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Country Music

IN 1967, JOHNNY CASH WALKED DEEP INTO NICKAJACK CAVE WITH ENOUGH PILLS IN HIS SYSTEM TO BELIEVE HE MIGHT NEVER COME BACK OUT. HOURS LATER, IN TOTAL DARKNESS, HE CHANGED HIS MIND. By then, Cash’s drug problem was no longer a private weakness. Amphetamines and painkillers had taken over much of his daily life. PBS’s Country Music recounts that by 1968 he had gone four years without a No. 1 record and was missing roughly half his concerts. Arrests, erratic behavior and failed attempts to quit had become part of the pattern. The lowest point came in 1967. Cash later wrote about driving to Nickajack Cave, near the Tennessee River, and walking deep inside while heavily under the influence. In his own telling, the intention was essentially to disappear into the cave and let nature finish the job. His autobiography describes the episode as part of the darkest period of his addiction and the spiritual awakening that followed. The cave was enormous, wet and completely black once he had gone far enough inside. Cash kept moving until he became disoriented. Then something shifted. He later said that in the darkness he became aware that he did not actually want to die. Whether one reads the moment spiritually or psychologically, Cash himself framed it as a turning point: the urge to disappear gave way to the urge to find the way back out. He started crawling toward air and light. When he emerged, June Carter and members of her family were part of the support system waiting around him. That did not mean the addiction vanished overnight. PBS records that June eventually gave him an ultimatum and that a doctor, June and her parents spent weeks watching him closely, removing hidden pills and keeping suppliers away. The recovery was messy, but the direction changed. Within months, Cash was back at work with a different kind of momentum. In January 1968 he recorded At Folsom Prison. The album revived his career, returned him to the center of country music and helped turn the damaged, unreliable star of 1967 into the Man in Black figure audiences would remember for the rest of his life. Nickajack Cave was not the moment every problem ended. Its real importance is that Cash later treated it as the moment he stopped cooperating with his own collapse. The next chapter began not on a stage, but underground, when a man who had gone in looking for an ending started feeling his way back toward daylight.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JOHNNY CASH WALKED INTO NICKAJACK CAVE WITH ENOUGH…

Country Music

THE GRAND OLE OPRY GAVE WILMA LEE COOPER A HOME FOR DECADES. IN 2001, THAT SAME STAGE BECAME THE PLACE WHERE HER SINGING LIFE ENDED. Wilma Lee Cooper knew what it meant to share a song before she ever had to carry one alone. She came out of West Virginia mountain music and built her life beside Stoney Cooper, her husband and singing partner. Together, Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper became one of country’s strong husband-and-wife teams, the kind of act that belonged to radio stations, schoolhouse stages, Opry nights, and long drives through weather most polished stars never had to face. Their sound was not built for glamour. It was mountain country — close harmony, gospel weight, fiddle and banjo, voices that seemed to know hardship without needing to explain it. In 1957, the Coopers joined the Grand Ole Opry, and for years that stage gave their music a permanent address. The Country Music Hall of Fame describes them as one of country’s premier husband-wife duos, with songs including “Sunny Side of the Mountain,” “Cheated Too,” and “Big Midnight Special.” Then Stoney’s health began to fail. By the 1970s, Wilma Lee was often carrying the act with more weight on her own shoulders. After Stoney died in 1977, she did not fold the band away like an old costume. She kept the Clinch Mountain Clan moving, kept playing, kept singing, kept walking back into the Opry as a widow with work still to do. That made the ending harsher. In 2001, while performing on the Grand Ole Opry stage, Wilma Lee suffered a stroke. The place that had held her through marriage, music, widowhood, and decades of country change suddenly became the place where her performing career stopped. The Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame notes that the stroke ended her touring career, and other accounts say she later recovered enough to return to the Opry only to greet and thank the crowd. She did make one more kind of entrance. In February 2005, during an Opry set hosted by Emmylou Harris, Wilma Lee walked onto the Ryman stage to a standing ovation. She was no longer there to lead the song. She was there so the room could stand for all the years she had already given it. Wilma Lee Cooper died in 2011 at ninety. By then, the old duet had been gone for decades, and the voice that survived it had gone quiet too. But somewhere inside that Opry memory, Stoney is still beside her, the band is still waiting for the next number, and a woman who refused to leave the stage too early is walking back out just long enough to hear the room rise.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” THE GRAND OLE OPRY GAVE WILMA LEE COOPER…

