Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

In 1950, Hank Williams began recording songs that MGM believed could not safely be sold under the name Hank Williams. The concern was not scandal. It was the jukebox. Operators kept standing orders for new Williams releases because songs such as “Lovesick Blues” and “Long Gone Lonesome Blues” reliably drew coins in honky-tonks. If one of those customers selected a Hank Williams record and heard a spoken sermon about mortality, poverty or moral failure, the operator might feel that MGM had sent the wrong product. Producer Fred Rose found a practical division. The honky-tonk singer would remain Hank Williams. The man reciting parables would become Luke the Drifter. MGM did not seriously attempt to conceal Luke’s identity. Williams sometimes introduced him on radio as a close relative or half brother. The pseudonym functioned less like a disguise than a label placed on a separate room inside the same man. As Luke, Williams recorded “Pictures from Life’s Other Side,” “Be Careful of Stones That You Throw,” “Men with Broken Hearts” and other pieces built around spoken verses, gospel imagery and sparse accompaniment. These records did not ask dancers to remain on the floor. They asked listeners to stand still long enough to consider a funeral, an abandoned woman, a man sleeping beneath newspapers or the ease with which respectable people condemned someone else. The separation contained an uncomfortable irony. Luke offered restraint and moral counsel while Hank’s own life was becoming increasingly unstable through pain, alcohol, pills and a punishing schedule. The records should not be treated as a confession he consistently obeyed. They preserve the standards he could articulate even when he could not live inside them. After Williams died in 1953, MGM collected the material on an album whose title finally placed both names together: Hank Williams as Luke the Drifter. The label had created Luke to protect the commercial expectations attached to Hank. What survived was evidence that those expectations had never been large enough to contain his entire voice.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE PART OF HANK WILLIAMS THAT HAD TO…

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Luther Perkins could make a Johnny Cash record recognizable with only a few notes. He was not a flashy guitarist, and that was part of the point. When Cash, Perkins and Marshall Grant began rehearsing together in Memphis in the mid-1950s, none of them considered themselves highly accomplished musicians. Grant later remembered that their limitations forced them into something simpler: bass and guitar hitting the same basic movement, Cash adding rhythm, and the three men gradually finding the dry, repetitive pulse that became the Tennessee Two’s signature sound. Perkins’s muted picking sat at the center of it. He played with so much restraint that the empty space between notes became part of the arrangement. That approach followed Cash from the first Sun records through “I Walk the Line,” “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Ring of Fire” and into the period when the Tennessee Two became the Tennessee Three. The Country Music Hall of Fame still preserves one of Perkins’s Fender Jaguars, noting that he used it on “Ring of Fire.” By January 1968, Luther was still there when Cash walked into Folsom Prison and recorded the album that revived his career. Three months later, the same band played San Francisco’s Carousel Ballroom, with Perkins still supplying the spare guitar figure beneath Cash’s voice. He did not make it to the next chapter. Later that year, Perkins died after a fire at his Tennessee home. When *The Johnny Cash Show* premiered on ABC in June 1969, Carl Perkins was filling the guitar chair temporarily, and Bob Wootton soon became the permanent replacement. The television audience saw Cash entering the largest period of his career with a new guitarist beside him. The sound continued because it had to. Wootton learned the parts, the Tennessee Three carried on, and Cash’s career widened far beyond anything the original Memphis trio could have imagined. But the economy of those early records never disappeared. Decades later, guitarists such as Duane Eddy still singled out Luther Perkins as one of the players who had shown how much could be done on the low strings without filling every space. Perkins left behind no need for virtuoso mythology. A few muted notes were enough.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” LUTHER PERKINS DID NOT HAVE TO PLAY FAST…

