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Country Music

AN UNKNOWN OHIO SINGER WON A TALENT CONTEST, CAUGHT BILL ANDERSON’S EAR—AND WITH HER VERY FIRST RCA SINGLE, SPENT EIGHT WEEKS AT NO. 1. Connie Smith did not grow up imagining herself as a star. Born Constance Meador in Indiana and raised in West Virginia and Ohio, she came from a large working-class family and spent much of her childhood listening to the Grand Ole Opry. At eighteen, while recovering from a lawnmower accident, she taught herself to play guitar. By the early 1960s, Smith was singing at local events and appearing on regional television. In August 1963, she entered a talent contest in Columbus, Ohio, and won. Her prize included performing that evening on a show featuring Grand Ole Opry artists. Bill Anderson was there. He heard something in Smith’s voice strong enough to remember. After hearing her again on a New Year’s Day show in Canton, Ohio, Anderson encouraged her to come to Nashville. In March 1964, Smith appeared on Ernest Tubb’s Midnite Jamboree. Two months later, she returned to Nashville and recorded four demos of Anderson songs. Those demos reached Chet Atkins. RCA signed her. In July, producer Bob Ferguson took Smith into RCA Studio B to record one of Anderson’s songs, “Once a Day.” It became her first single. Instead of slowly introducing a new singer to country radio, the record went straight to the top. “Once a Day” reached No. 1 and remained there for eight weeks, one of the longest runs ever achieved by a female solo country artist at that time. The success did not disappear with the debut. Smith followed with “Then and Only Then,” “I Can’t Remember,” “Nobody But a Fool,” and “Ain’t Had No Lovin’.” By 1973, she had accumulated nineteen Top 10 country hits and had joined the Grand Ole Opry. Yet Smith never embraced celebrity as completely as Nashville expected. Family and faith repeatedly pulled harder than the machinery of touring and promotion. When she moved to Columbia Records in 1973, she even required that her contract allow her to record a gospel album each year. That choice eventually slowed the commercial pace of her career, but it also kept Connie Smith from becoming only the product of one spectacular debut. “Once a Day” had opened the door almost overnight. What followed was a much longer decision about how much of her life she was willing to let the music business take.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” CONNIE SMITH WAS AN UNKNOWN OHIO SINGER WHEN…

Country Music

JOHNNY RODRIGUEZ WAS SINGING INSIDE A TEXAS JAIL WHEN A RANGER HEARD HIM. SOON BOBBY BARE AND TOM T. HALL FOUND HIM—AND HE REACHED NASHVILLE WITH A GUITAR AND JUST $14. Johnny Rodriguez grew up in Sabinal, Texas, close enough to the Mexican border for mariachi and honky-tonk to belong to the same world. His older brother gave him a guitar at seven. By his teens, Rodriguez was singing country alongside the Mexican music he had grown up hearing. But his route into Nashville began in a jail cell. After his father died, Rodriguez’s teenage years became troubled. At eighteen, he was jailed for a minor offense. Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson heard him singing there and told Happy Shahan, owner of the Alamo Village tourist attraction near Brackettville, about the young man’s voice. Shahan hired him. Rodriguez drove stagecoaches, rode horses, entertained tourists, and sang country songs at Alamo Village. Shahan also changed his stage name from Juan Rodriguez to Johnny Rogers, believing it sounded more conventionally country. Then Bobby Bare and Tom T. Hall heard him perform. Hall was impressed enough to invite him to Nashville. Rodriguez arrived with his guitar and about $14. Hall hired him as lead guitarist in his road band, the Storytellers, and encouraged him to use Rodriguez again. A Mercury audition followed. Rodriguez sang “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” moving between English and Spanish, and the label signed him. His first Mercury single, “Pass Me By (If You’re Only Passing Through),” reached the country Top 10 in 1973. Then came “You Always Come Back (To Hurting Me),” “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico,” and “That’s the Way Love Goes,” all No. 1 hits. His first fourteen chart singles reached the country Top 10, establishing him as the first Hispanic American to become a major mainstream country star. Rodriguez never needed to abandon South Texas to fit the format. Spanish verses appeared beside steel guitar and fiddle, and the border culture he had grown up with became part of what audiences recognized as his sound. Within a few years, the teenager singing wherever someone would listen was standing on country stages across America. And somewhere between Sabinal and Nashville, country radio had quietly become a little larger than it had been before him.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOHNNY RODRIGUEZ WAS SINGING INSIDE A TEXAS JAIL…

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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…

