Country Music

Country Music Hits

Uncategorized

Uncategorized

BRENDA LEE STILL REMEMBERS CLOMPING AROUND IN PATSY CLINE’S BOOTS, YEARS TOO BIG FOR HER FEET. That friendship began in the worst possible way. Brenda was a girl working the country circuit with her mother when a promoter took the box office and vanished, leaving the two of them stranded far from home with nothing to show for the night. Club owners did that constantly to the women on those bills, and a mother and a young singer had almost no way to fight it. Patsy found out, and she took them both in. “Miss Patsy took us under her wing,” Brenda has said. That was the pattern with Cline. Groceries bought for younger women who had none. Rent covered so somebody could stay in Nashville one more month. Work handed to friends who needed it more than she did. She was nearly twelve years older than Brenda, who has always described what she felt for her as something closer to sisterhood than admiration. Cline died in a plane crash on March 5, 1963, at thirty years old. Brenda Lee was eighteen. She is still telling people what that woman did for her family in a town where nobody else would.

No Comments

Brenda Lee Still Remembers Clomping Around in Patsy Cline’s Boots Brenda Lee has carried many memories from her long career,…

Uncategorized

ON APRIL 2, 1964, ONE OF THE BEST-SELLING SINGERS IN THE WORLD WAS NINETEEN, ELEVEN MONTHS MARRIED, AND THE MOTHER OF A DAUGHTER WHO HAD ARRIVED SIX WEEKS TOO SOON. Julie was born at Vanderbilt Hospital in Nashville. Six weeks early in 1964 carried a weight it does not carry now, and Vanderbilt happened to be one of the few places in America built for it. One of the country’s first newborn intensive care units had opened there three years before, the work of Mildred Stahlman, who gave much of her career to understanding why premature lungs fail. Brenda Lee already knew what it meant to carry a family. Her father died in a fall at a construction site when she was a child, and she became the household’s main earner. She married Ronnie Shacklett in April 1963. He ran his own business outside the music industry, and they are still married today, more than sixty years later. Julie came home. She grew up, married in 1986, and in 2002 she sat down and helped write her mother’s autobiography. The baby who arrived six weeks early is credited on the cover, next to Brenda.

No Comments

Brenda Lee, Julie, and the Quiet Hope Behind a Tiny Beginning On April 2, 1964, Brenda Lee was only nineteen,…

Uncategorized

HIS ASHES WENT INTO THE ROCKY MOUNTAINS. NO GRAVE. NO HEADSTONE. THERE IS NOWHERE FOR FANS TO STAND. Fourteen gold albums. Eight platinum. Poet Laureate of Colorado in 1974. In 1975 the Country Music Association named him Entertainer of the Year — the genre’s highest honor. The man reading the winner’s name onstage was Charlie Rich, the previous year’s winner. He pulled a lighter from his pocket, set the card on fire, then announced “my friend, Mr. John Denver.” Denver was watching by satellite from thousands of miles away. He accepted graciously, with no idea what had just happened. On October 12, 1997, he took an experimental Rutan Long-EZ up over Monterey Bay. Fifteen minutes later it went into the water. Investigators concluded he had likely caught a rudder pedal while twisting in his seat to reach an awkward fuel valve. He was 53. Police had to fly his fingerprints in from Colorado to identify the body. Then came the part Nashville had no say in. Colorado ordered its flags to half-staff. His service was held five days later at a Presbyterian church in Aurora, led by a retired Air Force chaplain, and his ashes went into the mountains he had built a career singing about. In 2007 “Rocky Mountain High” became an official state song. In 2011 he became the first person ever inducted into the Colorado Music Hall of Fame. The Country Music Hall of Fame still hasn’t called.

