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Country Music

JIM REEVES DIED IN 1964. HIS WIFE SPENT THE NEXT DECADES MAKING SURE HIS CAREER DIDN’T. WITH MARY REEVES GUIDING THE VAULT, HIS VOICE KEPT PRODUCING HITS INTO THE 1980s. When Reeves’ plane crashed near Nashville on July 31, 1964, Mary Reeves lost the husband she had been with since 1946, long before “He’ll Have to Go” and the international tours. She also inherited something far less personal but enormously consequential: master tapes, unreleased performances and hundreds of recordings whose future Jim could no longer decide for himself. The first proof of what remained in those vaults arrived quickly. “Distant Drums,” a Cindy Walker song Reeves had recorded before his death, was prepared for release with additional orchestration and became a major posthumous hit in 1966, reaching No. 1 on the U.S. country chart and spending five weeks atop the British chart. Mary realized that Jim’s recordings did not have to become museum pieces. Working with RCA and producers, she became increasingly involved in selecting and preparing material for release, drawing from a recorded catalog that reportedly contained roughly 350 songs. Older vocals could be paired with new backing tracks, unfinished material could be shaped for contemporary listeners, and albums continued appearing long after most posthumous catalogs would have gone quiet. The result was almost a second career. Jim Reeves remained present on the country charts into the 1980s, nearly twenty years after the crash, while his smooth baritone continued finding audiences far beyond the United States. Mary guarded more than the tapes. She operated the Jim Reeves Museum in Nashville, preserving his awards, belongings and career history while answering the questions that naturally followed when an artist’s reputation continued growing after his death. Technology eventually pushed that stewardship into unfamiliar territory. In 1982, separate recordings by Reeves and Patsy Cline were combined for “Have You Ever Been Lonely?,” creating a duet between two singers who had both been gone for nearly two decades. The record reached the country Top 10, placing their voices back on contemporary radio beside artists neither had lived to hear. Mary once drew a simple distinction between the man she had lost and the body of work left behind: the husband was gone, but the artist remained. By the time she had finished tending that legacy, Jim Reeves was no longer remembered only through the records released during his lifetime; an entire generation had grown up hearing songs that reached them because Mary Reeves had decided the vault was not a graveyard, but an unfinished catalog.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JIM REEVES DIED IN A PLANE CRASH IN…

Country Music

WHILE NASHVILLE WAS ADDING STRINGS AND VOCAL CHOIRS, A CALIFORNIA ROAD BAND TURNED UP THE DRUMS, SHARPENED THE GUITARS, AND MADE COUNTRY RADIO SOUND DIFFERENT. By the early 1960s, Nashville’s smoother productions were carrying country music toward a broader pop audience, but Buck Owens had come from a different world. Years inside Bakersfield dance halls had taught him that music needed enough attack to cut through crowded rooms, jukeboxes and cheap speakers, so when his Capitol career began taking off, he resisted polishing that edge away. More unusually, Owens regularly recorded with the same musicians who traveled with him. Don Rich supplied the piercing Telecaster lines and high harmony that locked around Buck’s voice, while Tom Brumley, Doyle Holly and Willie Cantu helped give the Buckaroos the tightness of a working road band rather than a collection of studio players assembled for the afternoon. Owens also pushed the drums unusually high in the mix, shaping records that seemed to leap from AM transistor radios. The approach produced an extraordinary run. Beginning with “Act Naturally” in 1963, Owens spent six consecutive years scoring at least one No. 1 country hit annually, with records including “Together Again,” “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail” and “Sam’s Place.” “Act Naturally” even traveled across the Atlantic, where the Beatles recorded it with Ringo Starr singing lead. What became known as the Bakersfield Sound was larger than Buck alone, with Wynn Stewart, Merle Haggard, Bonnie Owens, Ralph Mooney and others helping build its foundation. Yet Buck and the Buckaroos proved that its hard, bright mixture of honky-tonk, western swing and rockabilly could compete nationally without being softened into Nashville convention. Years later, that same vocabulary could be heard in country-rock and in artists such as Dwight Yoakam, who treated Bakersfield not as a regional curiosity but as a tradition worth carrying forward. Don Rich’s harmony and guitar, the Buckaroos’ road-tested precision, and Owens’s insistence on keeping the rhythm exposed gave later musicians something more valuable than a catalog of hits: they left behind another answer to the question of what country music was allowed to sound like.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” WHILE NASHVILLE WAS ADDING STRINGS AND VOCAL CHOIRS,…

