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Country Music

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

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

Country Music

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

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

Country Music

Audrey Williams opened Hank Jr.’s 1964 tour in Canton, Ohio—the same city his father had been trying to reach when he died eleven years earlier. For a fourteen-year-old boy, even the geography of the career had already been arranged around a man he barely remembered. Hank Jr. had been only three when Hank Williams died. Audrey raised him afterward and, by the time he was eight, had placed him on the road with her Musical Caravan of Stars. At eleven he appeared on the Grand Ole Opry singing “Lovesick Blues,” the same song his father had used for his own Opry debut. At fourteen, Audrey negotiated an album built around Hank Sr.’s songs. The audiences responded exactly as expected. People cried, cheered and came to hear the son reproduce the voice they had lost. Hank Jr. later remembered how strange that felt as a child: he could stand onstage singing songs written before he was old enough to understand them, while adults reacted to memories that belonged more to his father than to him. Audrey kept pushing the connection because it worked. When MGM prepared the 1964 Hank Williams film Your Cheatin’ Heart, she secretly recorded her son singing several of his father’s songs and played the tape for an executive without identifying the singer. The performance won Hank Jr. the job of providing the vocals for the film. By eighteen, however, he had had enough. Once he could legally control his own affairs, Hank Jr. dismissed his mother as manager and began trying to write and perform in a voice of his own. The transition was rough. He later recalled crowds leaving or booing when he announced that he wanted to sing one of his own songs instead of another Hank Williams standard. That resistance became part of the work that followed. Songs such as “Standing in the Shadows” made the pressure explicit, while the country-rock sound he developed in the 1970s finally moved him far enough from imitation to build a separate career. Decades later, the Country Music Hall of Fame inducted Hank Williams Jr. on his own record: twenty-one gold and platinum albums, a catalog of autobiographical hits, and a sound that younger artists copied from him rather than from his father.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” HANK WILLIAMS JR. OPENED A TOUR IN THE…

Country Music

Jack Cash was fourteen when he went to work cutting fence posts to help bring money into the family home in Dyess, Arkansas. The Cash children had grown up working early because there was little choice. Their parents were trying to hold a Depression-era farm together, and Jack, the older brother Johnny admired most, was already known inside the family as the serious one—the boy who spoke about becoming a minister and seemed to possess a steadiness Johnny did not yet have. On May 12, 1944, a table saw caught Jack while he was working and tore deeply into his abdomen. He survived for several days before dying from the injuries. Johnny was twelve. The loss settled into the family in ways that lasted far beyond the funeral. Cash later returned repeatedly to Jack in interviews and autobiographical writing, remembering not only the accident but the sense that his brother had represented a kind of goodness he spent much of his own life trying to recover. That memory eventually entered the music without needing Jack’s name in every song. Cash’s gospel recordings, his fascination with redemption, and the compassion he showed toward prisoners, drifters and people living outside respectable society all grew from several parts of his life, but PBS’s Country Music places Jack’s death close to the center of that emotional world. Cash had promised his mother that he would record gospel music, and once Columbia gave him greater freedom, he finally did. Decades of fame never turned Jack into a distant childhood story. Rosanne Cash recalled that her father returned to his mother every year on the anniversary of Jack’s death. They did not make a ceremony of it. They simply sat together. For all the arenas, prison concerts and records that later filled Johnny Cash’s life, that annual visit preserved something much smaller: a mother and her surviving son making room, once a year, for the boy who was still missing from the family.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOHNNY CASH WAS TWELVE WHEN HIS BROTHER JACK…

Country Music

The rhinestones, fringe and appliquéd broncos on Patsy Cline’s early stage clothes did not come from a Nashville costume shop. They came from her mother’s sewing machine in Winchester, Virginia. Hilda Hensley had been supporting three children since Patsy’s father left the family in 1948. Patsy quit school at sixteen and took whatever work she could find—at a poultry plant, a Greyhound station and a drugstore—while singing at night and entering talent contests whenever the schedule allowed. Hilda worked as a seamstress, and together they kept the household moving long before music paid enough to matter. As Patsy began taking local performances more seriously, Hilda helped give her daughter the appearance of someone who already belonged onstage. One surviving outfit from the mid-1950s, later documented by the Country Music Hall of Fame, was made by Hilda herself: a fringed Western shirt and skirt decorated with riders, broncos and rhinestones. The clothes gave Patsy the polished look country audiences expected even when the career behind them was still uncertain. For years, that uncertainty remained. Patsy worked clubs, radio programs and regional television around Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., while record success came slowly. Her 4 Star contract brought national exposure but also limited the material she could record, leaving her caught between steady work and the breakthrough she had not yet found. Hilda remained part of the practical structure underneath it all. There was always a home to return to, clothing to mend, family responsibilities waiting, and a mother who understood that ambition still had to fit around rent, groceries and the ordinary demands of raising a household. When “Walkin’ After Midnight” finally reached a national audience in 1957, Patsy seemed to arrive fully formed. The audience saw the confidence, the clothes and the voice. Much of the preparation had already happened years earlier, in a Virginia home where Hilda Hensley was still cutting fabric and stitching together the version of Patsy Cline the public would soon recognize.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” PATSY CLINE’S EARLY RHINESTONES DID NOT COME FROM…

