4. I Can’t Stop Loving You, Country Music

On May 26, 1953, the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jimmie Rodgers, more than thirty thousand people flooded into his hometown of Meridian, Mississippi, to celebrate the man known as “the Singing Brakeman” and “America’s Blue Yodeler.” Ernest Tubb, a Rodgers acolyte and one of the organizers of the celebration, referred to him as “the Daddy of Country Music.”

The array of stars that turned out demonstrated the broad embrace of the music Rodgers had helped popularize in the 1920s. The original Carter Family—A.P., Sara, and Maybelle—appeared together for the first time in ten years. Bluegrass innovator Bill Monroe and his brother Charlie put aside their long-standing feud for the day. Western swing was represented by Tommy Duncan and Hank Thompson.

Honky tonk heroes Lefty Frizzell and Webb Pierce were there, as was Hank Williams’s mother. Grand Ole Opry regulars Roy Acuff and Little Jimmy Dickens showed up. So did Ralph Peer, who had done more than anyone to record both hillbilly and race music in its early days.

Hank Snow’s devotion to Rodgers’s memory was as fervent as Ernest Tubb’s: he had just released an album of Rodgers’s songs and had named his son Jimmie Rodgers Snow in honor of his hero. With Rodgers’s widow at his side, Snow presided at a ceremony unveiling a new monument to the man Meridian had once considered a worthless drifter but now claimed as its most honored native.

Rodgers, Snow proclaimed, “led the way for all of us, including Hank Williams, who’s been called home.” Only five months earlier, the industry had been shocked by the passing of Williams, who like Rodgers had mixed hillbilly tunes with the blues, endeared himself to his audiences with his rakish persona, and died young—but not before leaving behind hundreds of songs that would influence American music forever.

“Jimmie Rodgers handed it over to Hank,” Snow added, “who bridged the gap between hillbilly and popular music.” But the handing down—and the bridging of musical gaps—was far from over.

In the 1950s and early ’60s, radio formats were segregated, like the rest of American society. Rhythm and blues played on stations presumably for black audiences. Country and western was heard on stations presumably listened to by whites. But in truth, on each side of the racial divide, young people were tuning in to—and buying—both. The children of the postwar baby boom were now becoming teenagers and hungry for music different from what their parents had listened and danced to.

“A lot of times, in this community, or that community,” said Darius Rucker, “you’re told, ‘You can’t listen to this; you can’t listen to that.’ You know, ‘We don’t listen to that; we don’t listen to this.’ But people that are buying music and listening to music are a lot more open than you think they are.”

With its diverse and tangled roots—from Appalachian ballads and cowboy songs to gospel and the blues—country music had always been a dynamic mixture of genres, perpetually striving to reach broader audiences and greater sales. Now, it would adapt again.

The sonic explosion that would both spring from country music and rock it to its core would include a poor boy from Mississippi and a restless, dark-eyed young man from rural Arkansas, with an unmistakable deep voice and a voracious passion for every type of American music. Their new sound would originate not in Nashville but farther west in Tennessee, along the Mississippi River in Memphis, where a pioneer record producer believed that this music could be a way to bring the races together.

Only 240 miles apart, but universes apart when it comes to music. Memphis has always had a little more soul. It was more horn driven, more blues driven. It’s not a country town, it’s a river town.

There’s a feeling in Memphis that you’ll not find anywhere else. There’s just a magic that comes up from the Delta and that surrounding country that’s in the gumbo down there.

MARTY STUART

In 1954, a newly wed couple arrived in Memphis to begin their married life together. Johnny Cash, from Dyess, Arkansas, about fifty miles north and across the Mississippi River, was twenty-two years old and just out of the U.S. Air Force. His young bride, the former Vivian Liberto, was from San Antonio.

Cash had chosen Memphis because his older brother Roy already lived there, where he had a job at a car dealership. “Roy took my dad down to where he worked and there were two mechanics in the bay, Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins,” said Rosanne Cash. “And Marshall told me that he looked up from the car he was working on, and he saw my dad standing in the doorway, this kind of skinny, black-haired restless guy; and Marshall said a chill started at the top of his head and went right down his spine. It was like he knew, that he knew something. And Dad came over to him and said, ‘Roy says you boys play a little guitar.’ And Marshall said, ‘Very little.’ And Dad said, ‘Well, we ought to get together and play sometime.’ ”

But Cash’s first priority was finding a job, and he soon started work as a door-to-door salesman for the Home Equipment Company. According to Rosanne, “He was the single worst appliance salesman who ever lived. At one point, he went up to a door, knocked on a door, and a housewife answered, and he goes, ‘You don’t want to buy anything, do you?’ ”

On his rounds one day, he came across an elderly black man playing music on his front porch and stopped to listen. Gus Cannon had once played in traveling medicine shows, and he had been leading a jug band on Memphis’s Beale Street when Ralph Peer had recorded him back in the 1920s. Cash struck up a friendship and sometimes brought along his own guitar to play with Cannon and learn songs from him. “That’s the narrative,” Rosanne Cash said. “The slave songs and blues meet; the Delta, gospel, somehow Appalachian gets filtered in there. They meet and marry, and there’s a story. That’s country music.”

My father was a man of the American soil. He worked hard. He saw poverty. They worked that soil—the rich, black gumbo soil is what they called it, gumbo.

JOHN CARTER CASH

Music had always provided both solace and an escape from the harsh realities of life for Johnny Cash. He was born February 26, 1932, the son of an Arkansas sharecropper too poor to pay the state’s poll tax to vote, and a pious mother who played piano three times a week at worship services in the Baptist church. His parents said that they had been unable to agree on a name for their third son, so they settled on the initials “J.R.”

In 1935, during the depths of the Great Depression, they moved from south-central Arkansas, along with five hundred other destitute families, to the Dyess Colony, a resettlement community created by President Roosevelt’s New Deal. It offered families a fresh start by providing homes, twenty acres of land, and small stipends for food and clothing, all of which the colonists repaid once they had cleared the trees for their fields and began raising crops. Young J.R. was picking cotton by the age of eight.

Their home had no electricity, and their only luxury was a battery-powered Sears, Roebuck Silvertone radio. They would gather around it at night, after a hard day’s work, and listen to the Carter Family show beaming up from the “border blaster” station in Mexico, or to Sister Rosetta Tharpe singing a mix of gospel and blues. “That was the light in his life,” Rosanne Cash said. “The radio was his lifeline to the rest of the world, to the rest of his life.”

J.R. had always looked up to his brother Jack, who in-tended to be a minister. But in 1944, Jack was fatally injured cutting fence posts when the saw blade ripped into his stomach. “I’m going to the light,” he told the family as he died. “Can you hear the angels singing? Listen, Mama, can you hear them?” The family had to return to the cotton fields the day after Jack’s funeral, Cash would always remember, and his mother would sometimes drop to her knees and say, “I can’t go on.” Then they would sing a spiritual and go back to work.

J.R.’s relationship with his father, who could be cruel and distant, was already strained. Now it worsened. Once, after drinking heavily, Ray Cash told his teenage son, “Too bad it wasn’t you instead of Jack.”

J.R. retreated into books about American history and the poems of Edgar Allan Poe. He went on solitary walks at night down the colony’s dirt roads, and returned from one to tell his mother he would honor Jack’s memory by becoming a gospel singer. She took in other people’s laundry to buy him singing lessons, telling him, “God has His hand on you, son. You have a special calling, a gift.”

