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WAYLON JENNINGS RECORDED 12 SONGS WITH ONLY HIS GUITAR, HIS VOICE AND ROBBY TURNER’S BASS. TEN YEARS AFTER WAYLON DIED, THE MAN BESIDE HIM RETURNED TO FINISH THEM. During the final years of Waylon’s life, he spent hours in the studio with Robby Turner, his longtime musician and close friend. Waylon sang and played guitar. Robby played bass. Together, they recorded the foundation of 12 songs and discussed the instruments that would eventually be added. But Waylon’s health was failing. He died on February 13, 2002, before the album could be completed. The recordings remained untouched for years. Then Robby received Jessi Colter’s blessing and brought several of Waylon’s longtime musicians back into the studio. Their guide was simple: finish the songs as Waylon would have wanted them. The work was not easy. While adding steel guitar to one track, Robby looked down and saw one of his tears fall onto the instrument. In 2012, the finished album was released as Goin’ Down Rockin’: The Last Recordings. Waylon was gone. But the men who had once played until he smiled came together one last time and finished what their friend had started.

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Waylon Jennings, Robby Turner, and the Songs Left Waiting for the Right Ending Some records arrive like a celebration. Others…

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JANIS JOPLIN PLAYED THE GUITAR PART HERSELF ON THE ONLY NO. 1 SHE WOULD EVER HAVE, AND SHE NEVER LIVED TO HEAR IT ON THE RADIO. She cut “Me and Bobby McGee” during the Pearl sessions in 1970, in the weeks before October 4, when she was found dead in a Hollywood hotel room at 27. Kris Kristofferson, who wrote the song with Fred Foster, was off in Peru working on a film. Bob Neuwirth had taught it to her. Kristofferson didn’t know the recording existed. The day after she died, her producer Paul Rothchild asked him to come to the office and listen. He said he walked all over Los Angeles afterward, in tears. In March 1971 the record reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, one of the first posthumous chart-toppers in the history of that chart, and the song that made his name as a writer. Then came the part nobody prepares for. Every audience wanted to hear it, and he couldn’t get through it. So he sat down with his friend Donnie Fritts and they played Joplin’s version over and over, until he could listen to it without coming apart. He sang it for the rest of his career. He said he thought of her every single time.

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Janis Joplin, “Me and Bobby McGee,” and the Song She Never Heard on the Radio There are songs that become…

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CHET ATKINS WAS THE GUITARIST NASHVILLE TRIED TO COPY. THEN JERRY REED CAME ALONG, AND EVEN “MR. GUITAR” BEGAN LEARNING FROM HIM. When Jerry Reed arrived at RCA in the mid-1960s, Chet Atkins was already one of the most respected men in country music. He was a legendary guitarist, a successful producer and the man who had helped shape the Nashville Sound. But Chet heard something different in Jerry’s playing. Jerry did not pick the guitar like anyone else. His fingers attacked the strings with unusual rhythms, sudden pauses and complicated patterns that seemed almost impossible to repeat. Instead of asking Jerry to become more conventional, Chet encouraged him to sound like himself. Then something remarkable happened. The established master began incorporating some of Jerry’s musical ideas into his own playing. Chet recorded Jerry’s songs, shared the studio with him and treated the younger guitarist not as a student, but as an equal. In 1971, their album “Me and Jerry” won a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance. Jerry had entered Nashville hoping to earn the respect of one of his heroes. He left behind something even greater. He had given “Mr. Guitar” a few new things to learn.