Country Music

BILLY JOE SHAVER WROTE “LIVE FOREVER” WITH HIS SON. THEN EDDY DIED IN A WACO MOTEL, AND BILLY JOE NEARLY DIED ONSTAGE AT GRUENE HALL LESS THAN A YEAR LATER. By the end of the 1990s, Billy Joe Shaver had already buried too much. His wife Brenda was gone. His mother Victory was gone. The Texas songwriter who had helped give outlaw country its backbone had written songs for Waylon Jennings, survived hard living, and carried enough grief to make most country songs sound polite. But Eddy was different. Eddy Shaver was not only Billy Joe’s son. He was the guitar beside him, the fire behind him, the young player who made his father’s songs hit harder onstage. Together, they made music with a dangerous family voltage — Billy Joe’s scarred words in front, Eddy’s guitar cutting through them like lightning. Then came “Live Forever.” Billy Joe and Eddy wrote it like a stubborn prayer, not a funeral song. It sounded like a man looking death in the face and refusing to give it the last word. Then life made the words almost too heavy to sing. On December 31, 2000, Eddy was found unconscious in a Waco hotel room and pronounced dead early that morning. The cause was ruled an accidental heroin overdose. He was thirty-eight. The son who had helped his father sing about living forever was gone before the record they had just finished could fully reach the world. Billy Joe did not cancel the night. He had a New Year’s Eve show scheduled near Austin. Willie Nelson and others helped him get through it, turning the room into a remembrance instead of letting silence take it. A father lost his son before sunrise, then walked toward a stage before midnight. Less than a year later, Billy Joe was on another Texas stage when his own body nearly gave out. In 2001, he suffered a heart attack while performing at Gruene Hall. After burying Eddy, he almost followed him from a room full of music. That is what makes “Live Forever” hurt. Eddy’s guitar went quiet in Waco. Billy Joe’s heart nearly stopped at Gruene Hall. But “Live Forever” kept traveling — not as a promise that the body wins, but as the sound of a father and son leaving one last light on after the room had emptied.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BILLY JOE SHAVER WROTE “LIVE FOREVER” WITH HIS…

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JAN HOWARD WROTE A LETTER TO HER SON SERVING IN VIETNAM. SHE RECORDED IT IN ONE TAKE AS “MY SON.” WEEKS LATER, JIMMY HOWARD WAS KILLED IN COMBAT. By 1968, Jan Howard already had a country career. She had recorded “Evil on Your Mind,” scored a No. 1 duet with Bill Anderson on “For Loving You,” and spent years working the road and television circuit with Anderson. But “My Son” did not begin as another song for the charts. It began as a letter. Howard’s oldest son, Jimmy, was serving in Vietnam. Like thousands of American mothers, she wrote to him about home, childhood memories, and the fear she tried not to put too plainly into words. The letter eventually became a spoken-word country piece. Howard was reluctant to record it. Her son Carter, Bill Anderson, and producer Owen Bradley encouraged her to do it. When she entered Bradley’s studio on October 4, 1968, the emotion made it difficult to finish. Bradley gave her one condition: get through it once, and they would keep that take. She did. “My Son” became a mother remembering baseball, school clothes, fishing trips, and the boy who had grown into a soldier. Beneath those memories was one simple request—that he come home safely. Howard sent a tape of the recording to Jimmy in Vietnam. He heard it. Before he could write back, his armored personnel carrier struck a land mine south of Da Nang. Jimmy Howard was killed in October 1968 at twenty-one. Decca released “My Son” that fall. It eventually reached No. 15 on Billboard’s country chart and earned Howard a Grammy nomination. More than 5,000 letters arrived from servicemen and their families, many telling her that the record sounded as though it had been written for them. Howard rarely performed the song afterward. It had stopped being simply a record she had written about a soldier overseas. Four years later, another tragedy reached the family when her youngest son, David, died by suicide. Her middle son Carter, who had also served in Vietnam, survived his tour and had escorted Jimmy’s body home. Howard remained connected to veterans for the rest of her life, appearing at memorials and supporting military organizations. Jimmy’s name was eventually carved into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington. The letter Jan Howard once hoped would reach one son had ended up reaching thousands of other families who already understood what it meant to wait for someone who might not come home.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JAN HOWARD WROTE A LETTER TO HER SON…