Country Music

At eighteen, Jimmie Rodgers Snow sat down for a WSM radio interview and thanked three people for whatever career might come next: his father, his mother, and the listeners who had begun buying his first RCA record. He had grown up traveling with Hank Snow, was already performing on package shows, and seemed to be following the most obvious road available to him. Even his name carried that expectation. Hank had named his only son after Jimmie Rodgers, the singer who had shaped his own life so deeply, and Jimmie spent much of his childhood around musicians, buses and Grand Ole Opry stages. By his mid-teens he was recording for RCA and touring alongside established country acts, with every reason to believe the family business would eventually become his own. The turn came just as that path was beginning to open. Jimmie later said that he had been in show business since childhood and was starting to find success when, in 1957, he felt called toward the ministry. The decision gradually pulled him away from the country career he had spent years preparing for and toward Evangel Temple in Nashville, where he eventually became pastor. His new congregation never sat entirely apart from the old world. Johnny Cash, June Carter, Connie Smith and Larry Gatlin were among the country figures who passed through Evangel Temple, and it was there that Kris Kristofferson attended a service in the early 1970s that helped inspire “Why Me.” The son who had stepped away from a recording career had not really left Nashville music behind; he had simply become part of it from another room. Hank and Jimmie remained connected through family, faith and the long history surrounding the Snow name. When Hank died at Rainbow Ranch in 1999, it was Reverend Jimmie Rodgers Snow who spoke publicly for the family. By then, the name Hank had borrowed from his own musical hero had traveled somewhere he probably could not have predicted. Jimmie Rodgers Snow had inherited a country-music name, but built his adult life around people who came to him when the music alone was no longer enough.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” HANK SNOW NAMED HIS ONLY SON AFTER JIMMIE…

Country Music

Before Hank Williams had a publisher, a record contract, or anyone in Nashville managing his career, his mother was already driving the Drifting Cowboys from one small Alabama booking to the next. Lillie Williams had spent much of Hank’s childhood keeping the family together after his father entered a veterans’ hospital. She ran rooming houses, moved the family to Montgomery in 1937, and watched her teenage son turn radio appearances and local talent shows into something more serious. When Hank left school and began working full-time with the band, Lillie stepped directly into the machinery around him. She booked dates, negotiated prices, handled money and drove the musicians to shows across Alabama, Georgia and the Florida Panhandle. Those years were less glamorous than the photographs that came later. Hank and the Drifting Cowboys played schoolhouses, theaters, armories, beer joints and private gatherings, often for audiences paying only a few cents at the door. Lillie’s station wagon was part transportation, part office, and part insurance that her son and the band actually arrived where they were supposed to be. Her involvement also carried a harder edge. Hank’s drinking had begun creating problems long before national fame, and Lillie’s role was not simply maternal encouragement; she was trying to keep a fragile local business functioning around a son whose talent and unreliability were already growing together. By the mid-1940s, Hank had become the biggest hillbilly attraction around Montgomery, but getting him that far had required years of practical work that never appeared on a record label. Once Fred Rose, MGM and the Grand Ole Opry entered the picture, professional managers and publishers took over much of what Lillie had once done herself. Hank’s career moved beyond anything a family-run operation could contain, while the boarding houses, station wagons and small-town bookings receded into the background of the larger legend. But Lillie did not disappear from the family’s musical history. After Hank’s death, she remained deeply involved in the complicated personal and estate matters surrounding his name, including the early care of his daughter Jett before Lillie herself died in 1955. By then, the business around Hank Williams had become national. The first version of it had been built much closer to home, by a mother with a boarding house, a car full of musicians, and a calendar that had to stay filled.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” BEFORE NASHVILLE HAD A HAND ON HANK WILLIAMS,…