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Chet Atkins and Jerry Reed: When the Master Learned Something New By the mid-1960s, Chet Atkins was already a giant…

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WHEN THE STATLER BROTHERS RETIRED, THREE MEN WERE READY TO STOP. JIMMY FORTUNE WAS 47—AND HAD TO LEARN HOW TO BEGIN AGAIN WITHOUT THEM. On October 26, 2002, The Statler Brothers gave their final concert in Virginia. For 21 years, Jimmy had stood beside Don Reid, Harold Reid and Phil Balsley, adding his high tenor to one of country music’s most recognizable harmonies. When the last note ended, the other three stepped away from touring. Jimmy was not ready. But continuing meant starting over. There would be no Statler name above him, no three familiar voices surrounding his own and no guarantee that audiences would follow him. Jimmy considered writing songs and performing wherever he could. Then he chose to keep singing. In 2003, he released his first solo album. Its title said exactly where his life stood: “When One Door Closes”. The Statler Brothers had given Jimmy the greatest opportunity of his career. Their retirement took away the only musical home he had known for two decades. At 47, he did not try to replace it. He simply opened another door.

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When The Statler Brothers Retired, Jimmy Fortune Had to Begin Again On October 22, 2002, The Statler Brothers stepped away…

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DOCTORS THOUGHT KRIS KRISTOFFERSON WAS LOSING HIS MEMORY TO ALZHEIMER’S. THEN A LYME DISEASE TEST CAME BACK POSITIVE — AND AT 80, HE RETURNED TO THE ROAD. By his mid-70s, Kris was struggling to remember names, lyrics and what he had been doing only moments earlier. Doctors suspected Alzheimer’s disease or dementia, possibly connected to the blows he had taken while boxing and playing football and rugby. He began taking medication, but his condition kept getting worse. Then, in 2016, a doctor tested him for Lyme disease. The result was positive. Kris stopped medications for illnesses he apparently did not have and completed three weeks of Lyme disease treatment. His wife, Lisa, said many of his symptoms improved, though some short-term memory problems remained. That same year, he toured again, including performances with Willie Nelson and shows in Europe. He also released “The Cedar Creek Sessions”, which earned a Grammy nomination. The family had feared they were watching Kris disappear. Instead, at 80, one of the Highwaymen found his way back to the stage.

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Doctors Thought Kris Kristofferson Was Losing His Memory. Then a Lyme Disease Test Changed Everything. By the time Kris Kristofferson…

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HE WROTE IT ALONE. NO CO-WRITER. THREE WEEKS AT NO. 1. June 1978. Waylon Jennings put out a song with nobody’s name on it but his own. Ten months earlier, federal agents had walked into a Nashville studio while he was standing at the mic, headphones on, singing harmony for somebody else’s record. August 23, 1977. He was arrested that night. The case never held up. He didn’t dodge it afterward. He opened the song by owning the arrests — the ones that were his doing, and the ones that weren’t. He refused to say he was proud of any of it. But there was one thing he would not let anyone take from him. One sentence he wrote in his own defense, and it’s the reason people still hear that song as an apology instead of a brag. Then the third verse turns. He stops talking about himself and speaks directly to a woman — and it isn’t a love song. It’s a warning. Sixth No. 1 of his career. Thirteen weeks on the chart.

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Waylon Jennings and the Song That Sounded Like a Confession In June 1978, Waylon Jennings released a song that stood…

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IN 1995, A WRITER WALKED INTO WAYLON JENNINGS’ LIVING ROOM AND FOUND HIS WIFE SINGING SCRIPTURE. Lenny Kaye was there to help Waylon put his autobiography together. Jessi Colter went to the piano with a Bible near her and began setting the Psalms to melodies she was inventing as her hands found the chords. Kaye said he was transfixed. Jessi has said it wasn’t something she normally did. It fit her, though. Her mother was a Pentecostal preacher who performed her wedding to Waylon in Phoenix in October 1969, and Jessi had been the church pianist since she was eleven. She married a man with three marriages behind him, and she stayed through the cocaine years that nearly ended the marriage in the early 1980s, through the heart bypass in 1988, through the diabetes, through the amputation of his foot in December 2001. In her memoir she writes that Waylon came to faith that Thanksgiving. He died in his sleep on February 13, 2002. She and Kaye finally recorded those songs in New York in 2007 and 2008, just her voice and piano and his guitar. They came out in March 2017 as an album called The Psalms, twenty-two years after the first of those melodies was played in a house where Waylon Jennings was still alive.

