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Country Music

8 WEEKS AT NO. 1 BEGAN WITH BILL ANDERSON HEARING CONNIE SMITH SING ONE SONG AT A SMALL OHIO CONTEST. She was a young housewife in Ohio. She had a husband, a small child, and a voice she mostly used in local rooms where the prize was not a record deal or a television camera. It might be a little money. It might be a chance to sing before a larger crowd. It might be nothing more than somebody saying, “You ought to keep doing that.” Then she entered a talent contest near Columbus. Bill Anderson was there. At the time, Anderson was already a country star and songwriter with a career moving through Nashville. Connie stepped up and sang a Jean Shepard song. It was not a big stage. There was no label executive in the front row. No one knew they were watching the start of one of the most important female country careers of the 1960s. But Bill Anderson heard something. He did not just compliment her and go home. He helped bring her to Nashville. He helped her make demonstration recordings. He introduced her to people at RCA Victor. And when the label finally gave Connie Smith a chance, Anderson wrote a song for the voice he had heard in Ohio. The song was “Once a Day.” On July 16, 1964, Connie walked into RCA Studio B and recorded it with producer Bob Ferguson. It became her first single. Then the record took over country radio. “Once a Day” went to No. 1 and stayed there for eight weeks. No female country singer had ever taken a debut single to the top like that before. For nearly fifty years, no woman held No. 1 that long again. Connie Smith did not arrive in Nashville with a famous last name or a polished plan. She arrived because one songwriter heard a young woman sing one song in Ohio and understood that country music had just found a voice it could not afford to lose.

“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.”

EIGHT WEEKS AT NO. 1 BEGAN WITH BILL ANDERSON HEARING CONNIE SMITH SING ONE SONG AT A SMALL OHIO CONTEST.

Before Connie Smith became one of country music’s great voices, she was a young housewife in Ohio.

A husband.

A small child.

A voice she used in local rooms where the prize was rarely a record deal.

Maybe a little money.

Maybe a bigger crowd next time.

Maybe somebody saying, “You ought to keep doing that.”

Then she entered a talent contest near Columbus.

Bill Anderson was there.

He Heard More Than A Contest Singer

At the time, Bill Anderson was already a country star and songwriter with Nashville moving around him.

Connie stepped up and sang a Jean Shepard song.

It was not a famous stage.

No label executive was waiting in the front row.

No television camera was turning it into a headline.

But Bill Anderson heard something that did not belong in a small contest for long.

He did not simply praise her and go home.

He helped bring her to Nashville.

Nashville Did Not Have Her Yet

Anderson helped Connie make demonstration recordings.

He introduced her to people at RCA Victor.

He gave her a path into a city that could be very hard to enter when you did not have a famous name, a powerful manager, or a polished plan.

Then RCA gave her a chance.

And Bill Anderson wrote a song for the voice he had heard in Ohio.

The song was “Once a Day.”

One Session Changed Everything

On July 16, 1964, Connie Smith walked into RCA Studio B with producer Bob Ferguson.

She recorded “Once a Day.”

It became her first single.

The record did not arrive quietly.

It took over country radio.

“Once a Day” went to No. 1 and stayed there for eight weeks.

For a debut single by a female country singer, that was history.

For nearly fifty years, no woman held the top spot that long again.

The Record Was Bigger Than A Breakthrough

The song gave Connie Smith more than a hit.

It gave country music a new standard for what a female voice could carry.

There was hurt in it.

Control.

A kind of stillness that made the emotion hit harder instead of softer.

Connie did not need to oversing the pain.

She let the line stand there until the listener had nowhere else to go.

That became part of her gift.

What That Ohio Contest Really Left Behind

The deepest part of this story is not only that “Once a Day” spent eight weeks at No. 1.

It is how small the beginning looked.

A young mother in Ohio.

A local talent contest.

One Jean Shepard song.

Bill Anderson listening.

A drive toward Nashville.

A first session at RCA Studio B.

And a debut record that made country radio stop and stay with her.