After graduating from high school in 1950, Cash enlisted in the Air Force and listed his name as “John.” Trained as a radio intercept operator, he was stationed in Landsberg, Germany, where he monitored the high-speed Morse code transmissions of Soviet Union bombers for three years.

In his off hours, he learned to play some basic guitar chords, filled sheets of paper with song lyrics, dreamed of starting his own band, and wrote daily letters to Vivian, the pretty and petite Italian-American girl he had met during his training at an Air Force base near San Antonio. He returned to the States in the summer of 1954, and he and Vivian married. It was then that they decided to move to Memphis.

Cash had no intention to remain an appliance salesman. He wanted to be a singer. Soon, he and Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins were gathering each night at Grant’s home to play music—some Hank Williams songs, but mostly gospel—while their wives played cards in the kitchen.

Their skills were limited—the only instrument any of them played was the guitar, and no one was particularly adept at it. But Memphis in 1954 would prove the best possible time and the best possible place for them to start.

THAT’S ALL RIGHT, MAMA

Memphis, in the ’50s, was just this hot stew. Tommy Dorsey was playing down the street in a hotel. And, at the same time, what they called “race music” was played on WDIA, which was really soul music, and B. B. King was a disc jockey, and Rufus Thomas was a disc jockey.

Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, Charlie Rich, Roy Orbison, my dad, they were all coming up there. All the guys listened to WDIA and were so profoundly influenced by it that you can say that that station and that music changed the course of modern country music through these guys, through these guys who came up through Sun Records.

ROSANNE CASH

There was a saying: “The blues had a baby and they called it rock and roll.” And I always said, “Yeah, and I think the daddy was a hillbilly.” So, I think rock and roll was a marriage of black and country music.

BOBBY BRADDOCK

The most popular tune on Memphis radio that summer was “That’s All Right,” a song written by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, an African-American Delta blues musician, whose original release had enjoyed only limited success on rhythm and blues stations. But this new version was something different. It was sung by a white teenager with long sideburns, slicked-back hair, and an almost angelic tenor voice. His name was Elvis Aron Presley.

He had been born in Tupelo, Mississippi, and like J. R. Cash grew up listening to every kind of music on the radio: from hillbilly tunes on the Grand Ole Opry to pop standards by Bing Crosby and Perry Como and then the blues by Muddy Waters. His personal favorite was gospel music, especially the kind performed by quartets like the Blackwood Brothers and the Statesmen, who combined tight harmonies with flashy showmanship. When Presley’s family moved to Memphis in 1948, he regularly attended the monthly All-Night Gospel Singings at Ellis Auditorium to see them excite the crowds with their energetic, joyful shows.

By 1954, Presley had graduated from high school and was driving a truck for an electrical contractor when he stopped at 706 Union Avenue, the home of tiny Sun Records. Its owner, Sam Phillips, had previously recorded B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and other black artists who sang rhythm and blues—the music Phillips called “where the soul of man never dies.” He wished he could find a white singer who could do the same thing.

“Sam Phillips has got to be one of the seminal geniuses of popular music,” said singer-songwriter Paul Simon. “That he understood exactly what could be achieved by blending the white and black cultures and that he looked for the vehicle to do that and found it in Elvis Presley and recognized it, and saw that as a way of bringing the races closer together—and that was his purpose—that’s an extraordinary vision.”

Phillips paired Elvis with two musicians from a hillbilly band called the Starlite Wranglers, guitarist Scotty Moore and bassist Bill Black, but initially was unimpressed when they cut “Harbor Lights,” a Bing Crosby hit, and “I Love You Because,” a country ballad Ernest Tubb had charted a few years earlier.

Then, during a break, Presley started goofing around on his own with Crudup’s “That’s All Right”—“jumping around and acting the fool,” one of them remembered. Black joined in on the fun with his slap-beat bass, and Moore started in on guitar.

“What are you doing?” Phillips asked from the control booth. “We don’t know,” they answered. “Well, back up,” Phillips ordered. “Try to find a place to start and do it again.” Then he started recording them.

“It’s not black, it’s not white, it’s not pop, it’s not country,” he said when he shared the recording with a local deejay, who immediately put it on the air, playing it over and over as calls and telegrams flooded the station for more.

Phillips quickly scheduled another session to record something for the B side of the record he now wanted to release. Once again Presley and his musicians struggled to come up with something distinctive. All three of them knew Bill Monroe’s hit song from 1946, “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” a lilting waltz that had become a standard for every bluegrass string band. They started clowning around with it, just as they had with “That’s All Right,” and Phillips began recording again, using a homemade device to add a distinctive echo to the sound. “Hell,” he said when they finished, “that’s different.”

The single that Sun Records rushed out became a regional phenomenon: rhythm and blues stations played “That’s All Right,” while country stations focused on “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”

It was enough to earn Presley an invitation to play at the Opry. The audience responded politely, at best, while some Opry regulars grumbled that he had desecrated Monroe’s classic song. “The first time I heard Elvis Presley, I hated him, because I was into bluegrass music,” country star Charlie Daniels remembered. “I was bluegrass to the bone back then, and he sang ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’ one of my favorite Bill Monroe songs, and I thought, ‘What’s he doing to my song?’ ”

Fifteen years earlier, Monroe had caused a similar stir at his own debut on the Opry with his energetic reinterpretation of Jimmie Rodgers’s “Mule Skinner Blues.” History was repeating itself, said Marty Stuart: “Bill Monroe took Jimmie Rodgers’s song and built another cornerstone, another pillar for country music to rest on. I think when Elvis took ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky,’ he took everything from his childhood that he had heard and loved, and he drove a new stake in the ground. Monroe didn’t like it much when he first heard it. He thought they were kind of not doing the right thing by way of his music until the first royalty check came. And then I believe Monroe’s tune went to, ‘I told him if there’s anything in this world I could do to help you out, you just let me know.’ ” (Monroe was impressed enough to release a hybrid version of his own that started with the original 3/4 waltz and then jumped into Elvis’s supercharged 4/4 beat.)

But Presley and his music seemed too radical for the Opry, and they did not ask him back. Phillips sent him to Shreveport and the Louisiana Hayride, which had provided Hank Williams a platform when no one else would. The Hayride’s audiences loved him—and called him “the Hillbilly Cat.”

Jerry Kennedy, who later became a renowned guitar player and record producer, recalled one of Presley’s first appearances:

When Elvis came to the Hayride, I was really excited to get to go see his guitar player. I didn’t even know Elvis’s name. And I had called a friend of mine, a disc jockey in Shreveport, and I said, “Who is the guitar player that’s playing on that guy you just played whose name was kind of weird.” And he told me, he said, “It’s a guy named Scotty Moore. He’s Elvis’s guitar player.” And he said, “They’re doing the Hayride Saturday night.”

A friend of mine and I went down, paid our money to get in to hear Scotty Moore. We are sitting there and Elvis comes out, with Scotty and Bill Black, and we are sitting there waiting for this instrumental that he would play. And Elvis steps back at that point, starts dancing. The girls start screaming. We never heard Scotty. So it was kind of a waste of our money, but it was worth it. And then, later on, I did find out who Elvis was.

Back in Memphis, the local newspaper declared, “A white man’s voice singing negro rhythms has changed life overnight for Elvis Presley.” Sam Phillips put it differently. “I went out into this no-man’s land,” he said, “and I knocked the shit out of the color line.”

I WALK THE LINE

In [his song] “Get Rhythm,” Johnny says, “Get rhythm, when you get the blues, come on get rhythm.” Isn’t he sort of telling you how to make rock and roll, in a way? He’s singing a country song and he’s saying, “Get rhythm when you get the blues.” Well, those are the ingredients for rock and roll, really.