Country Music

BLAZE FOLEY WAS SHOT DEAD IN AUSTIN BEFORE MOST COUNTRY FANS KNEW HIS NAME. YEARS LATER, MERLE HAGGARD, WILLIE NELSON, AND JOHN PRINE KEPT HIS SONGS ALIVE. Blaze Foley did not look like someone Nashville was waiting for. He was born Michael David Fuller, drifted through the South, and eventually became one of the ragged spirits of the Austin songwriter world. He wore duct tape on his clothes, moved from couch to couch, and carried songs that sounded too tender for the hard life around him. Austin knew him in pieces. A barroom set here. A borrowed room there. A joke, a fight, a song played for whoever would listen. He was not polished like a label act, but other writers heard the weight in him. “If I Could Only Fly” had the kind of ache that did not need decoration, and Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard recorded it together in 1987, two years before Foley’s death. Then came February 1, 1989. Foley was at a house in Austin’s Bouldin Creek neighborhood when he was shot and killed during a dispute involving Carey January, the son of his friend Concho January. He was thirty-nine. The story carried the terrible shape of a Blaze Foley song: a poor room, an argument, an old friend nearby, and a man who never had much protection from the world. He left behind almost no clean career to package. There were songs, stories, friends, scraps, tapes, and the kind of reputation that grows because people keep repeating what they heard one night in a room that is gone now. After his death, tribute projects and later releases began pulling the pieces together. His official site notes that writers and singers including Townes Van Zandt, Merle Haggard, Willie Nelson, Lucinda Williams, John Prine, Nanci Griffith, and Lyle Lovett were drawn to what he left behind. The songs traveled better than the man ever did. John Prine later recorded “Clay Pigeons.” Merle Haggard returned to “If I Could Only Fly” again, making it the title track of a 2000 album. Foley had died almost unknown outside a stubborn circle of Texas listeners, but the people who found his songs treated them like something rescued from a fire. Blaze Foley never got the tidy ending a record company could sell. What he got was stranger: a second life made from other people’s voices. Somewhere past the old Austin rooms, a man in duct tape is still walking through the songs — not cleaned up, not fully explained, but somehow still being heard.

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Country Music

MOLLY O’DAY WAS ONE OF THE FIRST MAJOR VOICES TO RECORD HANK WILLIAMS’ SONGS. THEN SHE WALKED AWAY FROM COUNTRY STARDOM BEFORE THE WORLD FULLY CAUGHT UP TO HER. Molly O’Day sang like the mountains had sent grief to the microphone. She was born Lois LaVerne Williamson in Pike County, Kentucky, in 1923, and came out of the Appalachian radio world with Lynn Davis beside her. Together, they worked as Molly O’Day and the Cumberland Mountain Folks, carrying a hard country sound that still had church pews, coal dust, and front-porch sorrow in it. By 1946, Nashville publisher Fred Rose heard enough in her voice to bring her to Columbia Records. Rose also had songs from a young Hank Williams, who was still trying to break through as a writer and singer. Before Hank became the name country would keep repeating, Molly was already putting some of his words into the world. She recorded several Hank Williams songs, and her 1946 Columbia sessions helped place that mountain voice beside the future of country music. Her version of “Tramp on the Street” became one of the recordings most tied to her name — plain, wounded, and close to gospel even before she fully turned that way. For a moment, the road ahead looked wide open. Molly had the voice. Lynn had the band. Columbia had the records. Fred Rose had the songs. Country music was moving from radio barns and schoolhouse shows toward something bigger, and Molly O’Day seemed ready to be carried with it. Then she stepped away. Around 1950, Molly and Lynn left the commercial country road and turned more fully toward religious music. She would later record gospel and spend years closer to church and Christian radio than to the Nashville spotlight. It was not the kind of exit that makes a dramatic headline. No crash. No scandal. No public collapse. Just a woman with one of country’s rawest voices choosing a smaller, more private road. That choice left her story half-lit. Hank Williams became Hank Williams. Nashville grew larger. The old Appalachian radio sound faded into memory. Molly O’Day remained one of those names serious country people speak with respect, but the wider audience never fully caught up to what had passed through her voice so early. She died of cancer in 1987. But play those old recordings now, and they do not sound like someone chasing fame. They sound like a woman standing at the edge of country music before the door opened all the way — singing with one foot near Nashville and the other still planted in a mountain church.

