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Country Music

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

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

Country Music

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

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

Country Music

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

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

Country Music

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

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

Country Music

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

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

Country Music

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

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

Country Music

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

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

Country Music

JOHNNY DARRELL BUILT HIS BEST YEARS AROUND PEOPLE COUNTRY SONGS OFTEN LEFT IN THE SHADOWS: A PARALYZED VETERAN, A MOTHER DRIVEN INTO PROSTITUTION, AND A FATHER BEGGING TO KEEP HIS FAMILY TOGETHER. Johnny Darrell never became one of Nashville’s largest stars. But during the late 1960s, he developed a remarkable instinct for songs that went somewhere darker than ordinary heartbreak. In 1967, he took Mel Tillis’s “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” to No. 9 on the country chart. The narrator is a disabled war veteran, unable to stop his wife from leaving for the evening and imagining that she is going to another man. Tillis based the story on a World War II veteran, although the reference to an Asian war caused many listeners to associate it with Vietnam. Two years later, Kenny Rogers and the First Edition would turn “Ruby” into a major international crossover hit. Darrell had already shown that the story could work on country radio. Then came Dallas Frazier’s “The Son of Hickory Holler’s Tramp.” Its narrator remembers a mother abandoned by an alcoholic husband and left with fourteen children. To keep them fed, she sells sex to men from the surrounding community. The song does not treat her as its villain; it is told by the son who understands what she sacrificed to keep the family alive. Darrell’s version reached the country chart before O.C. Smith carried the song to a much larger pop audience in 1968. Darrell followed with another uncomfortable domestic story. Bobby Goldsboro’s “With Pen in Hand” places the listener inside a collapsing marriage as one parent faces divorce and the possibility of losing daily contact with a child. Darrell released the first single version in April 1968, and it became his biggest country hit, reaching No. 3. Taken together, the records reveal why Darrell’s catalog feels different. He was repeatedly drawn toward songs about people trapped by circumstances larger than a conventional breakup: war wounds, poverty, prostitution, custody, shame and families coming apart. AllMusic later characterized his career as having an unusual knack for identifying songs that other performers would subsequently make more famous. Darrell never received the recognition those songs eventually did. But listen to his late-1960s records in sequence and another legacy appears: before some of these stories became standards, Johnny Darrell was already willing to put their most uncomfortable characters on country radio—and leave the listener alone with them.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOHNNY DARRELL BUILT HIS BEST YEARS AROUND PEOPLE…

Country Music

BEFORE MERLE HAGGARD BECAME A STAR, HE PLAYED BASS IN WYNN STEWART’S BAND. BEFORE “BAKERSFIELD SOUND” HAD A NAME, STEWART WAS ALREADY MAKING IT. Wynn Stewart never became as famous as Buck Owens or Merle Haggard, but both men emerged from a musical world he helped define. Born in Missouri and raised partly in California, Stewart was recording by the mid-1950s. His early records already leaned away from Nashville polish toward a sharper West Coast sound built on steel guitar, bright electric rhythm, and hard country phrasing. In 1959, Stewart took a regular job at the Nashville Nevada Club in Las Vegas. One of the young musicians who joined his band was Merle Haggard. Haggard had recently come out of San Quentin and was still trying to rebuild his life through music. Playing bass behind Stewart gave him steady work and placed him beside a singer whose sound was already pointing toward the style Haggard would later make famous. Stewart also had another important connection. Buck Owens recorded Stewart’s “Above and Beyond” in 1960 and took it to No. 3 on the country chart. The same West Coast circle of musicians, writers, clubs and studios was beginning to separate itself from Nashville long before anyone treated Bakersfield as a movement. Stewart scored his own breakthrough with “Wishful Thinking,” a Top 5 country hit in 1960. Then, in 1967, came “It’s Such a Pretty World Today.” The record spent two weeks at No. 1 and became Stewart’s signature hit. By then, Buck Owens and Merle Haggard were already major stars, and the sound Stewart had helped shape was being identified with Bakersfield itself. That timing partly explains why his name faded behind theirs. Stewart influenced the scene before the scene had a marketable identity. He gave Haggard work before Haggard had hits, supplied Buck Owens with material, and recorded the same lean, electric country that would soon define an era. History usually remembers the artists who carry a sound to its largest audience. Wynn Stewart belonged to the earlier moment—when that sound was still being built in clubs, before anyone knew it would need a name.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BEFORE MERLE HAGGARD BECAME A STAR, HE PLAYED…

Country Music

GUY CLARK HAD ONE LINE — “I WISH I WAS IN AUSTIN IN THE CHILI PARLOR BAR.” HE KEPT ASKING RODNEY CROWELL TO HELP HIM FINISH IT. CROWELL WOULDN’T. SO CLARK SAT DOWN ALONE AND WROTE “DUBLIN BLUES.” Guy Clark and Susanna had traveled to Ireland together. Then the trip split in two. Guy had to return to the United States for a golf tournament in Oklahoma. Susanna stayed overseas and decided to continue on to Italy, calling a friend to meet her in Ireland. The separation gave Clark exactly the kind of distance his songs often needed before ordinary places began carrying more weight. He already had one line: “I wish I was in Austin in the Chili Parlor Bar.” The place was real. Austin’s Chili Parlor was one of the joints Clark knew, and its cheap “Mad Dog Margaritas” gave him another piece of the song. He repeatedly tried to convince Rodney Crowell to write it with him. Crowell refused. Eventually Clark sat down by himself. He borrowed the melodic foundation from the traditional song “Handsome Molly,” something he later acknowledged openly. Clark loved the old melody and saw no reason to hide where it came from; preserving traditional songs by carrying pieces of them forward was part of the craft as he understood it. What emerged was not really a travel song. “Dublin Blues” moved through Austin, Dublin, Paris, Rome and other places, but geography was only the surface. Underneath was a man cataloging beauty, regret and distance while wishing he could be somewhere simpler with someone who was no longer beside him. Clark recorded it as the title track of his 1995 album Dublin Blues. The record arrived just as the newly organized Americana radio format was taking shape, and the album reached No. 1 on the Gavin Americana chart. The song became one of the moments audiences waited for in Clark’s shows. He said he could feel the room change when he began the opening line. By then, the Chili Parlor was no longer just a bar in Austin. Guy Clark had turned it into the place people imagined when they wished they were somewhere else.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” GUY CLARK HAD ONE LINE — “I WISH…

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