Connie Smith did not arrive in Nashville because the industry had been waiting for her.

She arrived because one songwriter heard one song and knew country music could not afford to lose that voice.

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Country Music

A FATHER AND DAUGHTER SPENT YEARS MOVING BETWEEN SMALL LABELS WITHOUT A REAL HIT. THEN ONE CHEATING SONG TOOK THE KENDALLS TO NO. 1, A GRAMMY, AND THE CMA STAGE. Royce Kendall had already lived one version of a country career before his daughter joined him. Raised in Missouri with roots in the Arkansas Ozarks, he sang with his brother Floyce as the Austin Brothers, recorded in California, and appeared on regional country television. When the act ended, Royce returned to Missouri. By then, his teenage daughter Jeannie was developing a voice of her own. Royce supplied the lower harmony; Jeannie’s high voice floated above him. The contrast made them instantly recognizable—and often led listeners to assume they were husband and wife rather than father and daughter. They became the Kendalls. Their first album appeared on Stop Records in 1969. A cover of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” narrowly missed the country Top 50. They later signed with Dot and recorded country versions of pop songs, but none produced a real breakthrough. By 1977, the Kendalls had spent nearly a decade recording without a Top 40 country hit. Their next chance came from Ovation Records, a small independent label. A remake of Kitty Wells’s “Making Believe” reached only No. 80. Then they recorded Jerry Gillespie’s “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away.” The song followed two people moving toward an affair they knew was wrong. Jeannie sang the temptation with a bright, almost innocent tone, while Royce’s lower harmony gave the record a darker pull. The unusual pairing created its own tension: a cheating song delivered not by lovers, but by a father and daughter. Released in 1977, “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away” went to No. 1 on the country chart and crossed onto the Billboard Hot 100. It won the Grammy for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group, then earned the CMA award for Single of the Year. The breakthrough lasted. “Sweet Desire” reached No. 1 in 1978, and “Thank God for the Radio” did the same in 1984. Over the next several years, the Kendalls placed twenty-two singles in the country Top 40. Royce and Jeannie continued touring until May 1998, when Royce suffered a fatal stroke while they were on the road in Iowa. For almost thirty years, Jeannie had entered each chorus knowing exactly where her father’s voice would meet hers. After he was gone, the records preserved that place for him.

Country Music

THE GREAT DEPRESSION TOOK POP STONEMAN’S HOME, POSSESSIONS, AND RECORDING CAREER. DECADES LATER, HE RETURNED WITH HIS OWN CHILDREN—AND THE FAMILY BECAME THE FIRST CMA VOCAL GROUP OF THE YEAR. Ernest “Pop” Stoneman belonged to country music before the business had fully decided what to call it. A carpenter from Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains, he traveled to New York in 1924 after hearing an early hillbilly record and believing he could do better. His recording of “The Sinking of the Titanic” became a major success, and between 1925 and 1929 he cut more than two hundred songs. He also helped Ralph Peer prepare the 1927 Bristol Sessions, where the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers entered country music history. Then the Great Depression erased the market beneath him. Pop and his wife, Hattie, lost their home and most of their possessions. In 1932, they moved their large family to the Washington, D.C., area, where Pop found work at the Naval Gun Factory and eventually built a small home in Maryland. Music survived inside the household. Twenty-three children were born to Pop and Hattie, and thirteen reached adulthood. Several became accomplished musicians: Scotty played fiddle, Donna mandolin, Roni banjo, Jimmy bass, and Van guitar. In 1947, the family won a talent contest at Constitution Hall and gained local television exposure. Nine years later, Pop appeared on NBC’s The Big Surprise and won $10,000 answering questions about country music. The money helped revive the career the Depression had interrupted. That same year, his children won on Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts as the Blue Grass Champs. Pop later retired from factory work and joined them full-time. The children had inherited more than his name. Scotty’s fierce fiddle, Roni’s driving banjo, Donna’s mandolin, and the family harmonies created a fast, aggressive sound rooted in the mountain music Pop had recorded decades earlier. By the early 1960s, they were recording albums and appearing at festivals, clubs, the Grand Ole Opry, and on television. In 1964, they moved to California and entered the growing West Coast country scene. Their largest audience came through the syndicated series Those Stonemans, which began in 1966 and carried their music, humor, and family energy into homes nationwide. At the first CMA Awards in 1967, the Stoneman Family was named Vocal Group of the Year, winning over acts including the Statler Brothers, the Browns, Johnny Cash and June Carter, and the Anita Kerr Singers. Pop lived long enough to see it. His health declined during the television years, but he continued performing until shortly before his death on June 14, 1968. The family continued without him. Several children remained in music, and Roni later reached a wider audience as both a banjo player and Ida Lee Nagger on Hee Haw. The award had not restored the home the Depression took away. But it proved that the music preserved inside the house Pop rebuilt had outlived the collapse that nearly ended his career.

