Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

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RODNEY CROWELL SPENT YEARS WRITING HITS FOR EMMYLOU HARRIS, WAYLON JENNINGS AND OTHERS. THEN IN 1988, *DIAMONDS & DIRT* GAVE HIM FIVE CONSECUTIVE NO. 1 SINGLES — THE ONLY FIVE CHART-TOPPERS OF HIS OWN CAREER. By the time *Diamonds & Dirt* appeared, Rodney Crowell had already spent more than a decade proving he could write songs other people could carry. He had played in Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band, written for Waylon Jennings and Johnny Cash, produced Rosanne Cash and built a reputation around Nashville as a songwriter’s songwriter. His own solo career had been far less certain. Then Crowell made the most deliberately country record of his career. Released in 1988 and produced with Tony Brown, *Diamonds & Dirt* leaned hard into honky-tonk, fiddle, steel and tight Nashville rhythm playing. It also brought together musicians including Paul Franklin, Mark O’Connor, Eddie Bayers and Vince Gill. The first single, “It’s Such a Small World,” paired Crowell with Rosanne Cash. It went to No. 1. Then “I Couldn’t Leave You If I Tried” did the same. So did “She’s Crazy for Leavin’.” Then “After All This Time.” Finally, Crowell covered Buck Owens’ “Above and Beyond,” taking that song to No. 1 as well. Over roughly seventeen months in 1988 and 1989, all five singles from the album topped Billboard’s country chart. At the time, it was an unprecedented run from one country album. “After All This Time” also won Crowell the Grammy for Best Country Song in 1990. The strange part was what happened afterward. Crowell never returned to No. 1 as a solo artist. Instead of spending the rest of his career trying to reproduce *Diamonds & Dirt*, he gradually moved away from the machinery that had finally made him a mainstream star. His later work became more personal, literary and increasingly associated with Americana rather than country radio. For seventeen months, Rodney Crowell had exactly what Nashville is supposed to promise. Then he spent the next three decades proving he did not need it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” RODNEY CROWELL SPENT YEARS WRITING HITS FOR EMMYLOU…

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DOC WATSON WAS BLIND FROM CHILDHOOD, HELPED REDEFINE LEAD GUITAR IN BLUEGRASS—THEN LOST HIS SON AND MUSICAL PARTNER IN A FARM ACCIDENT THAT GAVE RISE TO MERLEFEST. Arthel “Doc” Watson was born in the mountains of western North Carolina in 1923. Before festival stages, Grammy awards, and generations of guitar players studying his right hand, he was a blind boy in Deep Gap, learning music from family, radio, church songs, fiddle tunes, old ballads, and the sounds moving through the hills around him. Country music was never far from that world. It was in the Carter Family songs, the gospel harmonies, the dance tunes, and the old melodies people played because there was work to forget, sorrow to carry, and Saturday night to survive. In 1953, Doc joined Jack Williams’ country and western swing band in Johnson City, Tennessee, playing electric lead guitar. The band needed fiddle tunes for dances, but did not always have a fiddle player. So Doc began picking those fast melodies on guitar. What usually belonged to the fiddle started coming out of six strings with speed, clarity, and drive. Doc Watson did not make the guitar louder by making it flashy. He made it authoritative. In his hands, the acoustic guitar was no longer just rhythm behind the singer. It could carry the tune, answer the voice, cut through a band, and still sound like somebody’s front porch. The folk revival found him in the 1960s, but it did not invent him. By then, the music was already deep in his hands: mountain songs, blues, gospel, country, bluegrass, and swing under one roof. Then came the son beside him. Merle Watson became Doc’s musical partner, traveling and playing with him for years. Their sound was not built on show-business polish. It was father and son, guitar answering guitar, old songs moving through family blood. Then Merle died in 1985 in a farming accident. The loss hit Doc so hard that he stepped back from performing for a time. Out of that grief came MerleFest, founded in 1988 at Wilkes Community College in Wilkesboro, North Carolina. What began as a memorial became one of America’s great gathering places for folk, bluegrass, country, Americana, and roots musicians. Doc Watson never had to chase Nashville. The country was already there in the old songs, the church harmonies, the fiddle tunes, and the mountain roads running through his hands. He could not see the road in the ordinary way. So he left one in sound — clear, fast, humble, and still running through every picker who tries to make a guitar speak like it was born in the hills.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” DOC WATSON WAS BLIND FROM CHILDHOOD, THEN TAUGHT…

