Country Music – Page 2 – Classic Country Music Hits

Country Music

In May 1956, Jean Shepard released twelve songs about infidelity, suspicion and the slow collapse of trust inside a marriage. Country music was still built largely around singles. An LP often gathered unrelated recordings around a successful name. Songs of a Love Affair attempted something different: every selection belonged to the same emotional territory, allowing one side of the record to deepen what the previous song had begun. Shepard was twenty-two. Three years earlier, “A Dear John Letter,” her duet with Ferlin Husky, had reached No. 1 on the country chart and crossed into the pop Top 10. By 1955, “A Satisfied Mind” and “Beautiful Lies” had established that she could succeed without a male partner. She joined the Grand Ole Opry on her birthday that November, when its regular cast included only a handful of women. Producer Ken Nelson selected the material for her first album. Songs such as “A Passing Love Affair,” “Girl in Disgrace,” “Over and Over” and “It’s Hard to Tell the Married from the Free” examined betrayal from women’s positions inside and around it. The arrangements remained hard country—steel guitar, fiddle and Shepard’s unsoftened Oklahoma voice. The innovation did not require studio spectacle. It lay in accumulation. A single could present one argument between husband and wife, then surrender the subject when the next release arrived. Shepard’s album allowed doubt to remain in the room. Anger gave way to second-guessing; judgment shifted according to which woman was speaking; the affair became a condition rather than a three-minute incident. Songs of a Love Affair is now described as one of country music’s earliest concept albums and an especially early full-length country record centered on a female voice. It appeared before the celebrated story albums later associated with Marty Robbins, Willie Nelson and other male artists. The cover showed a young woman. Inside, the songs gave her twelve chances to tell the truth differently.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE TWELVE SONGS JEAN SHEPARD USED TO MAKE…

Country Music

Black Volga sedans kept arriving outside Moscow’s Rossiya Hotel on January 28, 1976. Officials and their wives stepped toward the concert hall while young people pressed around the entrance asking strangers for spare tickets. Inside, a woman selling Russian-language programs was driven back against a wall by the crowd. The man they had come to see was Roy Clark. American television had made Clark’s grin familiar through Hee Haw, but his Soviet audience was about to meet the musician behind the cornfield jokes. He had arrived with a company that included the Oak Ridge Boys, banjoist Buck Trent and other players for a winter run through Riga, Leningrad and Moscow. Clark was not the first country performer to enter the Soviet Union. George Hamilton IV had visited in 1974, followed by an Opryland group led by Tennessee Ernie Ford. Clark’s distinction was narrower and more important: he became the first country entertainer to headline his own full Soviet show. The tour operated inside the machinery of official cultural exchange. Lyrics were submitted for Soviet approval. Government agencies controlled the halls, programs and access. Opening-night seats tended to go to officials. Yet later performances drew younger audiences, and the response did not follow the expected hierarchy of American hits. Contemporary reports said Clark’s familiar vocal records received polite applause. The banjo instrumentals brought the strongest reaction. Those pieces required no translated lyric and offered little for a censor to remove. The speed of Clark’s right hand, the visible exchange between musicians and the structure of a tune moving cleanly through a room could be understood before anyone explained what country music represented. The concerts sold out with startling speed. A contemporary Billboard account placed total attendance above 57,000; Clark later said he was told the company could have remained for two additional weeks and still filled the halls. Soviet radio broadcast interviews and selected performances. The American Embassy sent Washington a cable noting the unusually favorable press coverage. Clark returned home during America’s Bicentennial year carrying a new ceremonial title: country music’s International Friendship Ambassador. But the clearest record of the tour was already inside those halls. When the singing stopped and the banjo began, the applause grew louder.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” WHEN ROY CLARK CARRIED A BANJO THROUGH THE…

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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…

Country Music

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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