Country Music

NASHVILLE THOUGHT “HELP ME MAKE IT THROUGH THE NIGHT” WAS TOO FRANK FOR A WOMAN. SAMMI SMITH HEARD NO SCANDAL IN IT—ONLY LONELINESS. THEN HER LOW, RESTRAINED VOICE TOOK IT TO NO. 1. Sammi Smith had been working nightclubs long before Nashville knew what to do with her voice. Born Jewel Fay Smith in California and raised across Oklahoma, Texas, Arizona, and Colorado, she left school young and began singing professionally. By fifteen, she had married steel guitarist Bob White and entered the working life of country music from the road rather than from Music Row. In 1967, Marshall Grant, Johnny Cash’s bass player, heard her at the Someplace Else nightclub in Oklahoma City. Cash later helped her secure a Columbia contract, but her early singles brought only limited chart attention. Her voice was deep, husky, and unusually calm. It did not plead for sympathy or decorate every line. It sounded as though the emotion had already happened and the singer was deciding how much to reveal. That quality found its song in 1970. Kris Kristofferson’s “Help Me Make It Through the Night” asked for physical closeness without promises about tomorrow. Its directness made some artists and industry figures uneasy, especially when imagined in a woman’s voice. Smith did not consider it scandalous. She heard two lonely people trying to survive one night. She recorded the song at Monument Recording Studio in Nashville on May 6, 1970, with producer Jim Malloy. Rather than attack its provocative lines, she slowed everything down. Her performance was intimate but controlled, leaving enough space around the words for the loneliness to outweigh the seduction. Mega Records released the single later that year. It spent three weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart in early 1971 and crossed to No. 8 on the Hot 100. The recording became a million seller, won the CMA award for Single of the Year, and earned Smith the Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. It was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1998. The success also helped establish Kristofferson as one of Nashville’s defining songwriters. Other singers later recorded the song, but Smith’s version remained the standard because she never treated the woman in it as ashamed. She followed with hits including “Then You Walk In,” “I’ve Got to Have You,” and “Today I Started Loving You Again.” During the 1970s, she also moved closer to the emerging outlaw circle around Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson, carrying a voice too rough-edged and independent to fit comfortably inside Nashville polish. “Help Me Make It Through the Night” changed what a woman could say on country radio without lowering her eyes afterward. Sammi Smith did not soften the request or explain it away. She simply sang it as an adult truth—and left the judgment to everyone listening.