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Johnny Cash met Vivian Liberto at a roller-skating rink in San Antonio only weeks before the Air Force sent him to Germany in 1950. For the next three years, distance became the relationship. Cash wrote to her almost every day from Landsberg, while Vivian saved the correspondence; the surviving exchange eventually filled more than 10,000 pages. During those same lonely years, Cash bought a guitar, began writing songs and formed his first small band with fellow servicemen. They married on August 7, 1954, shortly after his return, and eventually had four daughters. Then the life they had imagined in those letters changed with extraordinary speed. Sun Records signed Cash, “I Walk the Line” became a major hit, and he went from husband and young father to a musician spending much of his life on buses, stages and package tours. The song itself became associated with the promise of fidelity he was trying to maintain at home. Fame brought problems the letters had never prepared them for. Cash’s drug use worsened, his relationship with June Carter deepened, and Vivian was left raising their daughters through increasingly long absences. PBS recounts one painful scene after a Hollywood Bowl show when Vivian and the children watched Cash leave in a car with June; a band member remembered the anguish on Vivian’s face. In 1965 the family was hit by something stranger still. After a photograph of Cash and Vivian circulated nationally, white supremacists falsely claimed she was Black and attacked the family over what they believed was an interracial marriage. Rosanne Cash later recalled the resulting harassment and fear as one of the ugliest memories of her childhood. Vivian filed for divorce in 1966. Decades later, when the public story of Johnny Cash had become inseparable from June Carter, Vivian returned to those boxes of old correspondence while preparing her own memoir. Before the Man in Black, before the addictions and comeback, there had been a young airman in Germany writing home every day to the woman he expected to spend his life with.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOHNNY CASH WROTE TO VIVIAN LIBERTO ALMOST EVERY…

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Before Minnie Pearl became the loudest woman at the Grand Ole Opry, Sarah Ophelia Colley spent years standing quietly at the edges of small Southern communities. Colley had studied theater and dance at Ward-Belmont College, expecting to become a serious actress. Instead, after graduating in 1932, she took a job with the Wayne P. Sewell Producing Company. She traveled from town to town, helping local organizations stage community plays. The work placed her among women whose lives rarely reached a professional stage. While rehearsals were being arranged and costumes fitted, Colley listened to their stories—their family complaints, courtship memories, regional expressions and unguarded ways of making hardship funny. An elderly woman she met in North Alabama became a particularly important influence. From those encounters, Colley gradually constructed a character. Minnie Pearl wore secondhand-looking dresses, heavy stockings, worn shoes and a flowered straw hat. A price tag eventually dangled from its brim, suggesting a woman who had put on her best purchase and forgotten one small, revealing detail. Minnie made her professional debut at a women’s club event in Aiken, South Carolina, in 1939. The following year, Colley performed at a bankers’ convention in her Tennessee hometown. WSM executives heard the act and invited her to the Grand Ole Opry. She debuted there on November 30, 1940. Within a week, the station received more than 300 cards, telegrams and letters addressed to Minnie Pearl. The audience had recognized someone. Yet Minnie was not a direct copy of one rural woman, nor was Sarah Colley secretly as unsophisticated as the character appeared. She was an educated performer assembling years of careful observation into a woman who could enter a room loudly without making anyone inside feel small. The $1.98 tag became her most visible joke. Colley later described it as a sign of human frailty: Minnie had dressed for the occasion but overlooked the evidence still hanging from her hat. For more than fifty years, that forgotten tag remained exactly where Sarah Colley had deliberately placed it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” SARAH OPHELIA COLLEY SPENT YEARS TEACHING SMALL-TOWN WOMEN…

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Every morning in Mexia, Texas, Cindy Walker rose before daylight, made black coffee and went upstairs to write. She worked on a manual typewriter she had painted with pink flowers. When a song was ready, she carried it downstairs to her mother. Oree Walker could hear Cindy sing a new composition once or twice, locate its shape on the piano and help turn it into a home demonstration. Cindy supplied words and melody; Oree tested the song’s balance, accompanied her daughter and became the first audience whose judgment mattered. The arrangement lasted for decades. Cindy had already written for Bing Crosby, Bob Wills and other major artists before returning to Texas in 1954. Moving to the small house in Mexia did not remove her from the industry. It created a working rhythm that allowed her to participate without living permanently inside Nashville. Each autumn, Cindy and Oree traveled by train to Tennessee. They rented an apartment and a piano, stayed for several months and invited singers, musicians and publishers to hear the year’s material. Oree cooked. The apartment became part listening room, part publishing office and part family table. Nashville visitors called her “Mama,” including some who were older than she was. Then mother and daughter returned to Texas, where Cindy resumed the early mornings. The system produced songs recorded by artists across five decades. “You Don’t Know Me,” “Dream Baby,” “In the Misty Moonlight” and hundreds of other compositions moved outward from the Mexia house. Oree died in 1991. Six years later, Cindy entered the Country Music Hall of Fame wearing a dress her mother had once selected for an awards occasion. Oree had told her to save it in case the Hall of Fame ever called. Cindy had dismissed the possibility. On the induction stage, she recited a poem about the dress and the woman who was no longer there to see it. For most of Cindy Walker’s career, Nashville heard the finished songs. Oree had always heard them one room earlier.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” CINDY WALKER WROTE HITS FROM A SMALL TEXAS…