Country Music

IN FEBRUARY 1969, JOHNNY CASH WALKED INTO BOB DYLAN’S NASHVILLE SESSION AND STAYED FOR TWO DAYS. WHAT BEGAN AS A VISIT TURNED INTO ONE OF COUNTRY MUSIC’S MOST SYMBOLIC CROSS-GENRE MEETINGS. Dylan had already been moving toward Nashville for several years, recording Blonde on Blonde and John Wesley Harding with the city’s session players before returning in February 1969 for Nashville Skyline. The new record was simpler, warmer and more openly country than the psychedelic work dominating much of late-1960s rock, and Dylan insisted on keeping “Nashville” in the title even when the label worried it might limit the album’s appeal. Cash arrived at Columbia Studio A while Dylan was working and accepted an invitation to join him. Over February 17 and 18, the two moved freely through each other’s catalogs, singing “I Still Miss Someone,” “Big River,” “I Walk the Line,” “One Too Many Mornings,” traditional songs and even a loose medley that folded Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right” into Cash’s “Understand Your Man.” Carl Perkins also joined several of the recordings, turning the sessions into an unusually relaxed meeting of country, folk and rock & roll traditions. Only one duet made Nashville Skyline: “Girl from the North Country.” Cash also wrote the album’s liner notes, which later won a Grammy, while Dylan gave Cash “Wanted Man,” a song Cash soon performed at San Quentin and recorded for his chart-topping live album. The collaboration did not end in the studio. On May 1, Dylan appeared at the Ryman Auditorium for the first episode of The Johnny Cash Show, where he and Cash again sang “Girl from the North Country.” When the program aired in June, a network country show was presenting one of folk-rock’s most influential figures to a national audience from the home of the Grand Ole Opry. Cash would use that television platform repeatedly to bring country, folk and rock musicians into the same room, while Nashville Skyline helped alter how younger rock audiences viewed Nashville and its musicians. The two men did not create a new genre during those February sessions. They did something quieter and, in hindsight, just as important: they made the borders between country and the wider American music world look far less permanent than they had before.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOHNNY CASH WALKED INTO BOB DYLAN’S NASHVILLE SESSION…

Country Music

PORTER WAGONER DIDN’T JUST HOST A COUNTRY TV SHOW. HE PUT FUTURE LEGENDS IN FRONT OF MILLIONS BEFORE MOST OF AMERICA KNEW THEIR NAMES. When Porter Wagoner’s syndicated television show began in 1960, it was sponsored by the Chattanooga Medicine Company and built around a simple idea: take the kind of country package show audiences knew from the road and put it into living rooms every week. Porter surrounded himself with a working band, comedy from Speck Rhodes, a featured female singer and a steady stream of guests. The format looked modest. Its reach was not. As syndication expanded, The Porter Wagoner Show reached nearly one hundred markets and more than three million viewers. At a time when network television was becoming one of America’s most powerful cultural forces, Porter gave traditional country music a regular national platform without sanding away its fiddle, banjo, rhinestones or rural humor. That platform mattered because Porter did not fill it only with established stars. Future giants passed through the show while they were still building their names. Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings appeared as newcomers. In 1967, songwriter Hank Cochran was given space to sing a medley of songs he had written, including “I Fall to Pieces,” “Make the World Go Away” and “Don’t Touch Me.” Then came Dolly Parton. When Norma Jean left in 1967, Porter brought Dolly onto the show. RCA soon signed her as both his duet partner and a solo artist, and the weekly exposure helped turn a promising songwriter and singer into a national country star. That is the historical value of Porter Wagoner’s television years. The show did not merely preserve old-fashioned country while pop culture moved elsewhere. It became a bridge between generations: established Opry figures on one side, future stars on the other, all presented to millions of viewers in the same half-hour. Porter’s rhinestone suits made him easy to remember. The deeper legacy was that he used the camera to keep a whole ecosystem of country music visible.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” PORTER WAGONER DIDN’T JUST PUT A COUNTRY SHOW…

