placing records on the country charts for nearly two decades after his death. Each release kept his voice within reach of listeners. Each also required living people to make choices the singer could no longer make. The orchestra could provide strings, rhythm and a final ending. At the center remained the smaller performance Jim Reeves had left for two people: Cindy Walker and her mother, listening at home.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE YEARS WHEN MARY REEVES KEPT JIM’S VOICE…

Country Music

In August 1964, Johnny Cash purchased a full page in Billboard and addressed the men who controlled what America heard on the radio. “Where are your guts?” he asked. The dispute concerned “The Ballad of Ira Hayes,” part of Cash’s album Bitter Tears. Hayes had been one of the Marines photographed raising the American flag on Iwo Jima. He returned home a national symbol but remained a Pima man in a country that had taken much of his community’s water and land. He died in Arizona in 1955 at thirty-two. Peter La Farge wrote the song. Cash recorded it after meeting La Farge and listening closely to his material about Native history. Five of the album’s eight tracks came from La Farge; the record also addressed broken treaties, displacement and the destruction concealed beneath familiar Western legends. Columbia released the album, but promotion was hesitant. Many country programmers avoided the single. Some considered the subject political; others doubted their listeners wanted it. Cash had just come through “Ring of Fire” and “Understand Your Man.” He possessed enough commercial security to record safer material—and enough money to refuse silence. He bought copies of the single, enclosed his protest and sent the records to radio stations. He also contacted disc jockeys personally. The campaign helped push “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” to No. 3 on the country chart, although Bitter Tears never became one of his largest-selling albums. The record did not repair the history it described. Nor did Cash make himself the owner of that history. Its central voice belonged to La Farge’s writing and to the people whose experiences country radio had seldom treated as part of its audience. Cash used the part that belonged to him: the contract, the money, the famous name and the page in Billboard. Radio had declined to carry the record into American homes. So he placed it in envelopes and sent it back.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE RECORD JOHNNY CASH REFUSED TO LET COUNTRY…

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FOR FIVE WEEKS, DEBBIE REYNOLDS SAT AT MGM AND WATCHED HOLLYWOOD SELL ITS MEMORY BY THE LOT. In 1970, MGM began disposing of the costumes and props stored from decades of filmmaking. Debbie Reynolds came to the auction and raised her paddle. She kept returning. The studio treated the dresses, hats, furniture and shoes as inventory from productions already finished. Reynolds saw the physical evidence of a craft that Hollywood had never expected to need again. She bought what she could, often using her own money, and began asking other studios to let her preserve what they were throwing away. Over the following decades, the collection grew into thousands of costumes and objects. It included pieces associated with Judy Garland, Audrey Hepburn, Charlie Chaplin and Elizabeth Taylor. There was a version of the “Rosebud” sled from Citizen Kane. Most famously, there was the ivory dress Marilyn Monroe wore above the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch. Reynolds did not want the collection hidden in storage. She wanted a museum. A Hollywood museum never materialized. In 1995, she displayed part of the collection at her hotel and casino in Las Vegas, but only a fraction could be shown, and the business failed. Later plans for a permanent home near Dollywood in Tennessee also collapsed amid financial trouble. By 2011, Reynolds could no longer keep the archive together. The woman who had rescued Hollywood’s discarded history was required to sell it in a series of auctions. At the first major sale, Monroe’s subway dress brought $4.6 million before fees. Audrey Hepburn’s Ascot gown from My Fair Lady sold for millions more. The prices confirmed the cultural value Reynolds had recognized in 1970, but each winning bid carried another object away from the collection she had spent most of her adult life assembling. She called the sale the end of a dream. Studios had once been willing to empty these costumes from their warehouses because the pictures were finished. Reynolds understood that a film leaves more than images on a screen. Someone cut the cloth, fitted the body, stitched the hem and helped create the person an audience remembers. She saved that evidence for forty years. In the end, Hollywood proved willing to pay dearly for it—one separated piece at a time.

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DEBBIE REYNOLDS SAVED HOLLYWOOD’S CLOTHES. SHE COULD NOT SAVE THE ROOM THAT HELD THEM TOGETHER. For five weeks in 1970,…

Country Music

In 1980, Hank Snow stood on the Grand Ole Opry stage and used seven minutes of airtime to talk about an organization that was running short of money. It was not a music charity. The Hank Snow International Foundation for the Prevention of Child Abuse and Neglect wanted to support a refuge for endangered children and pay for abuse-prevention training. Snow had founded it in 1978 because the subject belonged to his own body. His parents separated when he was eight. After returning to his mother’s household, he lived under a stepfather whose beatings Snow later described without softening. He carried scars on his back and eventually decided that the fishing boats leaving Nova Scotia offered a safer life than the house to which he was expected to return. At twelve, he went to sea as a cabin boy. The work was built for grown men: hauling gear, cleaning fish and enduring the North Atlantic weather. Snow sang and played harmonica for the crew. After returning ashore, he taught himself guitar, absorbed Jimmie Rodgers records and slowly worked his way into Canadian radio. By 1950, “I’m Movin’ On” had made him one of country music’s largest stars. The title became a convenient description of his career, but Snow never treated movement as proof that the past had disappeared. When Nashville child-abuse cases drew public attention around 1980, he renewed his fundraising campaign. The foundation was struggling, and Snow said he had been unable to secure a major star for a benefit. Other Opry members responded that they had not known he needed them. The awkward exchange became its own evidence: even a famous man could have difficulty keeping neglected children in public view. Snow continued the work for years. Near the end of his life, he called the foundation—not the chart records, the long RCA career or the halls of fame—his finest achievement. As a boy, he had climbed aboard a schooner because no organized rescue was waiting. As an old man, he kept asking Nashville to help build one.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE WORK HANK SNOW CONSIDERED MORE IMPORTANT THAN…

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