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On Saturday afternoons in Poor Valley, Janette Carter moved between a concert hall and a kitchen window. Musicians carried fiddles and guitars toward the stage. Behind the concession counter, soup beans and cornbread were being prepared for the families who would arrive before dark. Janette had promised her father, A. P. Carter, that she would keep his music alive. At the time, she was working as an elementary-school cook. A. P., Sara and Maybelle Carter had entered recording history at Bristol in 1927. By the closing years of A. P.’s life, the original Carter Family had long since separated, and the commercial country industry they helped create had moved elsewhere. The family store in rural Virginia remained. Janette began hosting informal performances there. In 1976, she and local residents built an 880-seat amphitheater beside it. Seats were taken from retired school buses. Railroad ties became benches. The Carter Family Fold did not resemble the institutional monument its name might suggest; it looked like something a community had made with the materials at hand. Every Saturday, Janette welcomed the crowd with her brother Joe and her son Dale. She kept admission low enough for parents, children and grandparents to attend together. Acoustic music dominated the room. Johnny Cash, her cousin June’s husband, was among the rare performers permitted to bring electric instruments onto the stage. The Fold preserved more than Carter Family songs. It gave old-time musicians a regular place to work when radio had little use for them. Children watched grandparents dance. Visitors who had encountered the Carter name through records or scholarship entered a living room governed by family rules. Janette hosted those nights for more than thirty years. She earned little from them and expected little beyond keeping the doors open. Country music had begun turning her parents into history. Janette answered with Saturday-night supper, salvaged seats and a floor built for people who still wanted to dance.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JANETTE CARTER KEPT COUNTRY HISTORY WARM ON SATURDAY…

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The name Skeeter Davis was built for two voices. Skeeter had been born Mary Frances Penick. She met Betty Jack Davis at Dixie Heights High School in northern Kentucky, where the two girls began singing together between classes and at local events. They called themselves the Davis Sisters even though they were not related, and Mary Frances took her friend’s surname as part of the act. By 1953, the borrowed name was beginning to mean something beyond their hometown. RCA Victor signed the duo, and the young women recorded “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know.” Their close harmony carried the single to No. 1 on the country chart, where it remained for eight weeks. For the first time, a future large enough for both of them seemed to be opening. They were still traveling to support the record when that future ended. After performing in Wheeling, West Virginia, the Davis Sisters were returning toward Kentucky on August 2, 1953, when their car was struck near Cincinnati. Betty Jack was killed. Skeeter survived with serious injuries and spent weeks recovering. The record kept climbing. Listeners across the country were discovering the sound of two young women just as one of those voices had disappeared. The name printed on the label still read the Davis Sisters, preserving a partnership that could no longer walk into a studio together. Skeeter eventually tried to continue the act with Betty Jack’s younger sister, Georgia. The replacement kept the family name intact, but it could not reproduce the friendship or the particular blend that had created the original record. By 1956, Skeeter stepped away from the duo. When she returned as a solo artist two years later, she did not return as Mary Frances Penick. She remained Skeeter Davis. That was the name she carried into the Grand Ole Opry in 1959 and onto “The End of the World,” the 1962 recording that made her an international crossover star. Audiences who had never heard of Betty Jack came to know Skeeter by the surname the two friends had once shared for practical reasons. Keeping it may not have been intended as a public memorial. It did something quieter. Every record sleeve, radio introduction and theater marquee continued to carry a small part of the girl who had stood beside her before either of them knew how far their voices might travel.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MARY FRANCES PENICK BORROWED HER BEST FRIEND’S LAST…