No Comments

John Denver and the Silence of the Mountains John Denver built a career out of making distance feel intimate. His…

Uncategorized

HE SPENT HIS LIFE SINGING ABOUT THE SKY — AND ON A CLEAR OCTOBER AFTERNOON, THE SKY IS WHERE HE WENT. He was the man who made an entire generation homesick for a place they had never been. “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” “Rocky Mountain High.” “Annie’s Song.” A voice so bright and unguarded that critics sometimes mistook the warmth for simplicity — and millions of listeners knew better. Flying was never a side interest for him. He held a pilot’s license, he collected aircraft, he came from a family of Air Force flyers. The open air was not a metaphor in his songs. It was where he actually lived. On October 12, 1997, he took an experimental Long-EZ aircraft up over Monterey Bay, California. It was a plane he had recently acquired and was still learning. He was 53 years old. The aircraft went down into the water. He was killed on impact. The cruelty was in the details that came out afterward. Investigators found the fuel selector valve had been placed in a position nearly impossible to reach from the pilot’s seat — he would have had to turn and twist his body to switch tanks. The NTSB concluded he likely ran a tank dry and lost control while reaching behind him for that handle. A design flaw. Inches of reach. That was the margin. The contrast was almost unbearable. The man who had written the most joyful songs ever recorded about mountains and open air, who had sung for presidents and testified before Congress about the environment, died in seconds in the element he loved most. But what he left behind was never confined to those final moments. “Take Me Home, Country Roads” is now sung in stadiums in countries he never toured, by people who have never seen West Virginia. His environmental work outlived him by decades. The story of what he built — and what it cost him to live that fully — is still being told.

No Comments

He Spent His Life Singing About the Sky — And On a Clear October Afternoon, the Sky Is Where He…

Uncategorized

DOCTORS TOLD JOHN DENVER HE’D NEVER BE A FATHER. TWO YEARS AFTER HIS DAUGHTER ARRIVED, THE MARRIAGE THAT GAVE HER TO HIM WAS OVER. He met Cassandra Delaney in Australia in 1985, married her on a mountaintop above Aspen in August 1988, and by the time Jesse Belle was born the following May, he had a child he’d been told he would never have. Cassandra called her their miracle baby. The wedding made magazine covers around the world. By 1991 they were living apart. The divorce came through in 1993. What happened in between, Cassandra didn’t talk about publicly until 1996 — and when she did, she said she was finished protecting his image. She described bullying, jealousy, threats, and heavy drinking. She said John had tried to destroy the relationship himself. The custody fight that followed ran to millions. Denver’s version, in his memoir Take Me Home, was a single hard sentence: before their short-lived marriage ended, she made a fool of him from one end of the valley to the other. Two people who fell in love at first sight, in the same house at the end, writing each other notes because neither could say it out loud. He kept singing about home to sold-out rooms the entire time.

No Comments

John Denver, Cassandra Delaney, and the Short Marriage That Changed Everything By the time John Denver met Cassandra Delaney in…

Uncategorized

WILLIE NELSON GAVE AWAY “THREE DAYS” BEFORE HE EVER SANG IT HIMSELF. In 1961 he was a Texas songwriter in Nashville with more songs than luck, and the fastest way to eat was to hand your best work to somebody with a record deal. Faron Young recorded “Three Days” that year. It charted for Young. Willie didn’t cut his own version until 1962, on his Liberty debut …And Then I Wrote — the album that also carried “Crazy,” “Hello Walls,” and “Funny How Time Slips Away,” all songs that had already made other singers famous. His own recording is the quiet one. No push, no big finish. He sits just behind the beat the way he always has, and the song turns from a breakup into something closer to a man counting what’s left. Sixty-four years later he’s still singing it. Willie turned 93 in April. He’s on the road through the summer with the Outlaw Music Festival, performing seated, managing emphysema with a nebulizer on the bus and rest days built into the schedule. Lukas takes the heavier vocals now. Willie takes the guitar solos and the closing verses — every night. The songwriter who once had to give his songs away to be heard is now the last man standing who can sing them the way they were written. Sixty-four years on, he still gets the last verse.