JACK WHITE

Elvis Presley’s success with Sun Records was not lost on Johnny Cash. In late 1954, Phillips showed up at his studio to find Cash sitting on the front stoop asking for an audition. Phillips invited him in and listened to him sing.

“There was something in his voice, and I guess Sam heard it,” said former WSM announcer Ralph Emery. “But John wanted to be a gospel singer and Sam said, ‘I can’t sell gospel records. Write something that’s not gospel and I’ll cut it.’ He thought maybe he could make lightning strike twice.”

Cash told Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins they all needed to get more serious about their music. Perkins borrowed an electric guitar and Grant got a stand-up bass and began learning to play it. They started performing a few low-paying local gigs, and Cash persuaded his employer at the Home Equipment Company to sponsor a weekly fifteen-minute radio show on station KWEM.

Still, he wanted some original songs for Phillips to record. On his way home from the Air Force, Cash had written a poem on the train, called “Hey, Porter.” They put a simple melody to it, and began practicing. “They knew very few chords,” said Rosanne Cash. “And there was no real riffing on Luther’s part, but he could figure out these very simple and hypnotic lead lines on the guitar. But out of those limitations came a great style, undeniable. The simplicity of the accompaniment just created a frame for Dad’s voice and the lyrics. There was just something about it; it was a completely unique sound.”

“His voice is singular,” added Elvis Costello. “The bass is a percussive and Luther Perkins just playing like the four notes that he seemed to only know. Everything is so angular. I literally think they sound like punk rock records, and I mean that as the highest compliment. I mean, they’re just so vivid.”

“There’s something squirrely about you guys,” Phillips said when he first heard their stripped-down style in the spring of 1955. But, he admitted, “it’s different.” For the flip side of “Hey, Porter,” they played another Cash composition, “Cry, Cry, Cry,” which took them thirty-five takes because Perkins kept muffing his guitar solos.

But listeners liked the “boom chicka boom” sound of Johnny Cash and the Tennessee Two. They were soon booked on tours with Sun Records’ other star, Elvis Presley, usually with a better-known country and western artist, who got top billing. At concerts headlined by honky-tonker Webb Pierce, Cash got a good response as the opening act, but the crowds went absolutely crazy for Elvis—and many left before Pierce walked onstage to finish the show.

Out on the road, the two young singers became friends. Elvis called Cash “old man,” because Cash was three years older. Cash called Presley “the shaky kid” because of his electrifying stage presence, which now overwhelmed every show in which Presley appeared. Music historian Bill C. Malone was a student at the University of Texas in 1955: “I went down to the old Coliseum to see Hank Snow, who was my favorite at the time. And Hank had to cut his program short in order to let Elvis have a second show, or to let the people outside come in. As I watched Elvis, I thought I saw the beginning of the end of the music I loved. At certain points during his show, the young women would attack the stage, and I thought that was something young women shouldn’t be doing. It took me a long time to recognize just what he meant to American music and just how strongly a part of country music he really was.”

“The Hillbilly Cat, I think he was so different, he was so unique, they were trying to figure out what to do with him, where to put him, where does this guy go?” said Marty Stuart. “He didn’t neatly fit into anybody’s box. He wasn’t exactly country, he wasn’t exactly rock and roll, although he was all of those things. He wasn’t exactly gospel, although he was all of that. So it took the world a moment to sort out what to do with him.”

Also in 1955, the Hollywood movie Blackboard Jungle was released, featuring a song by Bill Haley and the Comets called “Rock Around the Clock,” which became a national smash hit. Haley himself had once been a yodeling Western swing artist, back when the Comets were called the Saddlemen, but an earlier song of his, “Rock the Joint,” had caught the attention of Alan Freed, a deejay at a rhythm and blues station in Cleveland, who was credited with calling the music “rock and roll.”

That same year, a blues guitarist named Chuck Berry went into Chess Records in Chicago, hoping to cut his first single, only to find the producer uninterested in most of his material—until he played a song he had adapted from an old Bob Wills fiddle tune called “Ida Red.” It was always the crowd’s favorite dance number, Berry said, at the integrated “salt and pepper” clubs in St. Louis where he performed. Intrigued by the notion of a hillbilly song sung by a black man, Chess Records released it, after reworking the lyrics to make it about a young man chasing his unfaithful girlfriend in her Coupe de Ville—and renaming it “Maybellene.” Like “Rock Around the Clock,” it would sell a million records, mostly to teenagers.

At the time, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash were known mostly in the South and Southwest, where country stations played their songs. Tours operated by the Grand Ole Opry and Louisiana Hayride booked them to attract younger people to their shows.

The term used to describe their music was “rockabilly.” “I think that most young people who heard rockabilly music in the mid-1950s just thought of it as music,” according to Bill Malone. “It was just something that sounded good to them. And, in the beginning, the music they heard would have been on country stations and they thought of the music as being just another form of country. But as time went on and as it began to attract another audience, then they began gradually to divorce themselves from the music of their parents.”

At a concert in west Texas featuring Elvis, Cash, and Porter Wagoner, a young singer from Lubbock named Buddy Holly opened the show. And at Sun Records in Memphis, Sam Phillips suddenly found himself inundated with aspiring rockabilly artists.

Jerry Lee Lewis, a flamboyant piano player from Ferriday, Louisiana, showed up after being turned down in Nashville. Roy Orbison came from the oil fields of Wink, Texas, at the suggestion of Johnny Cash, who had met him on tour. Orbison had a minor hit with “Rock House,” a tune written by another newcomer to Sun Records, Harold Lloyd Jenkins, who had turned down a contract to play baseball for the Philadelphia Phillies after being inspired by Elvis’s example. Jenkins was soon touring himself under a new name: Conway Twitty.

After signing with Phillips in 1955, Carl Perkins, the son of the only white sharecropper on an old plantation in west Tennessee, became a close friend of Johnny Cash after both men discovered they had scars on their fingers from picking cotton as young boys. Cash told him a story about a man he had met in the Air Force who prided himself on his spiffy clothes and always said, “Don’t step on my blue suede shoes.” Perkins turned that into his first major hit.

Wanda Jackson, a young country singer fresh out of high school in Oklahoma City, who wore cowgirl clothes and sang country ballads, joined one of the package shows for her first tour. She had never heard of Elvis Presley, who performed after her, and was in the dressing room with her father when they started hearing lots of screaming:

And Daddy said, “My gosh, I wonder if there’s a fire, or something.” So he runs out and he said, “Get your stuff together.” And he came back and he’s just shaking his head and he said, “Wanda, you’ve got to come see this for yourself. You’ll never believe it.”

He took me to the wings of the stage and I looked out and there was Elvis, doing all of his gyrations and singing, and all these girls down in front, screaming. And some were crying and reaching up for him. We had never seen anything like that.

Jackson and Elvis became friends, and he advised her to switch styles from country and western to rockabilly: “We were just talking and he said, ‘Wanda, you should get in on this new kind of music,’ because, he said, ‘things are changing.’ He said, ‘You know, I draw young people and they’re the ones that are buying records now.’ He already had this figured out.”

Jackson put away her cowgirl clothes in favor of tight-fitting skirts and low-cut blouses her mother tailored for her. (At her debut guest appearance on the Grand Ole Opry, Jackson was told she couldn’t appear with bare shoulders and was ordered to put on a jacket if she wanted to perform.) She would come to be called “the Queen of Rockabilly.”