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BILL ANDERSON WROTE “CITY LIGHTS” WHILE LOOKING DOWN ON A GEORGIA TOWN WITH ONLY A FEW TRAFFIC LIGHTS. RAY PRICE TURNED THAT SMALL-TOWN VIEW INTO A 13-WEEK NO. 1. Bill Anderson was nineteen, working as a disc jockey in Commerce, Georgia, and still far from becoming one of Nashville’s defining songwriters. One night in 1957, he went up to the roof of the three-story Andrew Jackson Hotel with his guitar. Looking across the town below, Anderson began writing about a man surrounded by bright city lights while trying to forget the woman he had lost. Commerce was hardly the glowing metropolis the lyric suggested. Anderson later remembered his father joking that the town had only a couple of traffic lights and a drugstore sign bright enough to qualify as nightlife. But imagination supplied what the skyline could not. Anderson finished “City Lights” and recorded his own version for TNT Records. It attracted some attention, but the real break came when Ray Price heard the song. Price recorded it in 1958. His version spent thirteen weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart and became one of the biggest records of his career. More importantly for Anderson, Nashville suddenly knew the name of the young man who had written it. The success opened doors quickly. Anderson moved to Nashville, signed with Decca as an artist, and joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1961. His own soft, conversational singing style earned him the nickname “Whispering Bill,” while his songwriting became even more valuable. He wrote Connie Smith’s “Once a Day,” which spent eight weeks at No. 1. He also supplied major songs for artists including Jim Reeves, Lefty Frizzell and Jean Shepard, while building his own run of hits such as “Still,” “Mama Sang a Song” and “For Loving You” with Jan Howard. Over time, “City Lights” became less important for what Commerce actually looked like than for what Anderson had managed to see from that rooftop. A nineteen-year-old DJ looked down at a very small town and wrote a song large enough for Ray Price, Nashville, and generations of singers after him.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BILL ANDERSON WROTE “CITY LIGHTS” WHILE LOOKING DOWN…

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CLARENCE WHITE HELPED REWIRE THE SOUND OF COUNTRY-ROCK WITH THE B-BENDER AND THE BYRDS—THEN, AT 29, WAS KILLED BY A DRUNK DRIVER WHILE LOADING HIS GEAR AFTER A SHOW. Clarence White did not enter country-rock through image. He entered through his hands. Before he joined The Byrds, before the electric Telecaster became part of his legend, he was already a bluegrass prodigy. With his brothers in the Kentucky Colonels, White helped push flatpicking guitar forward at a time when bluegrass lead guitar was still fighting for space beside banjo, fiddle, and mandolin. He could make an acoustic guitar move with fiddle-tune speed, but still keep the notes clean enough to feel hand-carved. That was the first revolution. The second came when he plugged in. By the late 1960s, White had moved into the California country-rock world. He played with Nashville West and then became a key member of The Byrds from 1968 to 1973, just as the band was moving deeper into country-rooted music. He was not the frontman. He did not need to be. His guitar became the bridge between bluegrass precision, Bakersfield snap, rock volume, and pedal-steel ache. The Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame notes that he worked with Gene Parsons to develop the B-Bender, a device that gave the electric guitar a steel-guitar effect. That small mechanical idea changed the emotional language of the instrument. With the Parsons/White B-Bender, a guitar strap pull could raise the B string and make a Telecaster bend like a pedal steel. Suddenly the electric guitar could cry in a way country listeners already understood, but rock audiences had not fully heard from six strings. It was not flash for the sake of flash. It was machinery used to make heartbreak more human. White’s playing helped define the country-rock Byrds, but he kept moving between worlds: bluegrass, sessions, Muleskinner, the New Kentucky Colonels, electric country-rock nights, and acoustic roots music. AllMusic notes that after The Byrds disbanded in 1973, he continued session work and joined Muleskinner with David Grisman, Peter Rowan, Richard Greene, Bill Keith, John Kahn, and John Guerin. Then came the ordinary scene that made the ending worse. In July 1973, after a gig in Palmdale, California, Clarence White was loading equipment when he was struck by a drunk driver. He died at 29. Premier Guitar places the accident early on July 15, 1973, after White had been playing with his brother Roland. There was no grand final solo. No mythic stage collapse. Just a working musician putting gear away after the job was done. That is the kind of detail that makes Clarence White’s story cut so deep. He was not famous enough to become a household name, but his fingerprints kept turning up everywhere — in country-rock bends, in bluegrass flatpicking, in Telecasters that suddenly sounded like they had a steel player hiding inside them. Clarence White did not live long enough to watch the sound spread. He only left the guitar with a new way to grieve