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IN 1975, WHILE OUTLAW COUNTRY WAS LEARNING HOW TO BREAK NASHVILLE’S RULES, TERRY ALLEN RELEASED A RECORD ABOUT PROSTITUTES, SAILORS, BLOODSHED AND THE MEXICAN BORDER — PRESSED IN ONLY ABOUT 1,000 COPIES. Terry Allen had grown up in Lubbock, Texas, the same West Texas city tied to Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings. But he left at 17, studied art in California and never treated music as separate from drawing, sculpture or theater. To him, they were different materials for the same story. That story became Juarez. Allen began the project as a group of drawings and songs, then expanded it into a full narrative about two couples moving through Texas, California and Mexico: a sailor with a Tijuana prostitute, and a pachuco traveling with his girlfriend. Their paths eventually meet in violence. The album did not behave like a conventional country record. Songs were joined by spoken passages. Piano, mandolin and pedal steel carried images of motel rooms, highways, guns, border towns and old Mexican history. The characters drifted between desire and danger as if Allen were cutting scenes in a film rather than arranging tracks for radio. The first edition was privately pressed in roughly 1,000 copies. That same year, Willie Nelson released Red Headed Stranger, another spare Texas concept album. Willie’s record became a commercial landmark. Juarez remained an underground object—too country for the art world, too strange and violent for country radio. Allen did not simplify the work to improve its chances. He continued treating Juarez as a living project, returning to its characters through drawings, performances, sculpture, video and later theatrical versions. The album was not a finished product he left behind. It became a landscape he kept re-entering. Four years later, he released Lubbock (On Everything), a double album recorded back in the city he had fled. Its humor, bitterness and country arrangements helped make it an early foundation for what would later be called alt-country. Allen’s songs were subsequently recorded by Bobby Bare, Guy Clark, Little Feat, Doug Sahm, Lucinda Williams and others. Yet Allen never settled into the role of country singer. His visual work entered major museums, while his records remained fiercely regional and difficult to classify. He belonged partly to outlaw country, partly to conceptual art, and partly to a Southwest storytelling tradition that treated highways and border towns as psychological territory. Decades later, Juarez was reissued with the visual material restored beside the music. That changed the way the album could finally be seen. What had once looked like an obscure country record was revealed as only one surviving piece of a much larger construction. Terry Allen had not spent his career trying to fit art inside country music. He had built a world large enough to hold both—and left the audience to decide where the border was.

Country Music

8 WEEKS AT NO. 1 BEGAN WITH BILL ANDERSON HEARING CONNIE SMITH SING ONE SONG AT A SMALL OHIO CONTEST. She was a young housewife in Ohio. She had a husband, a small child, and a voice she mostly used in local rooms where the prize was not a record deal or a television camera. It might be a little money. It might be a chance to sing before a larger crowd. It might be nothing more than somebody saying, “You ought to keep doing that.” Then she entered a talent contest near Columbus. Bill Anderson was there. At the time, Anderson was already a country star and songwriter with a career moving through Nashville. Connie stepped up and sang a Jean Shepard song. It was not a big stage. There was no label executive in the front row. No one knew they were watching the start of one of the most important female country careers of the 1960s. But Bill Anderson heard something. He did not just compliment her and go home. He helped bring her to Nashville. He helped her make demonstration recordings. He introduced her to people at RCA Victor. And when the label finally gave Connie Smith a chance, Anderson wrote a song for the voice he had heard in Ohio. The song was “Once a Day.” On July 16, 1964, Connie walked into RCA Studio B and recorded it with producer Bob Ferguson. It became her first single. Then the record took over country radio. “Once a Day” went to No. 1 and stayed there for eight weeks. No female country singer had ever taken a debut single to the top like that before. For nearly fifty years, no woman held No. 1 that long again. Connie Smith did not arrive in Nashville with a famous last name or a polished plan. She arrived because one songwriter heard a young woman sing one song in Ohio and understood that country music had just found a voice it could not afford to lose.