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The Day Jessi Colter Turned a Living Room Into Scripture In 1995, Lenny Kaye walked into Waylon Jennings’ living room…

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IN OCTOBER 2016, RANDY TRAVIS ROSE OUT OF HIS WHEELCHAIR AT THE COUNTRY MUSIC HALL OF FAME AND SANG — THREE YEARS AFTER DOCTORS TOLD MARY TO LET HIM GO. The room at the Medallion Ceremony went silent because nobody in it expected a sound out of him. He had not sung in public since 2013 and still could not put a full sentence together, so Mary read his acceptance for him. Then she said, “Randy stared death in the face, but death blinked,” and handed him the microphone. Garth Brooks was crying before the first verse ended. She had watched every inch of it. In July 2013 a virus settled in his heart and put him in a Texas hospital with both lungs full of fluid. His heart failed, he went on life support, and a stroke took the voice. One to two percent was the number the doctors gave her. Months later a staph infection and other hospital-borne bacteria piled on, and his team told her he did not have the strength left for any of it. Before she gave them an answer, she went and stood at his bed. He could not speak, could not sit up, could not tell her anything. He squeezed her hand, and a tear ran down his face. She turned around and told the doctors that man wanted to fight, and they were going to fight with him.

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When Randy Travis Stood Up and Sang at the Country Music Hall of Fame In October 2016, the Country Music…

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HE BURIED HIS WIFE AND MOTHER WITHIN WEEKS OF EACH OTHER. A YEAR LATER, HIS ONLY SON DIED. THEN BILLY JOE SHAVER’S HEART GAVE OUT ONSTAGE — AND HE KEPT SINGING. In 1999, Shaver lost his mother and his wife, Brenda, to cancer within a month of each other. Then, on New Year’s Eve 2000, his 38-year-old son Eddy died from an accidental heroin overdose. Eddy was not only his son. He was the guitarist who had stood beside him onstage and helped write “Live Forever.” Billy Joe later admitted that after those losses, part of him wanted to die. On August 25, 2001, while performing at Gruene Hall, the oldest dance hall in Texas, he suffered a massive heart attack. But he continued the show long enough that much of the audience never realized what was happening. He thought Gruene Hall might be a fitting place for an old outlaw to die. “It didn’t work out,” he later joked. Doctors performed a quadruple bypass. Billy Joe survived, returned to the studio, released another album in 2002 and kept performing for nearly two more decades. He had already buried the three people closest to him. But when his own heart tried to stop, Billy Joe Shaver kept singing.

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When Billy Joe Shaver Kept Singing By the time Billy Joe Shaver reached the stage at Gruene Hall, he had…

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WAYLON JENNINGS DIDN’T LEAVE RCA TO BECOME AN OUTLAW. HE STAYED — AND FORCED ONE OF NASHVILLE’S BIGGEST LABELS TO LET HIM CHOOSE HIS OWN SONGS, USE HIS OWN BAND, AND CONTROL HIS OWN RECORDS. By 1972, Waylon was exhausted and frustrated. He had spent years inside Nashville’s system, where producers chose studio musicians and artists had limited control over how their records sounded. While recovering from hepatitis, he even considered walking away from music. Instead, Waylon hired manager Neil Reshen and renegotiated his RCA contract. The new agreement gave him something almost unheard of for a Nashville artist at the time: creative control. He began producing his own records, recording with the musicians who played beside him on the road, and choosing songs the old system might have rejected. One result was “Honky Tonk Heroes”, built largely around the writing of the then little-known Billy Joe Shaver. The records sold. The movement grew. By 1976, “Wanted! The Outlaws” became country music’s first platinum album. Waylon’s beard and black hat made him look like an outlaw. But the real rebellion was written into his contract.