Country Music

WAYLON JENNINGS NEEDED A NEW LANGUAGE FOR OUTLAW COUNTRY. BILLY JOE SHAVER WALKED INTO NASHVILLE WITH A HANDFUL OF SONGS AND GAVE IT TO HIM. Billy Joe Shaver came into Nashville with more scars than polish. He had lost parts of two fingers in a sawmill accident, knocked around Texas, worked rough jobs, and carried songs that did not sound built for Music Row offices. They sounded like they had been pulled from barrooms, church pews, motel rooms, bad marriages, bad mornings, and men who had to decide whether to pray, drink, fight, or leave. Music Row knew how to smooth a song for radio. Shaver’s songs sounded like they would lose the truth if anyone tried. By the early 1970s, Waylon Jennings was trying to get loose from the clean Nashville system. He had the voice, the band, and the attitude, but he needed material that did not just talk about rebellion. He needed songs that had already lived through it. Shaver had them. The story became outlaw-country folklore. Waylon had promised to record Shaver’s songs, then tried to move on. Shaver kept pushing until the promise turned real. However rough the road was, the result came in 1973 with Honky Tonk Heroes. Waylon sang it, but Shaver’s life ran through the record. “Honky Tonk Heroes,” “Old Five and Dimers Like Me,” “Ain’t No God in Mexico,” “Black Rose,” “You Ask Me To” — they did not sound like Nashville playing dress-up. They sounded like hard living without the costume. The men in those songs were proud, ashamed, funny, reckless, religious, broke, and still standing. Waylon gave the songs a face big enough for the country world to see. Shaver gave them the blood. Together, they made an album that helped define outlaw country not as a hat, a pose, or a marketing word, but as a sound with dirt under its nails. For Waylon, Honky Tonk Heroes became part of the foundation of his outlaw identity. For Shaver, it became both breakthrough and shadow. His words went into jukeboxes, trucks, bars, and bedrooms across America, but many listeners learned Waylon’s name first. The songwriter who had brought the fire still had to keep walking behind the smoke. That was the bargain country music often made with men like Billy Joe Shaver. The singer stood under the lights. The writer left pieces of himself inside the songs and hoped somebody heard the bones moving. Years later, Honky Tonk Heroes still does not sound polished. It sounds like a door kicked open from the inside — and somewhere behind Waylon’s voice, Billy Joe Shaver is still standing there with a handful of songs Nashville could not sand down.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” WAYLON JENNINGS NEEDED A NEW LANGUAGE FOR OUTLAW…

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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…

Country Music

DAVID ALLAN COE DIDN’T WALK INTO NASHVILLE LIKE A SONGWRITER. HE DROVE IN WITH A HEARSE, HID HIS FACE BEHIND A MASK, AND CALLED HIMSELF THE MYSTERIOUS RHINESTONE COWBOY. David Allan Coe came to Nashville in 1967 after years inside reform schools and prison. He was not the kind of new writer Music Row usually knew how to welcome. He had long hair, tattoos, a prison past, and a hunger for attention that looked almost dangerous in a town built on controlled images. He lived in a Cadillac hearse and parked it near the Ryman Auditorium, where the Grand Ole Opry still carried country music’s old authority. Coe wanted Nashville to see him before it heard him. In the early 1970s, he began performing as the Mysterious Rhinestone Cowboy, wearing rhinestone-studded clothes and a mask. Some artists polished the rough edges off their past before stepping toward country music. Coe turned his into theater. But underneath the costume was a serious writer. Before the outlaw image fully caught, other people began proving his songs could work. Tanya Tucker took “Would You Lay With Me (In a Field of Stone)” to No. 1 in 1973. Later, Johnny Paycheck would turn Coe’s “Take This Job and Shove It” into one of country music’s great working-class anthems. Coe’s own biggest radio years came with songs like “You Never Even Called Me by My Name,” “The Ride,” and “Mona Lisa Lost Her Smile.” Nashville could use the songs more easily than it could use the man. The hearse, the mask, the rhinestones, the prison history, the biker look, the crude underground records, the self-made mythology — all of it made Coe impossible to separate from controversy. He became one of country music’s most recognizable outsiders, but never a clean outlaw hero in the way the business could frame Willie, Waylon, or Merle. He had hits. He had cult devotion. He had songs that outlived the noise around him. But he also carried a public image so jagged that even his best writing had to fight through it. That is what makes David Allan Coe’s story more complicated than the costume. The mask got him noticed. The hearse made people talk. The rhinestones made him unforgettable from across the room. But the songs were the part that kept finding their way into other people’s mouths. In the end, the clearest piece of him may not be the outlaw pose at all. It may be a factory worker somewhere, years later, singing “Take This Job and Shove It” like Coe had written down the words he was never allowed to say out loud.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” DAVID ALLAN COE DID NOT COME TO NASHVILLE…

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