Country Music

PATSY CLINE LOVED “CRAZY,” BUT WILLIE NELSON’S PHRASING WAS SO UNUSUAL THAT SHE COULDN’T FIND HER WAY INTO THE SONG. TWO WEEKS LATER, SHE RETURNED TO THE STUDIO AND SANG IT HER OWN WAY. By the summer of 1961, Patsy Cline had finally broken through with “I Fall to Pieces,” but the success arrived alongside a near-fatal car wreck that left her badly injured. When Willie Nelson’s “Crazy” reached her through husband Charlie Dick, she immediately recognized the song’s strength and agreed to record it, even though Nelson’s loose, behind-the-beat phrasing was unlike the cleaner rhythmic patterns Nashville singers usually followed. The first session did not go smoothly. With her body still recovering from the accident and Nelson’s demo fixed in her head, Cline struggled to reshape the melody around Owen Bradley’s slower arrangement, while the musicians built the track beneath her. Bradley eventually sent her home and finished the instrumental backing without a final vocal. Two weeks later, Cline returned. This time she stopped trying to reproduce Nelson’s phrasing and allowed the song to bend around her own voice, stretching certain words, tightening others, and turning the melody into something far more intimate than the demo that had first confused her. According to the account preserved in Ken Burns’s Country Music, the vocal they had been waiting for came on the first take. Released later that year, “Crazy” crossed into the pop Top 10 and became one of the recordings most closely associated with Cline, while Bradley’s productions with her helped define the smoother Nashville Sound that was carrying country music toward a broader national audience. The Country Music Hall of Fame still describes their work together as a standard against which female country recordings are measured. Willie Nelson had written the song in a voice Nashville considered unconventional. Patsy Cline made history by realizing that she did not need to sing it like Willie at all.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” PATSY CLINE LOVED “CRAZY,” BUT WILLIE NELSON’S PHRASING…

Country Music

MARTY ROBBINS THOUGHT HIS COWBOY ALBUM MIGHT SELL FEWER THAN 500 COPIES. THEN “EL PASO” WENT TO NO. 1 ON BOTH THE COUNTRY AND POP CHARTS — AND THE RECORD HE FEARED NOBODY WANTED SOLD MORE THAN A MILLION. By 1959, Robbins had already given Columbia enough hits to earn some leverage, yet the record he wanted next had little to do with the polished country-pop singles that were making him successful. Since childhood, he had been fascinated by the Old West, and after years of carrying cowboy stories in his head, he persuaded producer Don Law to let him devote an album to them, arguing that the label owed him the chance after everything his hits had already earned. At the center was “El Paso,” a song that had followed him for years before it finally arrived. Robbins first noticed the name while driving west for Christmas in 1955, thought it sounded like a song title, then lost the idea; two years later, with his wife driving their turquoise Cadillac toward Arizona, the story finally poured out while he sat in the back seat writing lyrics and melody together. On April 7, 1959, Robbins entered the studio with musicians including Grady Martin, whose Spanish-style guitar gave “El Paso” much of its distinctive atmosphere. In roughly eight hours, they recorded the material that became Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, allowing Robbins to build an entire world of gunfighters, deserts, saloons and doomed love without sanding away the old Western storytelling he had grown up admiring. The gamble quickly outgrew its modest expectations. “El Paso” reached No. 1 on both the country and pop charts, remained atop the country chart for seven weeks, and won the Grammy for Best Country & Western Performance, while the album itself eventually sold more than a million copies. Decades later, the Library of Congress placed Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs in the National Recording Registry, while western musicians continued treating it as a foundational record rather than a period novelty. Robbins had begun the project simply wanting the freedom to make the Western album he had carried inside him for years. What followed gave later generations a blueprint for how country music could tell an entire movie without ever leaving the record.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MARTY ROBBINS THOUGHT HIS COWBOY ALBUM MIGHT SELL…