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Waylon Jennings and the Real Rebellion Behind the Outlaw Sound By 1972, Waylon Jennings was worn down by the machinery…

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WAYLON JENNINGS RECORDED 12 SONGS WITH ONLY HIS GUITAR, HIS VOICE AND ROBBY TURNER’S BASS. TEN YEARS AFTER WAYLON DIED, THE MAN BESIDE HIM RETURNED TO FINISH THEM. During the final years of Waylon’s life, he spent hours in the studio with Robby Turner, his longtime musician and close friend. Waylon sang and played guitar. Robby played bass. Together, they recorded the foundation of 12 songs and discussed the instruments that would eventually be added. But Waylon’s health was failing. He died on February 13, 2002, before the album could be completed. The recordings remained untouched for years. Then Robby received Jessi Colter’s blessing and brought several of Waylon’s longtime musicians back into the studio. Their guide was simple: finish the songs as Waylon would have wanted them. The work was not easy. While adding steel guitar to one track, Robby looked down and saw one of his tears fall onto the instrument. In 2012, the finished album was released as Goin’ Down Rockin’: The Last Recordings. Waylon was gone. But the men who had once played until he smiled came together one last time and finished what their friend had started.

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JANIS JOPLIN PLAYED THE GUITAR PART HERSELF ON THE ONLY NO. 1 SHE WOULD EVER HAVE, AND SHE NEVER LIVED TO HEAR IT ON THE RADIO. She cut “Me and Bobby McGee” during the Pearl sessions in 1970, in the weeks before October 4, when she was found dead in a Hollywood hotel room at 27. Kris Kristofferson, who wrote the song with Fred Foster, was off in Peru working on a film. Bob Neuwirth had taught it to her. Kristofferson didn’t know the recording existed. The day after she died, her producer Paul Rothchild asked him to come to the office and listen. He said he walked all over Los Angeles afterward, in tears. In March 1971 the record reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, one of the first posthumous chart-toppers in the history of that chart, and the song that made his name as a writer. Then came the part nobody prepares for. Every audience wanted to hear it, and he couldn’t get through it. So he sat down with his friend Donnie Fritts and they played Joplin’s version over and over, until he could listen to it without coming apart. He sang it for the rest of his career. He said he thought of her every single time.

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CHET ATKINS WAS THE GUITARIST NASHVILLE TRIED TO COPY. THEN JERRY REED CAME ALONG, AND EVEN “MR. GUITAR” BEGAN LEARNING FROM HIM. When Jerry Reed arrived at RCA in the mid-1960s, Chet Atkins was already one of the most respected men in country music. He was a legendary guitarist, a successful producer and the man who had helped shape the Nashville Sound. But Chet heard something different in Jerry’s playing. Jerry did not pick the guitar like anyone else. His fingers attacked the strings with unusual rhythms, sudden pauses and complicated patterns that seemed almost impossible to repeat. Instead of asking Jerry to become more conventional, Chet encouraged him to sound like himself. Then something remarkable happened. The established master began incorporating some of Jerry’s musical ideas into his own playing. Chet recorded Jerry’s songs, shared the studio with him and treated the younger guitarist not as a student, but as an equal. In 1971, their album “Me and Jerry” won a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance. Jerry had entered Nashville hoping to earn the respect of one of his heroes. He left behind something even greater. He had given “Mr. Guitar” a few new things to learn.

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WHEN THE STATLER BROTHERS RETIRED, THREE MEN WERE READY TO STOP. JIMMY FORTUNE WAS 47—AND HAD TO LEARN HOW TO BEGIN AGAIN WITHOUT THEM. On October 26, 2002, The Statler Brothers gave their final concert in Virginia. For 21 years, Jimmy had stood beside Don Reid, Harold Reid and Phil Balsley, adding his high tenor to one of country music’s most recognizable harmonies. When the last note ended, the other three stepped away from touring. Jimmy was not ready. But continuing meant starting over. There would be no Statler name above him, no three familiar voices surrounding his own and no guarantee that audiences would follow him. Jimmy considered writing songs and performing wherever he could. Then he chose to keep singing. In 2003, he released his first solo album. Its title said exactly where his life stood: “When One Door Closes”. The Statler Brothers had given Jimmy the greatest opportunity of his career. Their retirement took away the only musical home he had known for two decades. At 47, he did not try to replace it. He simply opened another door.