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” CLARENCE WHITE HELPED GIVE COUNTRY-ROCK ITS STEEL-GUITAR CRY…

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JOHN LENNON ONCE CORNERED DELBERT MCCLINTON BACKSTAGE TO ASK ABOUT HIS HARMONICA. THE BEATLES HADN’T BROKEN AMERICA YET. MCCLINTON’S HARP WAS ALREADY ON A NO. 1 HIT. Delbert McClinton grew up around Lubbock and Fort Worth, where country music, blues and R&B existed much closer together than record-store categories suggested. As a teenager, he worked Fort Worth roadhouses and eventually played behind artists including Jimmy Reed, Muddy Waters and other touring blues performers. In 1960, his recording of “Wake Up Baby” reportedly made him the first white artist played on Fort Worth’s Black-oriented radio station KNOK. Then Bruce Channel needed a harmonica player. McClinton supplied the sharp, repeating harp figure on Channel’s “Hey! Baby,” recorded in Fort Worth. The record reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1962 and stayed there three weeks. Its success sent Channel and McClinton to Britain. On part of that tour, the opening act was a still-young Liverpool group called the Beatles. John Lennon already played harmonica, so the later legend that McClinton simply “taught Lennon to play” overstates what happened. But Lennon admired the sound on “Hey! Baby” and asked McClinton for advice on how he produced it. McClinton showed him some techniques and lines backstage. Soon afterward, harmonica became one of the defining sounds of the Beatles’ earliest records, including “Love Me Do.” McClinton returned to Texas without becoming part of Beatlemania. He formed the Ron-Dels, spent years working clubs and later built a career that refused to stay inside one genre. Waylon Jennings and Doug Sahm recorded “If You Really Want Me To I’ll Go.” Emmylou Harris took his “Two More Bottles of Wine” to No. 1 on the country chart in 1978. McClinton eventually won Grammys while moving between country, blues, soul and rock. By then, the backstage encounter in England had become only a footnote in a much longer career. That may be the more revealing part of the story. McClinton did not spend the next sixty years trying to sound like the Beatles. He went back to Texas and kept sounding like the place that had taught him first.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOHN LENNON ONCE CORNERED DELBERT McCLINTON BACKSTAGE TO…

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GLEN SHERLEY WROTE ABOUT A CHAPEL HE COULD SEE INSIDE FOLSOM PRISON. THEN JOHNNY CASH TURNED THAT LOCKED-UP SONG INTO THE FINAL WORD OF A LIVE ALBUM. On January 13, 1968, Johnny Cash came to Folsom Prison to record in front of men who did not need “Folsom Prison Blues” explained to them. Glen Sherley was one of those men. He was serving time for armed robbery inside Folsom, a place built out of stone, routine, noise, fear, and waiting. Somewhere behind those walls stood Greystone Chapel — the prison chapel that gave Sherley his song. The chapel was not freedom. It was still inside the prison. That was what made the song cut deeper. Sherley was not writing about escape. He was writing about a place where a man could sit under a roof meant for prayer while still surrounded by bars. The building promised mercy, but the walls reminded everyone where they were. The night before the concert, Reverend Floyd Gressett handed Cash a tape of Sherley’s “Greystone Chapel.” Cash listened, learned it, and decided to use it. At the end of the Folsom show, after the laughter, the shouts, the prison songs, and the hard charge of the performance, Cash introduced a song written by a man right there inside Folsom. Then he said Sherley’s name. The room heard it. Sherley heard it too. A song written by an inmate about a chapel inside a prison was suddenly being sung by Johnny Cash to the very men who lived behind those walls. It was not a clean rescue. It was not a pardon. Sherley still wore the uniform. The doors still locked. The guards were still there. But for the length of the song, something moved differently through the room. When *At Folsom Prison* went out into the world, “Greystone Chapel” went with it. The last voice on the album was Cash’s, but the final image belonged to Sherley: a little chapel of stone, standing where hope and confinement had to share the same ground. That is why the song still feels heavier than a prison anecdote. It did not make Folsom disappear. It made the world hear that even behind its walls, someone had been looking at the chapel long enough to turn stone into a song.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GLEN SHERLEY WROTE A SONG ABOUT A CHAPEL…