But the undisputed king of them all was the Hillbilly Cat, Elvis Presley. Cashbox and Billboard magazines reported that country deejays had voted him as the most promising new artist, and Country & Western Jamboree said that 250,000 readers named him “New Star of the Year.”

Hank Snow had witnessed Presley’s magnetic star power firsthand on his package shows. So had Snow’s manager and business partner, Colonel Tom Parker, who had once guided Eddy Arnold’s career. They encouraged RCA Victor to buy out Presley’s contract with Sun Records for $40,000—at the time, the most ever paid for a recording artist. After the contract was signed, Snow learned that Parker had squeezed him out of the deal and was now the exclusive agent for Elvis Presley.

In Nashville, Presley began his RCA career by recording “Heartbreak Hotel,” which rose to the top five of the pop, country, and rhythm and blues charts simultaneously. His cover of “Blue Suede Shoes” soon began the same rise. By late 1956, Presley had been signed for Hollywood movies, and sales of his singles represented two-thirds of RCA’s business. “It’s hard to explain a phenomenon like Elvis,” said Ralph Emery. “He just took off. I think people, in the beginning, didn’t know what to do with him. Do you play him country? Do you play him pop? And then by the time he got down to ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ he was gone.” Elvis Presley had outgrown the family of country music. He left for a career in the movies and the more lucrative pop market.

Meanwhile, Johnny Cash stayed put (although he incorporated a short segment into his performances in which he impersonated his friend, twitching his legs and curling his lips just like Presley). Cash was doing well enough to buy a house in northeast Memphis for his growing family: Vivian had given birth to two daughters, Rosanne in 1955 and Kathy in 1956. The Louisiana Hayride had made him a regular, and Marshall Grant and Luther Perkins quit their jobs as auto mechanics.

In July 1956, Cash made his first guest appearance at the Grand Ole Opry, where someone backstage told a reporter, “He’ll be better than [Elvis] because Johnny’s a true country singer, and Presley isn’t and never has been.”

A new single of Cash’s had just become his first number-one country hit. It was for Vivian, who had become worried that on his tours he would succumb to one of the well-known temptations of the road—one that Elvis was already famous for giving in to: the adoring female fans.

Talking about Vivian’s concerns with Carl Perkins one night as they watched a group of girls follow Elvis to his dressing room, Cash said that as a married man, “I walk the line.” Perkins replied, “That’s your title.”

“It’s a simple song, a very simple song, except they change key every verse,” said Paul Simon, an admirer of “I Walk the Line.” “And that forces Johnny Cash to change the register of his voice. If it had a weakness, it would be that it was kind of episodic. It was like verse after verse, which is just kind of the same thing. ‘This happens, that’s why I walk the line; that happens, that’s why I walk the line.’ But he moves it in his register and so you feel some kind of three-dimensional depth that’s happening. I think it allows the listeners to project their lives into the spaces. And that is what makes for people’s favorite songs, is because they hear songs and their lives fit with those songs.”

“The style came from his limitations, as both a guitar player and a singer at that time in his life,” Rosanne Cash said. “He had no contrivance yet, only his raw influences and his woundedness that it came from, the purity of it and the stark lines of it—how perfect it is. Bob Dylan said that when he first heard that song on the radio, it was like a voice came from the center of the earth to deliver that song. That’s part of the greatness of the song, is that that song cannot be separated from his voice. And I think that is one of the definitions of timelessness, is when the song cannot be separated from the writer and the singer. And the melody cannot be separated from the words, that none of it would work by itself, but there’s this beautiful perfection in all of the parts. And that’s ‘I Walk the Line.’ ”

The song came from her mother’s fear about her father’s life on the road, Rosanne added. “And he wrote, ‘I Walk the Line.’ ‘I’m going to stay true to you.’ Of course, that wasn’t true, but…”

Backstage at the Opry the night of his debut, after singing “I Walk the Line,” Cash met for the first time someone whose voice he had once heard on his family’s radio back in Dyess, Arkansas. It was June Carter.

TEENAGE BOOGIE

I think country music, blues music, folk music, rock music, you name it, I think it’s all intertwined. They categorized me as rockabilly. Well, I didn’t know it was rockabilly. I’m just singing songs, singing them like I sang. And then, all of a sudden, I was rock. And then, all of a sudden, I was pop. Then, all of a sudden, I became country.

I think, when a singer is absolutely passionate about what they do, I don’t think you should pigeonhole them. I think they should just be everything they want to be. Because if you ask us artists when it’s all said and done, it’s music. That’s all it is. Doesn’t have a title.

BRENDA LEE

In 1956, Fred Foster left his job as a clerk in a record store in Washington, D.C., to take over promotion for the Mercury label’s country music division. His bosses dispatched him on a long trip to the South, telling him, “Get on the road and don’t come back until you find out why we’re not selling.” He was gone eight weeks, visiting retail outlets and radio stations.

At a record store in San Antonio, Texas, Foster was impressed with a new inventory system that showed the date they had ordered any release, how many had sold over any period of time, how many they had on hand, and how many were on order. “Why Baby Why” by Webb Pierce and Red Sovine was the top country and western song at the time. The store had sold fifty-two copies, had three in stock, and had none on order. Carl Perkins’s “Blue Suede Shoes” had sold 1,300 copies and they had twenty thousand on order. “So I said to the lady that was in charge of the inventory, I said, ‘How do you account for the discrepancy here?’ ” Foster remembered. “She said, ‘You ain’t going to give country music away with them fiddles and banjos anymore. It’s changed.’ ”

As rock and roll began taking over the airwaves and record sales, the postwar boom in country music seemed to go bust overnight. Speaking to a gathering of deejays in Nashville, Steve Sholes, the RCA producer now handling Elvis Presley, told them, “Your older listeners who want old country music sounds are wonderful people [and] loyal radio listeners…but they don’t buy records, not enough to keep us in business; not enough to keep the old-fashioned country artist in guitar strings. It’s the kids who want and buy the newer sounds.”

More and more radio stations switched to a new “Top Forty” format that emphasized pop and rock music. The number of stations devoted to country shrank from six hundred to about eighty-five. Live “barn dance” programs began disappearing. “Country music just died on the vine,” said Wanda Jackson. “You could dial your radio back and forth all the time, you couldn’t find a country song. The general sense in the country and western community about rock and roll was, ‘Maybe it will go away. If we just hang in there long enough, it will go away.’ ”

On some nights, the Grand Ole Opry—which had given Elvis the cold shoulder—found itself playing to a half-empty Ryman Auditorium. NBC dropped its national network portion of the show in 1957. But the station’s powerful 50,000-watt signal still reached many of the adult listeners the National Life and Accident Insurance Company wanted, so the show continued. And a new disc jockey, Ralph Emery, was hired for an all-night country music show.

“It was the longest air shift I ever had in my life; ten at night till five in the morning is a long time to be on the radio,” Emery said. “When you’re sitting there, just talking to a microphone, you’re not really aware of the distance. But we reached into Canada and down into Florida. I used to play records for a Texas Ranger on a fishing boat in the Gulf of Mexico, right off the Yucatan Peninsula.”

“[Emery] became a very powerful, powerful figure,” said Eddie Stubbs, a WSM announcer. “And artists needed Ralph Emery. They needed radio. Their opportunities on television, at that time, were fairly minimal. But Ralph Emery was the person they went to see because they knew they could get in at any time and they knew that he had listeners.” “There weren’t many stations playing country music,” Emery added. “I always thought that if the Opry had died and they had taken that show off, it would have killed country music. But because of WSM, and the Grand Ole Opry, and that all-night show, we hung on by our fingertips, because rock and roll was taking over everything.”