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DONNA FARGO TAUGHT ENGLISH BY DAY AND SANG IN CALIFORNIA CLUBS AT NIGHT. THEN TWO SONGS SHE WROTE HERSELF MADE HER THE FIRST WOMAN IN COUNTRY MUSIC WITH BACK-TO-BACK MILLION-SELLING SINGLES. Before country radio knew Donna Fargo, students at Northview High School in Covina, California, knew her as their English teacher. Born Yvonne Vaughn in Mount Airy, North Carolina, she studied at High Point College and the University of Southern California before entering the classroom. She eventually became head of the school’s English department while building a second life after work. At night, she sang in clubs around Southern California. In 1966, she met Stan Silver, who became her manager and later her husband. She adopted the name Donna Fargo, opened shows for artists such as Ray Price, and recorded for small labels. The Academy of Country Music named her a promising new female vocalist, but national success did not follow. Fargo kept teaching—and writing her own songs. At a time when female singers were often handed material chosen by producers and publishers, she was shaping her own voice with the same attention to language she brought into the classroom. One song began with a title that would not work. She first tried “The Happiest Girl in the World,” but the rhyme felt forced. Changing it to “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.” unlocked the song. Instead of betrayal, drinking or divorce, Fargo wrote about waking beside the person you love and moving through an ordinary morning almost overwhelmed by happiness. Dot Records released it in March 1972. The song reached No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart and No. 11 on the Hot 100. It earned Fargo the Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance and the CMA award for Single of the Year. She had already written the follow-up. “Funny Face” came from a private nickname in her marriage. Fargo reportedly offered it first to comedian and Hee Haw performer George Lindsey, who declined. She then recorded it herself at Jack Clement’s Nashville studio, with Stan Silver producing. Released later in 1972, “Funny Face” spent three weeks at No. 1 country and climbed to No. 5 on the Hot 100. Both singles sold more than a million copies, making Fargo the first woman in country music to achieve back-to-back million-selling singles with songs she had written herself. Her debut album showed the same control. She wrote eight of its ten tracks. It reached No. 1 on the country chart and was certified gold. “Superman” and “You Were Always There” later gave her two more No. 1 country hits, while many of her own compositions continued reaching the Top 10 throughout the decade. The classroom had trained her to hear what one changed phrase could do. By 1972, Donna Fargo was no longer waiting for Nashville to choose her words. Other people were buying records to sing them.

Country Music

A FATHER AND DAUGHTER SPENT YEARS MOVING BETWEEN SMALL LABELS WITHOUT A REAL HIT. THEN ONE CHEATING SONG TOOK THE KENDALLS TO NO. 1, A GRAMMY, AND THE CMA STAGE. Royce Kendall had already lived one version of a country career before his daughter joined him. Raised in Missouri with roots in the Arkansas Ozarks, he sang with his brother Floyce as the Austin Brothers, recorded in California, and appeared on regional country television. When the act ended, Royce returned to Missouri. By then, his teenage daughter Jeannie was developing a voice of her own. Royce supplied the lower harmony; Jeannie’s high voice floated above him. The contrast made them instantly recognizable—and often led listeners to assume they were husband and wife rather than father and daughter. They became the Kendalls. Their first album appeared on Stop Records in 1969. A cover of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” narrowly missed the country Top 50. They later signed with Dot and recorded country versions of pop songs, but none produced a real breakthrough. By 1977, the Kendalls had spent nearly a decade recording without a Top 40 country hit. Their next chance came from Ovation Records, a small independent label. A remake of Kitty Wells’s “Making Believe” reached only No. 80. Then they recorded Jerry Gillespie’s “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away.” The song followed two people moving toward an affair they knew was wrong. Jeannie sang the temptation with a bright, almost innocent tone, while Royce’s lower harmony gave the record a darker pull. The unusual pairing created its own tension: a cheating song delivered not by lovers, but by a father and daughter. Released in 1977, “Heaven’s Just a Sin Away” went to No. 1 on the country chart and crossed onto the Billboard Hot 100. It won the Grammy for Best Country Vocal Performance by a Duo or Group, then earned the CMA award for Single of the Year. The breakthrough lasted. “Sweet Desire” reached No. 1 in 1978, and “Thank God for the Radio” did the same in 1984. Over the next several years, the Kendalls placed twenty-two singles in the country Top 40. Royce and Jeannie continued touring until May 1998, when Royce suffered a fatal stroke while they were on the road in Iowa. For almost thirty years, Jeannie had entered each chorus knowing exactly where her father’s voice would meet hers. After he was gone, the records preserved that place for him.