Country Music

Lefty Frizzell was still a teenager when his young marriage was forced through a crisis that could easily have ended both his family and whatever musical future he imagined for himself. He had married Alice Harper in March 1945, and by 1947 the couple were already living the unsettled life that followed a young singer from Texas to New Mexico and back again. That July, Frizzell was charged with statutory rape; he was convicted the following month and served six months in county jail. Jail separated him from Alice at precisely the age when most young couples were still learning how to build a life together. Frizzell spent part of those months writing songs to her, and among them was “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” a plainspoken declaration that carried none of the swagger associated with the honky-tonk singer he would soon become. After his release, there was no immediate rescue. A Louisiana Hayride audition failed, and Frizzell kept moving through small radio jobs and honky-tonks until he reached Jim Beck’s Dallas studio in 1950. Beck initially showed more interest in one of Lefty’s songs than in Lefty himself, but Columbia executive Don Law heard the demo and wanted the singer too. At Frizzell’s first Columbia session, “I Love You a Thousand Ways” was paired with “If You’ve Got the Money I’ve Got the Time.” Both sides eventually reached No. 1, turning a young man who had recently been drifting between small clubs and jail into one of country music’s fastest-rising stars. The marriage to Alice would survive far beyond that first crisis; photographs from the early 1960s still show her beside Lefty and their sons, long after fame had transformed the scale of their lives. And “I Love You a Thousand Ways” never needed listeners to know where it had been written. What began as a private attempt to reach his wife across the distance of a jail cell became one of the records that introduced Lefty Frizzell’s voice to the entire country.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” LEFTY FRIZZELL WROTE “I LOVE YOU A THOUSAND…

Country Music

A few days after Eddy Arnold married Sally Gayhart in November 1941, he left home with Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys for a tour that kept him away for weeks. Sally later joked that she sometimes wondered whether he had married her simply to leave someone at home with his mother. They had met the year before in Louisville, when Arnold was still a young singer working with King’s band. Sally came from a large Kentucky farm family and understood responsibility long before fame entered the picture. When Eddy began thinking about leaving the security of a band salary for a solo radio show on WSM, she was one of the people urging him forward, even though it meant accepting more uncertainty at home. That decision opened the career everyone else remembers. Arnold signed with RCA, built a run of country hits that lasted for decades, moved easily into television and pop-oriented arrangements, and eventually became one of the central figures in the Nashville Sound. Sally remained mostly outside that machinery while raising their daughter Jo Ann and son Dickie and adjusting to a marriage shaped by long absences, publicity and constant travel. Friends later described their relationship less as show-business romance than as teamwork. Jim Ed Brown said Sally had been willing to share Eddy with the world because she understood how much he loved both the work and her. By then the marriage had survived not only touring, but several transformations of Arnold’s public identity—from “Tennessee Plowboy” to polished crossover singer to Country Music Hall of Famer. They remained married for more than sixty-six years. Sally died in March 2008, while Eddy was hospitalized after breaking his hip. He died less than two months later, one week before his ninetieth birthday. The quieter measure of their life together appears in a detail from the very beginning: Sally had married a man whose work required him to keep leaving, then spent more than six decades helping build a home sturdy enough for him to keep coming back to.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” EDDY ARNOLD MARRIED SALLY GAYHART IN 1941, THEN…

Country Music

Long before Kitty Wells became the woman who changed what Nashville believed a female singer could sell, Johnnie Wright had already spent years beside her in station studios, small Southern theaters and crowded cars moving from one engagement to the next. They married in 1937, when she was still Muriel Deason, an eighteen-year-old Nashville girl who had worked ironing shirts for nine dollars a week during the Depression. She joined Johnnie and his sister Louise as part of the Harmony Girls, then traveled with Johnnie & Jack after Wright formed the duo with Jack Anglin. Somewhere in those early radio years, Johnnie began calling his wife “Kitty Wells,” borrowing the name from an old song. For more than a decade, his career was the steadier one. Johnnie & Jack reached the Grand Ole Opry while Kitty’s first recordings went nowhere, and she was already a thirty-three-year-old mother of three when Decca offered her $125 to record “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels.” She accepted largely for the money and expected to return to family life. Instead, the record went to No. 1 and made her the first major female country star of her generation. The change in billing could easily have unsettled a marriage built inside the same profession. It did not. By the 1960s, the road show carried her name first—The Kitty Wells-Johnnie Wright Family Show—with their children Ruby, Carol Sue and Bobby eventually joining their parents onstage. At its busiest, the family operation played as many as 300 dates a year, turning what had begun as a husband-and-wife act into a working household that traveled together. Johnnie never became merely “Kitty Wells’s husband.” He had his own successful recording career, including the 1965 No. 1 “Hello Vietnam,” while also managing and guiding much of Kitty’s career behind the scenes. Their professional lives kept crossing without requiring one of them to erase the other. They finally retired from touring together on New Year’s Eve 2000, after more than six decades of marriage and work on the same stages. Johnnie died at their Nashville home in 2011, after seventy-three years of marriage; Kitty followed less than a year later. Among the photographs preserved by the Country Music Hall of Fame is one from 1955 showing Kitty and Johnnie at home with all three children. By then she was already changing country music history, but the picture preserves something the chart records cannot: the family was becoming part of the work, and the work had become part of the family.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOHNNIE WRIGHT GAVE MURIEL DEASON THE NAME KITTY…

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