Opry icons like Hank Snow and Ernest Tubb saw their record sales plummet—as well as the fees they could command for personal appearances. Tubb considered leaving music entirely to join his brother’s insurance agency in Texas. “He was like a man grieving,” a friend said, “like he’d had a couple of kids die.”

Hoping to connect somehow with younger listeners, Tubb came out with a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Thirty Days (To Come Back Home).” Hank Snow released “Hula Rock,” whose chorus simply repeated the line “Rockin’ and a rollin’ in Waikiki” four times. Pee Wee King and His Golden West Cowboys tried their best with “Blue Suede Shoes,” although it sounded more like a big band than Carl Perkins.

Webb Pierce’s four-year string of number one singles had ended in 1956, and on tour he had been upstaged by Elvis Presley’s wild gyrations and hard-driving beat. Now, desperate to appear relevant, he came out with a tune called “Teenage Boogie.” Worried that his country fans might be offended by the more sexually suggestive lyrics of another song—called “The New Raunchy”—he released that single under the pseudonym of Shady Wall.

“The same way that honky tonk music kind of put old-timey string band music or the quaint songs of the Carter Family out of style a little bit,” Marty Stuart said, “I think when rock and roll came through, some of the crooners and some of the more authentic, old-line country, Hank Williams kind of singing, it kind of got left behind by this new force and this new energy called ‘rock and roll.’ ”

Ray Price was one country star who didn’t get left behind. His response to the crisis in country music was to double down, ignoring rock and roll completely and sticking even closer to his country roots.

Price had been a struggling singer in Texas before Hank Williams befriended him, helping him get a recording contract and a place on the Opry and taking him on tour for a while. In the wake of Williams’s death, Price had adopted the Drifting Cowboys as his band. “They were working a dance one night in Grand Junction, Colorado,” according to Eddie Stubbs, “and this guy came up to the stage and said, ‘You sound just like old Hank.’ And a light went off that night. And he got to thinking, ‘If I’m going to make it, I’m going to have to do things in my own way.’ ”

He found it with a song called “Crazy Arms,” which featured a prominent walking bass line in 4/4 time—a beat that became known as the “Ray Price shuffle” or “Texas shuffle.” It was perfect for dancing the Texas two-step. “It is one of the happiest kinds of music there is,” said Darius Rucker. “Even when the song’s not happy, a Texas shuffle makes you happy. You hear the beat and you just want to dance along.” Price’s friend Mel Tillis remembered, “Somebody asked old Ray one time, he said, ‘Ray, can you define a shuffle?’ And he said, ‘Yes, it’s a beat that makes a slow song feel fast.’ ”

Price also kept the fiddle and the steel guitar front and center. “If it hadn’t have been for Ray Price,” Eddie Stubbs said, “the fiddle may have gone away completely in country music. He kept the fiddle and the steel guitar going.”

Other country singers went in a different direction—toward pop music. Ferlin Husky, in California’s Central Valley, abandoned a steel guitar and fiddle accompaniment for a weeping ballad called “Gone.” In early 1957 it topped the country charts, and went to number four on the pop charts—exceeded only by “Young Love,” a song of teenage romance by Sonny James, a former barn dance performer from rural Alabama. “The happiest day in a country boy’s life in those days was going pop, his crossing over, because country records didn’t sell,” according to Ralph Emery. “Jukebox operators, I think, were the only people that bought them.”

Marty Robbins would prove to be the most adaptable musician in the fast-changing environment. Born Martin David Robinson in 1925, in a shack in the southern Arizona desert eight miles from Glendale, he had been constantly uprooted as his father, an alcoholic and petty thief, moved the family from place to place, including living for a while in a tent. When his parents divorced in 1938, his mother moved the children to the barrio on the wrong side of the tracks in Glendale, where Hispanics and poor whites lived—and where he learned to love Mexican music.

As a boy, he herded goats and worked on ranches in the summer, and used some of his money to spend his Saturdays watching Gene Autry movies. “I would sit so close to the screen,” he remembered, “that I got powder burns when the guns went off.”

He dropped out of school in 1943 to join the Navy and served as a ramp operator of landing craft bringing Marines to shore in the battle of Bougainville Island, where he remained for fifteen months helping the Seabees bulldoze an airfield; made a name for himself as an amateur boxer; and learned to play guitar.

Back in Phoenix after the war, performing as Marty Robbins on a local country music show, his impressive vocal versatility caught the attention of Little Jimmy Dickens, who helped arrange a recording contract and a regular spot on the Opry. In 1953, Robbins’s song “I’ll Go on Alone” reached number one on the country charts, and he became known as “the boy with a teardrop in his voice.”

When Elvis Presley began to emerge, Robbins covered “That’s All Right, Mama,” which did better on country radio than Presley’s original. He charted again with a cover of Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.”

The direction of Robbins’s music took a new turn in 1956 with “Singing the Blues,” a song brought to him backstage at the Opry by a young man in a wheelchair. “Singing the Blues” topped the country charts for more than three months, even beating out Presley’s “Hound Dog.” But Robbins was chagrined when the New York producer Mitch Miller recorded a version by Guy Mitchell, which reached number one on the pop charts and sold four times as many records.

After Guy Mitchell did the same thing to his next song, Robbins decided to go to New York himself and have Mitch Miller record him singing a tune he had written. “A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation” became Robbins’s third number one country hit—and, more important to his bottom line, reached number two on the pop charts. Despite its success, he would never consider it a country song. But, he said, “I wasn’t doing any good writing the songs I wanted to write, and I wasn’t doing any good singing the songs I liked.”

In Philadelphia, Mississippi, Hilda Stuart was so enamored by Robbins’s singing, she named her son Marty in his honor. (His full name is John Marty Stuart, for his father and for the country star.) “ ‘A White Sport Coat and a Pink Carnation’ was the first Marty Robbins song I remember hearing,” Stuart said. “And I thought he was a rock singer. And then I found out he was a country singer. Then I found out he was all of that.”

Ira and Charlie Louvin, who came from the hill country of northeastern Alabama, where they grew up steeped in gospel and bluegrass music, now mixed their own “high lonesome” vocals with a more contemporary accompaniment that included an electric guitar and drum—and showed that traditional brother harmonies could survive in the age of rock and roll.

In 1957, two other brothers, Don and Phil Everly, ages twenty and eighteen, from Kentucky, had already been trying for two years without success to make it as a country duo in Nashville and were thinking of calling it quits. One day, their father, a barber (and skilled guitar player), was talking about his sons while cutting the hair of Boudleaux Bryant. Bryant and his wife, Felice, were among the first professional songwriters to establish themselves in the city. “Ike used to tell my dad about his boys and said, ‘You know, I’ve got two boys and they really sing well. I really wish you would listen to them,’ ” said Del Bryant. “My father would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I’d like to listen to them; a little shorter here, please.’ And, ‘Can you take a little off here?’ ”

As it turned out, the Bryants had written a song meant for two-part harmony, but it had been turned down by dozens of artists. The Everly brothers decided to record it. Its title was “Bye Bye Love.” They were on a month-long tour with Bill Monroe, making $90 a week doing tent shows in Mississippi and Louisiana, when the song exploded on the radio. In Queens, New York, young Paul Simon heard it on a local station:

I went to buy “Bye Bye Love” right after I heard it. There wasn’t a record store in my immediate neighborhood so I had to take a bus and take a transfer and then another bus, two buses, to get to a record store. I bought it and came home, put it on my player, loved it, flipped it over, played the other side. Loved it. Went to play it again, scratched the record. Just mortified.