No Comments

Willie Nelson Gave Away “Three Days” Before He Ever Sang It Himself In 1961, Willie Nelson was still building a…

Uncategorized

JOHN DENVER SANG “BACK HOME AGAIN” IN THE RAIN — AND THE TITLE MEANT SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY THAT DAY. May 1995. The National Memorial Day Concert on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. The rain came down steadily and stayed, and the crowd stayed with it. Denver stepped out with his guitar and said, “What we honor on Memorial Day means an enormous amount to me, as we move hopefully to a world without war.” Then he sang “Back Home Again.” Anywhere else it’s one of the happiest songs he ever wrote — a man pulling into the driveway, the porch light on, someone waiting for him. That’s the whole song. But he sang it at a concert for people who died in military service, in front of families who had waited for a car that never turned into the driveway. The rain kept falling and he kept singing, and for those few minutes Memorial Day wasn’t about speeches or ceremony. It was about one word. Home — and everyone who gave up their chance to see it again.

No Comments

John Denver Sang “Back Home Again” in the Rain — and the Title Meant Something Else Entirely That Day In…

Uncategorized

EMMYLOU HARRIS SAID LOSING GRAM PARSONS FELT LIKE FALLING OFF A MOUNTAIN. Before he found her, she was playing bars and small clubs around Washington DC, her first album already forgotten, unsure music would ever be more than a struggle. Gram heard something in her voice that others had missed. He asked her to sing beside him, and together they built the harmonies that helped shape country rock. Then, in September 1973, he died suddenly in a motel room near Joshua Tree, only 26 years old. Their second album together, Grievous Angel, wouldn’t reach the world until months after he was gone. She was left with unfinished plans and songs no one would hear him sing. Nearly two years later, she and Bill Danoff wrote “Boulder to Birmingham” — the only song she had a hand in writing for her breakthrough album, Pieces of the Sky. She didn’t write it to explain Gram Parsons to anyone. She wrote someone still trying to understand why he was gone, someone who would walk all the way from Boulder to Birmingham just to see his face again. The album launched her solo career. But she never treated Gram as merely the man who discovered her. For the rest of her life, she carried his music with her.

No Comments

Emmylou Harris, Gram Parsons, and the Song That Carried Her Grief When Emmylou Harris spoke about losing Gram Parsons, she…

Uncategorized

IN 1978, JOHNNY CASH FINALLY SANG “TAKE ME HOME, COUNTRY ROADS” — THE HIT THAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE HIS ALL ALONG. When Bill Danoff and Taffy Nivert first pieced the song together on a Maryland back road, they were imagining Cash’s booming voice, not John Denver’s. They thought it was too country for the young folk singer opening their shows. But after one of Denver’s December 1970 gigs at a little Washington, D.C. club, they played him what they had, and he wouldn’t let it go. The three stayed up until morning finishing the words. The song meant for Cash became Denver’s signature and one of the most beloved records in American music. Cash never got to make it his own. Yet years later, on Denver’s own television special, the two men sat down together with their guitars and traded that famous chorus back and forth, one voice deep and weathered, the other bright and clear, meeting inside the same song. It felt less like a contest over a song than two friends finally sharing one. And Denver, the host, seemed to be welcoming Cash into a home the song had promised him all along.

No Comments

In 1978, Johnny Cash Finally Sang “Take Me Home, Country Roads” Some songs feel so natural that it is hard…

Uncategorized

THEY HELD HIS MEMORIAL AT FAITH PRESBYTERIAN IN AURORA. MOURNERS LINED UP OUTSIDE, LIP-SYNCHING HIS SONGS THROUGH TEARS AS HIS MUSIC DRIFTED ACROSS THE PARKING LOT UNDER A BRILLIANT BLUE COLORADO SKY. His songs became the poetry of a whole state. Colorado named “Rocky Mountain High” an official state anthem. West Virginia claimed “Take Me Home, Country Roads” as its own. On October 17, 1997, hundreds gathered in Aurora to say goodbye. His friend Tom Crum, co-founder of Denver’s Windstar Foundation, stood to speak. He said just eight words that people would carry for decades: “I hate that John died. But I am so glad that he lived.” The next day, thousands of fans filled a second celebration in Aspen — the mountain town he had made his home. His own lyrics were printed on the program: “Love is why I came here in the first place.” His ashes were scattered across the Rocky Mountains he had spent his life singing about. In Aspen, the city built the John Denver Sanctuary — boulders carved with his lyrics beside the Roaring Fork River. Every October 12, fans still gather there. He spent his life telling the world where home was. Then he went home for good.