Country Music

THE ROOM WASN’T FANCY — JUST A STEEL QUONSET HUT BEHIND AN OLD NASHVILLE HOUSE. BUT INSIDE IT, OWEN BRADLEY BUILT A NEW SOUND AROUND PATSY CLINE’S VOICE, AND COUNTRY MUSIC LEARNED HOW TO COMPETE WITH POP WITHOUT LOSING ITS HEART. By the turn of the 1960s, Nashville had a problem. Rock & roll was taking younger listeners, and the hard-country records that had dominated the previous decade no longer guaranteed crossover success. Producers such as Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins began experimenting with a smoother approach: softer piano, background vocals, strings, less twang and more space around the singer. The style would become known as the Nashville Sound. Patsy Cline was one of the voices perfectly suited to that experiment, though she did not always agree with Bradley’s instincts. When she signed directly with Decca in 1960, Bradley began steering her toward more polished arrangements. Patsy initially resisted some of the Jordanaires-backed production, but Bradley heard something larger in her voice than conventional honky-tonk could contain. Their laboratory was the Quonset Hut. Owen and his brother Harold had built the studio behind a Nashville house using a military-style steel structure, then tuned the room largely by ear with curtains, wood and insulation. By the early 1960s, hundreds of sessions were passing through the building each year. On August 21, 1961, that room filled with some of Nashville’s best musicians for “Crazy.” Patsy was still recovering from the car crash that had nearly killed her two months earlier. Owen recorded the instrumental track first, using Floyd Cramer’s piano, Grady Martin’s guitar, Bob Moore’s acoustic bass, Harold Bradley’s electric bass, Buddy Harman’s drums, Walter Haynes’s steel and the Jordanaires behind them. A few days later, Patsy returned to complete the vocal. The process itself was unusually modern. Bradley was using three-track recording, separating Patsy from much of the backing so the balance could be shaped more precisely. He encouraged her to linger over words, leave pauses and bend phrases in ways that increased the emotional weight of the lyric. “Crazy” became a country Top 10 and crossed into the pop market, but its larger importance was what the session demonstrated. Country did not have to become rock & roll to reach a broader audience. It could keep a steel guitar in the room, add piano, vocal harmony and studio sophistication, then let one unmistakably country voice carry the center. Within a few years, the Quonset Hut had become part of the foundation of Music Row, and Bradley’s work with Patsy Cline was being treated as a standard other producers and singers measured themselves against. What survives from those sessions is more than a handful of famous records. It is the sound of Nashville discovering that refinement did not have to mean surrender.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE ROOM WASN’T FANCY — JUST A STEEL…

Country Music

AT ONE RADIO STATION, LORETTA LYNN FOUND HER FIRST RECORD LYING IN THE GARBAGE. SHE PICKED IT UP, CONFRONTED THE DJ — THEN KEPT DRIVING TO THE NEXT STATION UNTIL COUNTRY RADIO COULD NO LONGER IGNORE HER. In early 1960, Nashville was not waiting for Loretta Lynn. She was a mother of four living in Washington state, singing locally and making five dollars a night when she could get a tavern job. Her first real opportunity came through the tiny Zero Records label, which sent her to Los Angeles to record four songs. One of them was “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.” There was no major promotion department behind it. So Loretta and her husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, became the promotion department themselves. They waited for freshly pressed copies of the single, loaded the car and started driving east. Their method was primitive but direct: whenever they saw a radio tower, they looked for the station. They slept in the car and lived largely on bologna-and-cheese sandwiches. Loretta later remembered carrying one good black-and-white dress. Before walking into a station, she would change out of her jeans in the back seat, put on the dress, introduce herself to the DJ and ask him to play her record. Then she would change again and head for the next town. Sometimes persuasion took hours. Loretta said she occasionally sat inside a station for three or four hours waiting until the DJ finally put “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” on the air. At one stop, she found the record itself in a garbage can. The DJ admitted he had never listened to it. Loretta pointed out that he probably never would if he left it there. The strategy was exhausting, but it worked. Stations began adding the single. As Loretta and Doo worked their way across the country, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” started climbing Billboard’s country chart. By July 1960 it had reached No. 14. That was enough to pull them toward Nashville. The Wilburn Brothers noticed her. The Grand Ole Opry finally gave her a spot. Loretta and Doo arrived so late and with so little money that they slept in their car across from the Ryman Auditorium before her first Opry appearance. The next morning, Doo brought her a box of donuts. That night Loretta walked onto the Opry stage and sang the same record they had spent months carrying through radio-station doors. Doolittle was not inside watching. He was sitting out in the car, turning the radio dial until he found the broadcast. Before Nashville had managers, television shows and major-label machinery ready for Loretta Lynn, there had been two people, one car, one good dress — and a record they refused to leave in the trash.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” LORETTA LYNN FOUND HER FIRST RECORD LYING IN…