Got back on the bus, took the second bus, went and bought another record. I couldn’t even wait for the next day. I had to have it, again. I mean it was like an hour ride and then an hour ride back. And then I showed it to Artie [Garfunkel], and we tried to figure out how they were singing.

For their next song, the Everly Brothers turned again to Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. It was “Wake Up, Little Susie,” about two teenagers falling asleep at a movie and fearing their reputation was now ruined. Helped by the publicity of being banned in Boston, where parents thought the song was too suggestive, “Wake Up, Little Susie” rose to number one on all three charts: country, pop, and rhythm and blues. With more songs written by the Bryants—“All I Have to Do Is Dream,” “Bird Dog,” and others—the Everly Brothers would sell more than thirty million records worldwide in three years.

And, although Memphis had given birth to the new hybrid of country and rhythm and blues, Nashville had now established itself as the place to write and record it.

MUSIC ROW

Country music wasn’t always recorded in Nashville. The major label companies had studios in New York, Chicago, the West Coast. In some cases, they would go to Dallas, Texas, and record as well. But when Owen and Harold Bradley opened their studio, everything changed here.

EDDIE STUBBS

My brother, Owen, is the big daddy. He saw the big picture. He’s the architect. He had a vision. He saw how the picture fit together, all the different pieces. I give him all the credit. I was just glad to be there and glad to plug in the guitar and play it.

HAROLD BRADLEY

Owen and Harold Bradley grew up in Nashville, where Owen had carved out a musical career: playing piano in dance bands as a young man; leading WSM’s twenty-six-piece orchestra and becoming the station’s music director; and moonlighting at Castle Recording, a small recording studio run by some WSM engineers in the downtown Tulane Hotel. Harold, ten years younger, had learned the guitar and, at Owen’s urging, briefly joined Ernest Tubb’s band as a teenager.

In the mid-1950s, WSM told its employees they could no longer have outside jobs, and the Castle studio was closing. Paul Cohen, a Decca executive who had used it and a small studio the Bradleys had opened in Hillsboro Village, informed Owen that he would be taking his business to a bigger, newer studio in Dallas, which had better equipment. He asked Bradley to come along. “He didn’t want to leave,” Harold recalled. “So, he said, ‘I’ll tell you what. Let Harold and I build you a studio. You put up $15,000; I’ll put up $15,000. Harold will continue working for nothing.’ ” Cohen also promised that Decca would book one hundred recording sessions a year.

Bradley found a bungalow in a decaying residential neighborhood on 16th Avenue, southwest of downtown Nashville, paid $8,500 for it, and in 1955 opened a studio in what had been its basement. Decca chose to stay, and soon other labels began using the Bradleys’ new studio. Business was so good, they erected a military-surplus Quonset hut in the backyard and equipped it as a second studio—and for filming performances, too, to send to television stations.

“We had a lot of other things going for us here,” Harold Bradley said. “We had the Grand Ole Opry, so we had the musicians; we had the singers, who happened to also be songwriters, or there were songwriters who weren’t musicians. It was all sittin’ here waiting.”

Then, RCA Victor built a brand-new studio a block away on 17th Avenue, which would be run by producer Chet Atkins, who had become one of the most sought-after session musicians in town.

Before long, Atkins and the Bradleys were busy making records—and other houses in the neighborhood were being converted into offices of booking agents and music publishers, offering songs to meet the growing demand. Eventually, the area would become known as Music Row.

Among the songwriters who now gravitated to Nashville was Mel Tillis, who had grown up in rural Florida and discovered that music—and a sense of humor—helped him cope with a speech disorder. “My daddy stuttered a bit, and my brother stuttered a little bit, too, and I thought that’s the way we talk,” Tillis said:

And I started to go to school in the first grade at Woodrow Elementary, in Plant City, Florida. And I came home, the first day, and I said, “Mama, do I stutter?” And she said, “Yes, you do, son.” I said, “Mama, they laughed at me.” And she said, “Well, if they’re going to laugh at you, give them something to laugh about.” And that was my first day, I think, in show business.

Miss Short, my teacher, found out that I could sing without stuttering. And she’d take me around to the other classes, up to the sixth grade, and let me sing. And I’d sing an old song, a Gene Autry song, “I’m Going to Drink My Coffee From an Old Tin Can.”

During a stint in the Air Force, Tillis started playing in a country group, but found it difficult to make a living as a musician after his discharge. He took a job as a railroad fireman for a while, until they fired him because of his stutter. But in Nashville, his songs started being recorded by established artists, particularly Webb Pierce, who, like Elvis Presley and some other stars, often insisted on sharing the writing credit—and therefore a share of the royalties—on tunes he recorded: “He told me, ‘Your songs aren’t hits unless I do them.’ Okay, so I’d give him half of this one and half of that one. And it ended up quite a few.”

One of them, called “I Ain’t Never,” was inspired by something a waitress said to Tillis at a local diner before he went to a barber shop where Pierce was getting a haircut. Pierce heard him working on the song and offered him $50 for half of the writing credit. When Tillis refused, he upped the offer to $150. Tillis finally agreed—if Pierce would throw in his fancy cowboy boots as well. The song was recorded by Pierce and ultimately fifty-six other artists, Tillis said, bringing in half a million dollars in royalties over the years. Pierce got half of that. “I learned a lesson on that,” Tillis said. “Just don’t do that. I’d have had a half a million instead of $250,000. That’s a lesson.”

A year after Tillis came to Nashville, another aspiring singer-songwriter arrived in town. Roger Miller was born in Fort Worth, Texas, but after his father died, when Miller was a year old, his destitute mother sent him away to be raised by an uncle near Erick, Oklahoma. It was a town so small, he later remembered, “we didn’t have a town drunk [so] we had to take turns.”

Precocious and mischievous, he wrote poems and silly songs as a boy, dreamed of leaving farm life far behind, and was expelled from two different high schools for his constant pranks. “He didn’t fit,” one classmate remembered, “because his brain operated different than the rest of us.”

Miller took up the fiddle—he could play “Bonaparte’s Retreat” standing on his head—and joined a country band. But after being caught for a petty theft in Amarillo, he was given the choice of jail or the Army and ended up in Korea, where he spent most of his time performing at military bases. Back in the States, he moved to Nashville in 1957 and took a job as a bellhop at the Andrew Jackson Hotel, not far from WSM and the Ryman Auditorium, where he hung out, trying to interest artists in his songs.

When Tillis got him a chance to be the fiddler in a band Minnie Pearl was forming for an upcoming tour, he jumped at it. Tillis was the opening act, and during the first shows, still too self-conscious to speak in public, he asked Miller for help:

Roger would introduce my song for me. And I’d finish the song and he’d come back and he’d say, “Melvin said thank you.”

And Miss Minnie Pearl, she watched me for a little while, and then one day she called me over and she said, “Melvin, if you’re going to be in our business, you’re going to have to learn to introduce your own songs and you’ve got to thank them. And you’ve got to sign autographs.”

I said, “Miss Minnie, I can’t do it. They’ll laugh at me.” And she said, “No, they won’t, Melvin, they’ll laugh with you.”

She told me to talk. Go out there and talk. And the more I talked, the less I stuttered. And she taught me the timing. “Melvin,” she said, “don’t step on your laughter.” And I said, “Why?” And she said, “It’s too hard to get.”