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ERIC CLAPTON HEARD DUANE ALLMAN’S GUITAR ON WILSON PICKETT’S “HEY JUDE” AND IMMEDIATELY WANTED TO KNOW WHO WAS PLAYING. TWO YEARS LATER, THAT SAME GUITARIST WAS HELPING HIM MAKE LAYLA. A YEAR AFTER THAT, ALLMAN WAS DEAD AT 24. In 1968, Duane Allman was still better known inside studios than to the public. He had arrived at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals as a young slide guitarist and began building a reputation on sessions for artists including Aretha Franklin, Clarence Carter and Wilson Pickett. When Pickett came to Muscle Shoals without a clear song in mind, Allman suggested recording the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” Near the end of the track, his guitar broke loose into a fierce extended passage that immediately stood apart from a normal soul session. Eric Clapton heard it. He later remembered calling Atlantic and asking, essentially, who the guitarist was, saying he had rarely heard rock guitar fit so powerfully inside an R&B record. By 1969, Allman had moved beyond session work and formed the Allman Brothers Band with Gregg Allman, Dickey Betts, Berry Oakley, Butch Trucks and Jai Johanny Johanson. Their mixture of blues, country, jazz and long improvisation quickly established a new Southern rock language. Then Tom Dowd connected Allman with Clapton. In 1970, while Derek and the Dominos were recording Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs in Miami, Allman came by after an Allman Brothers show. Clapton already knew the guitar from “Hey Jude,” and the two musicians began trading parts almost immediately. Allman ended up playing on most of the album, his slide guitar becoming essential to tracks including “Layla.” At the same time, his own band was reaching another level. At Fillmore East, recorded in March 1971, captured the Allman Brothers at full force and became the record that cemented their reputation as one of America’s great live bands. Allman barely had time to see where any of it might lead. On October 29, 1971, while riding his motorcycle in Macon, Georgia, he collided with a truck and suffered fatal injuries. He was 24. The unusual thing about Duane Allman’s story is how much happened before most musicians would have reached their prime. He had already reshaped Southern session guitar, helped define the Allman Brothers, and left his sound inside one of Eric Clapton’s most famous records. Then the career stopped. The guitar did not.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” ERIC CLAPTON HEARD DUANE ALLMAN’S GUITAR ON WILSON…

Country Music

IN AUGUST 1969, MARTY ROBBINS SUFFERED A HEART ATTACK. FIVE MONTHS LATER, HE UNDERWENT BYPASS SURGERY WHEN THE PROCEDURE WAS STILL CONSIDERED EXPERIMENTAL—THEN RETURNED TO BOTH COUNTRY MUSIC AND STOCK-CAR RACING. By 1969, Marty Robbins had already spent nearly two decades living at full speed. He had joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1953, built a career that moved effortlessly from “A White Sport Coat” to “El Paso,” and developed a second life behind the wheel of stock cars. By the mid-1960s, he was arranging his Opry appearances around races at Nashville Speedway and had entered NASCAR’s top division. Then his heart forced everything to stop. In August 1969, Robbins suffered a heart attack. Doctors eventually determined that surgery was necessary, and on January 27, 1970, he underwent coronary bypass surgery—a procedure still new enough that the Country Music Hall of Fame describes it as being in its experimental stages at the time. For someone whose life revolved around stages, highways and race tracks, recovery could have meant a permanent retreat. It did not. Robbins recovered quickly. Only about three months after the operation, he appeared at the Academy of Country Music Awards and accepted its Man of the Decade honor. The following year, “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife” earned him another Grammy. But the stranger part was what happened away from the microphone. Robbins went back to racing. In October 1970—less than a year after open-heart surgery—he returned to NASCAR competition. Racing was not a publicity stunt for him; he had been doing it for years, often using the No. 42 car and sometimes scheduling Saturday nights so he could race first and still reach the Opry afterward. He would continue balancing both lives through the 1970s. There were more wrecks, temporary retirements from racing, and another return in 1977. He was still competing as late as November 1982. That same year, “Some Memories Just Won’t Die” gave him another Top 10 country hit, and in October he was finally inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Marty Robbins died from another heart attack on December 8, 1982, at 57. What makes the 1970 comeback unusual is not simply that he survived surgery. It is what he chose to do with the time doctors gave him afterward: he went back to the Opry, back to making hit records—and eventually, back behind the wheel.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” MARTY ROBBINS HAD OPEN-HEART SURGERY WHEN BYPASS WAS…