Country Music

A BROKEN CONSOLE GAVE MARTY ROBBINS’ “DON’T WORRY” A SOUND NOBODY COULD RECREATE. SO AN ENGINEER BUILT A DEVICE TO COPY THE MISTAKE — AND FUZZ GUITAR WAS BORN. During a Marty Robbins session in Nashville, guitarist Grady Martin was playing a six-string Danelectro bass when a faulty transformer in the recording console suddenly distorted his tone. Instead of stopping the take, Robbins and engineer Glenn Snoddy kept the strange sound, allowing it to remain on “Don’t Worry.” The effect was rough, compressed and unlike the clean studio sound Nashville usually prized. When the single was released in 1961, listeners began asking what instrument had produced the noise, while musicians around town wanted the same effect on their own records. The problem was that nobody had designed it. The sound belonged to a piece of failing circuitry, and when the damaged console finally stopped producing it, Snoddy could no longer recreate the effect on demand. That limitation pushed him to work with Revis Hobbs on a transistor circuit that could reproduce the distortion deliberately rather than by accident. Their design became the Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone, one of the first commercially available fuzz units. A few years later, Keith Richards used a Maestro on the Rolling Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” helping turn fuzz from a Nashville studio accident into one of rock guitar’s defining sounds. “Don’t Worry” had begun as another Marty Robbins country session. What survived from it was not only a hit record, but a mistake engineers learned how to manufacture.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” A BROKEN CONSOLE GAVE MARTY ROBBINS’ “DON’T WORRY”…

Country Music

BY THE LATE 1950s, THE MAN WHO HAD ONCE DOMINATED COUNTRY RADIO WAS WATCHING HIS SALES COLLAPSE — AND SERIOUSLY CONSIDERING RETIREMENT. INSTEAD, EDDY ARNOLD THREW AWAY THE “TENNESSEE PLOWBOY” IMAGE THAT HAD MADE HIM FAMOUS AND STARTED OVER IN A TUXEDO. For most singers, changing your sound after the hits stop is desperation. For Eddy Arnold, it became a second career. Few country artists had owned the late 1940s the way Arnold did. “I’ll Hold You in My Heart,” “Anytime” and “Bouquet of Roses” made him one of RCA’s biggest stars, while the “Tennessee Plowboy” image connected him directly to the rural audience that had first embraced country music. Then rock & roll arrived. By the late 1950s, country record sales were down, Arnold’s own records were losing momentum and his personal appearances were drawing less business. The decline became serious enough that he considered leaving music altogether. Instead, he began removing pieces of the old Eddy Arnold. The steel guitar that had once helped define his records became less prominent. Background singers and orchestral arrangements moved forward. His vocals softened. The cowboy clothes disappeared. By the mid-1960s, Arnold was appearing in tuxedos and performing with orchestras. It was a risky move for a singer whose name had been built on traditional country, but Arnold was not trying to pretend the musical world had stayed the same. He wanted a place inside the new one. Then came 1965. “What’s He Doing in My World” returned him to No. 1. Later that year, Arnold recorded “Make the World Go Away,” Hank Cochran’s song of regret and reconciliation. The record became enormous. It topped the country chart, crossed into the pop market and helped turn Arnold’s comeback into something much larger than nostalgia. A singer who had once wondered whether his career was finished was suddenly reaching a broader audience than before. More No. 1 records followed. In 1966, Arnold entered the Country Music Hall of Fame. The next year, he won the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year award. By 1970, RCA was honoring him for reaching sixty million records in career sales. There was an irony in how completely the reinvention worked. The man once marketed as the “Tennessee Plowboy” became one of the clearest examples of country music learning how to survive in television studios, supper clubs and urban America. Eddy Arnold did not recover his old career. He built a second one on top of it.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” EDDY ARNOLD WAS WATCHING HIS SALES COLLAPSE AND…

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