On the road, Tillis and Miller became close friends: “I told him, I said, ‘You ain’t never going to make it, writing them old stupid songs you’re writing.’ He said, ‘You ain’t going to make it with that damn stutter, either.’ ”

After the tour, Miller had trouble finding more work and moved to Amarillo, where he got a job in the fire department and played clubs as “the Singing Fireman.” There, he met Ray Price, who asked him to join his new band, the Cherokee Cowboys, and liked Miller’s song “Invitation to the Blues” well enough to record it, with Miller singing harmony. With its success, he moved back to Nashville and signed a recording contract with Owen Bradley and Decca. Though his own records did not sell, other artists had success with his songs: Ernest Tubb, Faron Young, and Jim Reeves, who had a hit with “Home,” a tune Miller had written in the space of fifteen minutes because he needed $300 to buy a riding lawn mower, which he then drove eight miles down busy streets to his house.

Miller encouraged another songwriter, Bill Anderson, to come to Nashville. Anderson was a nineteen-year-old journalism student at the University of Georgia, working nights at a country radio station, when he first met Miller at a Wanda Jackson concert. Sitting on the roof of his apartment building in tiny Commerce one night, he was inspired to write a song about the view. “City Lights” got recorded by Ray Price at the same session Price recorded Miller’s “Invitation to the Blues,” and after it spent thirteen weeks as the number one country song, Anderson headed to Music Row.

Like others in the growing music industry, he quickly learned that Nashville’s elite still wanted their city to be known as “the Athens of the South” and looked down on the songwriters and performers as second-class citizens:

And Roger told me, when I got to Nashville, he said, “When you go to get credit anywhere, like to get a telephone, or whatever, don’t tell them you’re in the music business. Whatever you do, don’t admit to being in the music business.”

I went to get my first telephone and the lady says, “It’s a $15 deposit,” and she said, “By the way, what do you do?” Well, I was kind of proud of it—I had just written a couple of hit songs—and I said, “I’m in the music business.” And she said, “That will be a hundred dollars.”

WALKIN’ AFTER MIDNIGHT

When she moved to Nashville in 1959, Patsy Cline seemed more like a throwback to country music’s past than a bridge to its future. She wore a cowgirl outfit, complete with a hat and boots; many of her songs featured steel guitars and fiddles and had honky tonk themes, like cheating; when she sang Hank Williams’s old hit “Lovesick Blues,” she could yodel as well as Hank did—and she intended to be as big a star as he had been.

Virginia Patterson Hensley had been born on September 8, 1932, in the small town of Winchester, in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, and dropped out of high school at age fifteen after her abusive father deserted the family. “Ginny,” as she was called, began working in a drugstore during the day and singing in bars and supper clubs at night to help support her mother and two younger siblings.

Her rich voice had a remarkable range and power that impressed anyone who heard it. By 1954 she had won first place at a national country music contest in Virginia and began appearing regularly on a country television show in Washington, D.C., hosted by Jimmy Dean.

She married a businessman named Gerald Cline, changed her first name to Patsy, and signed a recording contract with a small independent label, 4 Star, which she learned later was notorious among insiders for cheating its artists—a royalty rate half of what other companies paid, and an insistence that she sing only songs published by the label’s owner.

But the studio it used was in Nashville, where Owen Bradley instantly recognized her talent and struggled to make the most of the mediocre songs she was required to sing. “We tried rock and roll on the country songs; we tried Western swing,” according to Harold Bradley. “They tried everything. But the songs weren’t there.”

After a string of singles that failed to sell, 4 Star insisted that she record a song originally written for the popular artist Kay Starr. Cline resisted at first: “It’s nothing but a little ol’ pop song,” she said, “I hate it.” But under Bradley’s guidance—and with steel guitar solos by Don Helms, a former member of Hank Williams’s Drifting Cowboys—she turned “Walkin’ After Midnight” into something special. Singing it on CBS television’s Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, she won the night’s competition, and the exposure pushed the song to number two on the country charts and number twelve on the pop charts.

Billboard magazine named her the Most Promising Country & Western Female Artist of 1957, though for the next several years none of her other 4 Star recordings sold well. The label released her, saying she owed them nearly $5,000 in unrecovered royalty advances.

Divorced from Gerald Cline, she married Charlie Dick, had a daughter, and moved to Nashville, where the Grand Ole Opry offered her a spot in its cast. There, and on tour with Opry package shows, she quickly became known not just for her powerful voice, but also for her equally powerful personality. She argued with everyone; swore like a sailor; walked out of concerts if promoters didn’t pay her and her band on time. She called people “Hoss,” and referred to herself as “the Cline.”

Among those traveling with her was a singing prodigy named Brenda Lee. “Well, let me tell ya, you didn’t mess with Patsy,” said Lee. “She’d tell you in a New York minute what she thought and what she was gonna do and how it was gonna be done.”

Lee was born in 1944 in a charity hospital in Georgia to a family of sharecroppers. Even as a toddler, her talent was unmistakable. By the time she was three years old, she would stand on the wooden counter of the local grocery store and sing, while people dropped pennies and nickels at her feet, which helped her destitute family buy food. When she was seven, her father died, and she started singing professionally. “And I became the primary breadwinner for the family,” Lee said. “My mom was working odd jobs and doing all that she could working in a cotton mill, sixteen hours a day. My goal was to help my mom and my siblings get out of the situation that we were in.”

She belted out Hank Williams songs in a voice that belied her age and tiny stature, working so many late nights her third-grade teacher sometimes let her put her head on her desk and nap during class. In 1956, her television appearances on ABC’s Ozark Jubilee, billed as “the little girl with the big voice,” landed her a contract with Decca, and her family moved to Nashville, where Owen Bradley became her producer. “We started recording her when she was eleven or twelve years old,” Harold Bradley said. “She was just amazing—the energy and the things that she was doing vocally, just none of us had heard of. We were cutting one day and we started and hardly played just eight bars and she stopped. And my brother said, ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ She said, ‘Bass player missed a note.’ ”

Lee’s first single was “Jambalaya,” and with her mother along to chaperone, she soon began touring on package shows that included everyone from Kitty Wells to Chuck Berry and Patsy Cline. On one tour, the promoter didn’t pay the performers, Lee remembered, “and Patsy put us in her car, she paid us out of her own pocket, took us back to Nashville, fed us on the way. And that’s what kind of gal she was. She was so bighearted and so kind.” Despite the age difference, the two became friends:

Patsy, I think, was thirteen years older than I was. So, she was kinda like a big ole sister to me. And I’d go to her house and she’d let me clomp around in her cowboy boots and try her spangledy-dangledy outfits on. And boy I was in heaven. We just were the greatest of friends.

And she, as I like to say in the kindest sense of the word, she was a great broad.

LONG BLACK VEIL

Nashville has always been proud and pleased and eager to go on any ride that a hit engenders. That’s what a music capital is about—and there is no music capital like Nashville. So it could mount a running horse faster than any city I’ve ever seen. Country music has always been happy to take a ride on a fast horse.

DEL BRYANT

In 1959, at the inaugural ceremony of the Grammy Awards, the winner for Best Country and Western Performance went to a group totally unlike anything associated with Nashville. The Kingston Trio—three clean-cut college graduates from the San Francisco Bay Area—had released an old murder ballad from North Carolina, based on the story of a Confederate Civil War veteran who stabbed his sweetheart to death and was hanged for the crime. “Tom Dooley” had first been recorded in the 1920s, during the country music industry’s early years. Now, it was sweeping the nation.