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JIM CROCE WAS FINALLY A STAR IN 1973. HE WAS ALSO EXHAUSTED, BROKE FROM BAD BUSINESS DEALS AND READY TO STEP AWAY FROM THE ROAD. THEN HIS WIFE RECEIVED THE LETTER TELLING HER SO — A WEEK AFTER HE DIED. Success had arrived late for Jim Croce. For years he and Ingrid Croce had played small rooms, taken ordinary jobs and watched an early Capitol album disappear. When Ingrid became pregnant in 1970, Croce pushed harder at songwriting. The same night they learned a baby was coming, he wrote “Time in a Bottle.” By 1972, the struggle abruptly turned into a career. You Don’t Mess Around with Jim produced “Operator” and the title track. Then “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown” reached No. 1 in 1973. Croce went from opening act to headliner in roughly a year and a half. But the success demanded almost constant touring, and his official biography says poor business arrangements still left him financially strained. At home were Ingrid and their young son, A.J. By September 1973, Croce had had enough of living somewhere else every night. While on the road, he wrote Ingrid a letter. It was not a songwriter trying to turn loneliness into another hit. He apologized for the strain between them and described what he wanted when the tour ended: better health, time at home, perhaps graduate school, short stories and movie scripts instead of endless travel. Most of all, he promised that they would finally have a life together. On September 20, Croce played Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana. After the concert, he, guitarist Maury Muehleisen and four others boarded a chartered Beechcraft bound for the next show in Texas. The aircraft crashed shortly after takeoff. Everyone aboard was killed. Croce was 30. The next day, his new single “I Got a Name” was released as planned. Then the mail arrived. About a week after the crash, Ingrid received Jim’s final letter. Near the end he had joked that he still had another thirty years ahead of him. The records kept moving without him. “I Got a Name” became a Top 10 hit. “Time in a Bottle,” the song written when Ingrid was pregnant with A.J., was pushed as a single after Croce’s death and reached No. 1 by the end of 1973 — making him only the third artist of the rock era at that point to score a posthumous Hot 100 No. 1. Years later, their son A.J. became a musician himself. For a long time he deliberately avoided building a career around his father’s songs. Only decades later did he begin performing them publicly as part of Croce Plays Croce. So one of the strangest parts of Jim Croce’s legacy is not that “Time in a Bottle” became immortal after his death. It is that the little boy for whom he wrote it eventually grew old enough to stand onstage and sing the songs his father never lived long enough to grow old with.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” JIM CROCE WAS FINALLY A STAR IN 1973.…

Country Music

IN JULY 2006, PORTER WAGONER SUFFERED A NEAR-FATAL AORTIC ANEURYSM AND SPENT SEVEN MONTHS AWAY FROM THE GRAND OLE OPRY. ONE YEAR LATER, AT 79, HE WAS OPENING FOR THE WHITE STRIPES AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN. By then, Porter Wagoner was supposed to belong to country music’s past. His syndicated television show had ended decades earlier, his hit-making years were behind him, and most of his public life centered on the Grand Ole Opry, where he had been a member since 1957. He still wore the rhinestone suits and still worked regularly, but Nashville had long since moved toward younger stars. Then, in July 2006, Wagoner suffered a near-fatal aortic aneurysm. Emergency surgery saved him, but the recovery kept him away from the Opry for seven months. At 79, it would have been an understandable place to stop. Instead, when he returned in early 2007, he told the Los Angeles Times he had been desperate simply to get back to work. There was also an album waiting. Marty Stuart, who had grown up watching Wagoner on television, had approached him about making a new record before the aneurysm. Once Porter recovered, they finished Wagonmaster—his first secular studio album in seven years. Released in June 2007 on Anti-, it unexpectedly brought strong reviews and fresh attention from listeners far outside the traditional Opry audience. Then came one of the strangest bookings of his career. In July, Wagoner opened for the White Stripes at Madison Square Garden. The 79-year-old country veteran who had once introduced America to rhinestone Nashville on syndicated television was suddenly standing before a rock audience young enough to be his grandchildren. He did not have long to enjoy the revival. Wagoner was diagnosed with lung cancer later that year and died on October 28, 2007, at 80. His final season did not restore him to the country charts of the 1960s. It gave him something stranger: a new audience arriving just as his life was ending, discovering that beneath the rhinestones was music darker and tougher than they had expected.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” PORTER WAGONER SURVIVED A NEAR-FATAL AORTIC ANEURYSM AT…