No Comments

John Denver’s Last Goodbye in Colorado On a bright October day in 1997, mourners gathered at Faith Presbyterian in Aurora,…

You Missed

Uncategorized

Fifteen years after John Denver and Annie Martell’s marriage ended, Annie revealed something unexpected after his death: her favorite John Denver love song was not “Annie’s Song.” John and Annie married in 1967, when they were both young. Years later, after a difficult period in their marriage, John went skiing in Aspen. While riding a chairlift, the words to “Annie’s Song” came to him. He returned home and wrote down one of the most famous love songs of the 1970s. Annie later said she still cried when she heard it. But their marriage did not survive. They separated in 1982 and eventually divorced. During that painful period, John wrote another song for Annie: “Perhaps Love.” John died in a plane crash on October 12, 1997. He was 53. The very next day, Annie was interviewed about him. She said her favorite song of his was “Perhaps Love.” Not the song John wrote when their love was strong. The one he wrote while they were losing each other.

Uncategorized

Kris Kristofferson bought a ticket to Nashville in November 1970. He never used all of it. He met Rita Coolidge at the gate in Los Angeles. They were on the same flight and talked the whole way, and when the plane stopped in Memphis, he got off with her. Before that night ended they had already picked a name for a child they hadn’t had yet. She called it love at first flight. They married in 1973. Their daughter Casey was born the next year. They won two Grammys singing together. Then it came apart. They divorced in 1980, and when Rita finally wrote about it, she softened nothing — the drinking, the betrayal, crying every single day. She said it was not a good way to live. She asked for nothing when she left. But around that same time, asked about Kris, she wasn’t bitter at all. She said the two of them still had a bond nobody else could follow. Asked whether they might ever sing together again, she smiled and said, “Never say never.” They never got the chance. Kris died on September 28, 2024, at his home in Maui. He was 88. By then they had been divorced forty-four years.

Uncategorized

In 1978, Willie Nelson gave Columbia the last kind of album anyone expected from the face of outlaw country: ten old pop standards, some of them written before he was born. Willie had wanted to make that record for years. The problem was finding someone who could arrange songs as sophisticated as “Stardust” and “Moonlight in Vermont” without burying the way he naturally sang. Then he met Booker T. Jones. The legendary soul musician happened to be living in the same Malibu apartment building. Willie asked him to arrange “Moonlight in Vermont.” When he heard what Booker T. had done with it, he knew he had found the man to produce the entire album. Columbia executives were far less certain. Willie later remembered that they looked “stunned” when they heard what he was making. The audience answered for them. Stardust reached No. 1 on the country album chart. “Georgia on My Mind” and “Blue Skies” both became No. 1 country singles, and the album remained on Billboard’s country album chart for a decade. Willie Nelson had built his reputation by refusing to sound like everyone else. Then Booker T. Jones helped him prove that even the oldest songs could sound completely like Willie.

Uncategorized

In 1968, Kris Kristofferson was driving from Nashville toward the Gulf of Mexico when the end of a real relationship began turning into a song. He called it “For the Good Times.” Kris wasn’t writing about anger or trying to win someone back. The relationship was over, and the song simply imagined two people spending one last tender moment together before saying goodbye. Two years later, Ray Price recorded it. Price had been one of country music’s biggest stars, but he had gone 11 years without a No. 1 country single. On March 16, 1970, he walked into Columbia Studio A in Nashville and recorded Kristofferson’s song with a full orchestra behind him. That version changed things for both men. “For the Good Times” reached No. 1 on the country chart and crossed all the way to No. 11 on the pop chart. For Price, it was his first country chart-topper in 11 years. For Kristofferson, it became his first No. 1 as a songwriter. Kris had written the song because something in his own life was ending. Ray Price sang it, and suddenly two careers were beginning a new chapter.