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During the first years of Flatt & Scruggs, Earl Scruggs tried to handle bookings while traveling with the band. That meant locating telephone booths between performances, returning promoters’ calls from the road and negotiating future work while already exhausted by the current engagement. In 1955, Earl asked his wife, Louise, to return one of those calls. She completed the booking and asked for more. Louise had worked as a bookkeeper before marrying Earl in 1948. She understood records, figures and the discipline required to make informal work function like a business. Within a short period, she was handling all of Earl’s dates. By 1956, she had taken responsibility for Flatt & Scruggs’ management, including payroll, publicity, accounting and record-contract negotiations. She was entering a part of country music almost entirely controlled by men. Louise did not simply organize the work already available. She changed where the band could work. While many bluegrass acts remained inside regional radio and schoolhouse circuits, she pursued college audiences, folk festivals and major concert halls. She helped place Flatt & Scruggs at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and later pushed toward Carnegie Hall. She also understood that album covers, liner notes and publicity materials could present the group as serious musicians rather than rural novelty entertainers. Those decisions positioned the band for the folk revival and for opportunities such as The Beverly Hillbillies, whose theme carried their sound into millions of homes. When Flatt & Scruggs separated in 1969, Louise continued managing Earl and the Earl Scruggs Revue, helping connect his music with younger artists and audiences. Her work was usually performed away from the microphone. A completed booking left no audible trace on a record. A properly paid musician did not reveal who calculated the payroll. Yet the distance between a roadside telephone booth and Carnegie Hall was not crossed by banjo playing alone. It required someone at home who knew which call to return—and which room the music should enter next.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” EARL SCRUGGS ASKED HIS WIFE TO RETURN ONE…

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Justin Tubb was four years old the first time he sang on radio, and nine when he appeared on the Grand Ole Opry. The problem was that everyone already knew exactly whose son he was. Ernest Tubb had become one of country music’s defining stars by the 1940s, and Justin grew up close enough to that machinery to understand both its advantages and its traps. He later made a point of distancing himself from his father’s reputation, rarely presenting himself simply as “Ernest Tubb’s son” and trying instead to earn his own place as a singer and songwriter. He even took a detour through the University of Texas, studying journalism while forming a small country band on the side. Music won. Justin left school, moved to Nashville and worked as a disc jockey at WHIN in Gallatin, a job his father had encouraged because it forced him to learn how to handle a microphone and an audience without leaning on the family name. The break came slowly. His early Decca singles did little, but duets with Goldie Hill began charting in 1954. A year later, at twenty, Justin joined the Grand Ole Opry, becoming its youngest male member at the time. His larger legacy came from the writing room. Justin wrote “Lonesome 7-7203” for Hawkshaw Hawkins, along with “Love Is No Excuse,” “Keeping Up with the Joneses” and other songs recorded by artists including George Jones, Patsy Cline, Jim Reeves, Faron Young and Dottie West. Six of his compositions earned BMI awards. Father and son still crossed paths. Justin wrote material Ernest recorded, later worked with him in the Ernest Tubb Record Shops, and near the end of his own life assembled a duet project using recordings his father had left behind. *Just You and Me Daddy* was released after Justin died in 1998. By then, the name Tubb no longer pointed in only one direction. Ernest had given Justin access to country music. Justin spent the rest of his career making sure the songs gave him a reason to stay there.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JUSTIN TUBB WAS SINGING ON RADIO AT FOUR…

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Ted Webb died in 1959, just as his daughter was beginning to sing outside the home and write songs of her own. He never lived to hear “Coal Miner’s Daughter.” For Loretta, that title was never an invented piece of country imagery. Ted had worked in the Van Lear mines near Butcher Hollow, supporting eight children on a miner’s wages while Clara Webb kept the household running. The family lived without electricity or indoor plumbing, and Loretta later described a childhood built around field work, coal dust, a battery-powered radio and whatever could be stretched far enough to feed a large family. Loretta left Kentucky as a teenager after marrying Doolittle Lynn and moving west to Washington. By the time Ted died, she was raising four children of her own and only beginning to perform seriously. PBS places his death in the same year she started writing songs and appearing more regularly in public, leaving almost no overlap between the father who had raised her and the career that would eventually turn their family history into national memory. More than a decade later, Loretta wrote “Coal Miner’s Daughter” from those details rather than from nostalgia polished smooth by success. The song kept Ted at work in the mines, Clara at the washboard, the children inside the cramped home, and Butcher Hollow exactly where it had always been. Released in 1970, it became one of the records most closely associated with her life and later supplied the title for her autobiography and the 1980 film based on it. The family story did not remain frozen in the song. Loretta’s brother Herman stayed near Butcher Hollow for decades, operating Webb’s Grocery and helping preserve the family home for visitors, while younger siblings such as Peggy Sue and Crystal Gayle carried other branches of the Webb family into music. Ted Webb never saw the daughter from that mining camp become one of country music’s defining writers. But the house, the hollow and the work he did there became permanent parts of the record she left behind.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” TED WEBB DIED BEFORE LORETTA LYNN BECAME A…

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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.

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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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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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.