Country Music

STRINGBEAN AKEMAN LEFT THE GRAND OLE OPRY AFTER A SATURDAY NIGHT SHOW. WHEN HE AND HIS WIFE GOT HOME, TWO MEN WERE WAITING IN THE DARK. David Akeman was known to country fans as Stringbean. Onstage, he looked almost harmless by design — tall, skinny, wearing his comic outfit, picking banjo, telling jokes, and carrying the old mountain style into the Grand Ole Opry and later Hee Haw. The laugh came first for many viewers, but underneath it was a serious old-time musician. The Country Music Hall of Fame identifies him as an Opry performer and a protégé of Uncle Dave Macon, one of the early pillars of country entertainment. Away from the stage, he and his wife, Estelle, lived simply near Nashville. They were not flashy people, even after television made Stringbean more recognizable. Friends knew he did not trust banks much and had a habit of keeping cash close, a detail that would become dangerous once the wrong men heard it. On November 10, 1973, Stringbean performed at the Grand Ole Opry. After the show, he and Estelle drove home. Two intruders had broken into their cabin looking for hidden money. When the couple returned, the night turned into one of the most shocking crimes Nashville’s country community had ever seen. Stringbean and Estelle were killed at their home after the Opry performance. The next morning, Grandpa Jones went to check on them. He was Stringbean’s friend and fellow Opry performer, and he found the scene that confirmed what Nashville did not want to believe. The murder did not feel like ordinary crime news. It felt like someone had stepped from the darkness into the Opry family’s own living room. The killers had come for money, but the story kept one last bitter turn. Years later, in 1996, cash was reportedly discovered hidden in the cabin’s chimney, long after Stringbean and Estelle were gone. The money had survived the men who came looking for it, but it had not saved the people who owned it. Stringbean’s death changed the way Nashville remembered its own innocence. The Opry still opened. Hee Haw still aired. The banjos, jokes, and bright country costumes kept moving across television screens. But behind that old stage smile was now a cabin outside town, a Saturday night ride home, and a silence that made even the funniest man in the room feel suddenly far away.

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Country Music

A STEEL REFINERY ACCIDENT LEFT STONEY EDWARDS TOO SICK TO GO BACK TO WORK. THEN A TWO-DOLLAR TOY STOPPED HIM FROM WALKING OUT ON HIS FAMILY. Before country music found him, Stoney Edwards was trying to keep food on the table. He was born Frenchy Edwards in Seminole, Oklahoma, during the Depression, and work came before dreams. After moving west, he took the jobs available to him — janitor, truck driver, cowboy, machinist, forklift operator. At night, he still sang country songs around the Bay Area, carrying Lefty Frizzell, Bob Wills, and Merle Haggard in his voice before any label knew his name. Then the refinery nearly killed him. In 1968, while working at a steel refinery, Edwards was trapped inside a sealed tank and suffered severe carbon dioxide poisoning. He survived, but the accident left him too sick to return to the kind of heavy work that had supported his wife and children. The paycheck was gone, and so was the old certainty that his body could always earn another one. The song came from the edge of that fear. Edwards later wrote “A Two Dollar Toy” from the feeling of a father who thinks about leaving because he cannot provide. In the story, the man is stopped when he steps on a child’s toy and realizes what he would be walking away from. It was not a clever Nashville setup. It was a poor man’s crisis made small enough to fit in a doorway. Then Bob Wills became the unlikely turn. In 1970, after the accident had changed Edwards’s life, he appeared at a benefit he helped organize for the ailing Western swing legend. A lawyer with Capitol Records connections heard him sing, and within months Edwards was recording for the label. His first album arrived as A Country Singer, and his records carried the plain hard-country sound of a man who had already worked too many jobs to fake one. For a few years, the door stayed open. “She’s My Rock” became a Top 20 country hit, and “Mississippi You’re on My Mind” followed. In the 1970s, Edwards became one of the most visible Black country singers after Charley Pride, but his story never felt like a clean industry breakthrough. It still began in a tank, a hospital, a house full of children, and a toy on the floor. Stoney Edwards did not enter country through glamour. He came through work clothes, bad lungs, and the moment a father stopped at the door because something small under his foot reminded him who was still asleep inside the house.

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“Scroll down to the end of the article to listen to music.” A STEEL REFINERY ACCIDENT LEFT STONEY EDWARDS TOO…

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