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DUANE ALLMAN HELPED INVENT SOUTHERN ROCK, TURNED “HEY JUDE” INTO A GUITAR LANDMARK, AND BUILT THE ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND—THEN DIED IN A MOTORCYCLE CRASH AT JUST 24. He was born in Nashville, raised mostly in Florida, and came up through bands with his younger brother Gregg. But the place that sharpened him was Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where he became a session guitarist at FAME Studios. There, Duane learned how to disappear into other people’s records and still leave a mark. He played behind soul singers. He listened hard. He absorbed blues phrasing, gospel weight, country looseness, and the discipline of a studio player who had to make one lick matter. Then came Wilson Pickett’s “Hey Jude.” Duane suggested the Beatles song to Pickett, then put a guitar part on it so fierce that people who had not known his name suddenly wanted to know who was playing. That session helped make him more than a talented sideman. It made him a force other musicians could feel from across the room. But Duane was not built to stay behind someone else’s microphone. In 1969, he formed the Allman Brothers Band with Gregg in Macon, Georgia. The band did not sound like Nashville country, but country was in the ground under it — long roads, Southern grief, open chords, front-porch memory, and songs that stretched like highways after dark. The Allmans mixed blues, jazz, rock, soul, and country into something loose and dangerous. Duane’s slide guitar became the voice inside that sound: crying, climbing, cutting through the band like metal against warm air. By 1971, At Fillmore East had made the Allman Brothers one of the great live bands in America. Duane was not just playing solos. He was building conversations — guitar to guitar, band to audience, road to road. The music felt like it could keep expanding all night. Then, on October 29, 1971, he was riding his motorcycle in Macon when he crashed into a flatbed truck. Doctors tried to save him for hours. He died at 24. The cruel part is that Duane Allman never got the long arc most legends need. He did not grow old onstage. He did not get a late-career tribute run. He did not sit in interviews explaining what the sound had meant. He left almost as soon as the door opened. But the guitar stayed. It stayed in Macon. It stayed in southern rock. It stayed in every long jam that needed both fire and ache. It stayed in the country-adjacent sound of road bands that understood the South was never only one genre. Duane Allman did not live long enough to watch southern rock become history. He only had time to strike the match.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” DUANE ALLMAN HELPED TURN “HEY JUDE” INTO A…

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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.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” IN 1975, TERRY ALLEN RELEASED A COUNTRY RECORD…

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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.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” DONNA FARGO TAUGHT ENGLISH BY DAY AND SANG…

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NANCI GRIFFITH LEFT THE CLASSROOM FOR NASHVILLE—THEN HER SONGS FOUND KATHY MATTEA, EMMYLOU HARRIS, DOLLY PARTON AND A GRAMMY OF HER OWN. Nanci Griffith came out of Texas with a voice that did not sound built for the big country machine. It was high, bright, almost fragile — closer to a letter read aloud than a barroom confession. She was born in Seguin, raised in Austin, and began writing songs young. Before music became her full life, she worked as a teacher, carrying the patience of classrooms into songs about waitresses, old lovers, small towns, drive-ins, lonely rooms, and people who usually passed through country music only as background. That became her strange power. Griffith did not write like someone trying to dominate a room. She wrote like someone noticing the one person in the corner. “Love at the Five and Dime” followed Rita and Eddie through ordinary love and ordinary disappointment. “Gulf Coast Highway” sounded like a marriage standing quietly at the edge of time. “Trouble in the Fields” gave rural hardship a human face instead of turning it into a slogan. Nashville admired her, but it never fully knew how to sell her. She had country in the writing, folk in the delivery, Texas in the bones, and a literary tenderness that did not always fit the radio format. Still, the songs traveled. Kathy Mattea turned “Love at the Five and Dime” into a major country hit. Suzy Bogguss recorded her work. Emmylou Harris, Lyle Lovett, John Prine, Guy Clark, and other roots figures moved in the same orbit around her music. Griffith herself would later win a Grammy for Other Voices, Other Rooms, an album built not around proving herself louder, but around honoring the writers who had shaped her. That was the beautiful contradiction of Nanci Griffith. She was famous enough for other artists to know exactly who she was, but never famous in the simple, easy way. Her songs lived in the space between folk clubs and country charts, between Texas memory and Nashville craft, between a woman’s soft voice and the hard lives she kept writing about. When she died in Nashville in 2021, she left behind a catalog that felt less like a monument than a drawer full of letters. Some were opened by Kathy Mattea. Some by Emmylou. Some by younger Americana singers who heard in her work a permission to be gentle without being weak. Nanci Griffith did not kick the door into country music. She left it slightly open — and let the small stories walk in first.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” NANCI GRIFFITH LEFT THE CLASSROOM WITH A TEACHER’S…

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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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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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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.

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.