“The Kingston Trio’s version of ‘Tom Dooley’ had an impact that no previous song had had,” according to Bill C. Malone. “It was just a huge, huge hit. And it set off a hunger, an enthusiasm, for old songs, both real and newly made. It was mainly a Northern urban phenomenon in its beginnings, but it had a great impact on country music because country musicians eventually began trying to capitalize on what had been unleashed.”

In their search for anything that would sell, suddenly, it seemed, every country artist was releasing a folk or story song, returning to one of the deepest roots of the music.

The Louvin Brothers came out with an even older murder ballad, “The Knoxville Girl,” that traced its origins all the way back to the 1700s in the British Isles. Riley Puckett had released a version in 1924, and the Louvins said it was the first song they themselves had ever sung. They had recorded it in 1956, but until the success of “Tom Dooley,” their label had considered it too morbid to release as a single. Country singer Stonewall Jackson had success with “Waterloo,” which related the story of three men who each had to “meet his Waterloo”—Adam eating the apple, Napoleon at the famous battle, and…Tom Dooley.

Johnny Cash released two songs he had written: a Western saga called “Don’t Take Your Guns to Town” and a remembrance of his family’s experience evacuating their home in Dyess, Arkansas, during the great Mississippi River flood of 1937, “Five Feet High and Rising.” Eddy Arnold got caught up in the folk craze, too, releasing two albums, including one that featured “Tennessee Stud,” his biggest hit in four years.

The Browns, three siblings from Arkansas who had toured with Elvis Presley for the Louisiana Hayride, were getting out of the music business and had come to Nashville for their final recording session, when Chet Atkins asked them what they’d like to sing as a swan song for RCA. They decided on a plaintive tune by Jean Villard, made popular in France by Edith Piaf. “Les Trois Cloches” (The Three Bells) told the story of a man’s life—his birth, his marriage, and his death—through the chiming of his village’s chapel bells. The Browns’ version of “The Three Bells” hit number one on both the pop and country charts, and sold more than a million copies. Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans” recounted Andrew Jackson’s victory against the British during the War of 1812. It had been written by Jimmie Driftwood (also the writer of “Tennessee Stud”), a former Arkansas elementary school teacher who composed songs to help his students learn American history. “The Battle of New Orleans” reached number one on the country and pop charts and won a Grammy Award, and Horton’s performance fees went from $350 a show to $6,000. He bought a new house for himself and his wife, Billie Jean, the widow of Hank Williams.

But it was another murder ballad that would rescue another country singer’s fortunes. Lefty Frizzell had once challenged Hank Williams for supremacy in the world of honky tonk. Then, from 1955 to 1958, as rock and roll took off, he had failed to chart a hit. His new hit song seemed to spring from another century, but in fact had just been written by Danny Dill and Marijohn Wilkin. It, too, was a murder ballad: “The Long Black Veil.”

Johnny Cash was so enamored of it, he included it on a list of one hundred essential American songs for his daughter Rosanne to learn. “ ‘Long Black Veil,’ I thought, was a perfect country song,” she said. “It had everything. It was a ghost story; there was a death; the central character had integrity. The scene was laid out—the scaffold, the judge, her veil, the graveyard—I mean, it was chilling in every way. And the fact that Marijohn had co-written that, that was hugely inspiring to me. That song is timeless. It’s like Stephen Foster’s ‘Hard Times’; it’s bedrock, it’s rooted somewhere in the mist of time. You can’t imagine the fabric of music without these songs.”

“If Shakespeare were sitting there, he would have to go, ‘That’s a good song.’ I don’t care, Irving Berlin would have to go, ‘That’s a great song,’ ” Marty Stuart added. “I loved rock and roll. But that was the kind of song that captivated my heart. It made me want to play country music. It was like a beam that said, ‘Come here, Marty. Come here, Marty.’ I had to get there. It knew more about me than I knew about it.”

Marty Robbins wasn’t trying to tap into the folk boom when he cajoled his label into letting him record the album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs. He just wanted to sing something that harkened back to growing up in the West, watching Gene Autry’s singing cowboy movies, hearing the harmonies of the Sons of the Pioneers, and listening to stories his maternal grandfather had told him about the frontier. “This album won’t sell five hundred records,” he told his producer, “but it’s something I’ve always wanted to do and I think Columbia owes it to me.”

The inspiration for one of the album’s songs had come to him while driving his family from Nashville to Arizona one Christmas, seeing a road sign for El Paso and thinking it would be a good setting for a tune. “The song came out like a motion picture,” he said later. “I really didn’t have too much to do with that song. It just came out.” He had it finished by the time he got to Phoenix.

A combination love story, murder ballad, and Western outlaw saga with a surprise twist at the end, “El Paso” begins in a place called Rosa’s Cantina, where a young cowboy shoots another man vying for the affections of a pretty dancer named Faleena, named in honor of a Mexican girl Robbins had known in fifth grade. In the studio, Grady Martin added a distinctive Spanish guitar that is as unforgettable as Robbins’s voice as he recounts his tale. Robbins overrode his label’s objections that at four and a half minutes, the song was much too long to ever be played on the radio. “We didn’t play records that long,” deejay Ralph Emery said, “but it was a story. You had to play it all. And, the fact is, Columbia reissued it, edited some of the story out. But nobody played that. To get the story, you had to play the whole record.”

Of all the songs he would record, Robbins would consider “El Paso” his favorite, and later he would use the same characters to write two more—one called “Faleena” and the other “El Paso City”—that essentially were sequels to the original song. The Grateful Dead would add “El Paso” to their repertoire in the late 1960s and keep it on their set list for more than twenty-five years, calling it their most-requested song.

As 1959 ended, Robbins’s version was headed to number one on the pop and country charts. Six of the ten top country songs that year had been story songs.

FOLSOM PRISON

My father knew thousands of songs—and not just “kind of” knew them—he could sing you thousands of songs. He had the instincts of a musicologist. And he had a deep and wide knowledge of roots music, folk music, country music, Appalachian music, blues, and then the sub-genres of death songs, songs about Mother, songs about trains—he loved them all.

He also was a natural poet. You combine those two things, and it’s powerful.

ROSANNE CASH

By 1959, Johnny Cash had moved Vivian and his growing family—they now had three girls—from Memphis to an expensive house in Southern California. Only five years earlier, he had been making $50 a week as an appliance salesman and would-be performer; now he was on track to bring in $250,000 a year.

Cash had left Sun Records to sign with Columbia, a bigger label that promised him not only a $50,000 bonus and a better royalty rate, but also greater creative freedom in choosing what songs to record. He finally was able to release an album of gospel songs, just as he’d promised his mother after his brother Jack’s death. He soon followed it with his first concept album, Songs of Our Soil, featuring a collection of folk-type tunes filled with stories of hardship and death.

“Jack’s death was central to everything,” Rosanne Cash said. “Even in the end of my grandmother’s life, my dad went up, every year, on the day of Jack’s death, and sat with his mother all day. And they just sat together. And Dad always said that he dreamed of Jack his whole life, and Jack would age as he did; Jack was always two years older than he was.”

Like every other singing star, Cash spent most of his time traveling from one personal appearance to another, promoting his records—an existence that required ceaseless miles, punctuated only momentarily with performances before fans who thought it must be both easy and glamorous to make a living giving a two-hour concert and creating three-minute songs.

Now headlining his own package tours, Cash added a drummer—W. S. “Fluke” Holland, formerly with Carl Perkins—and the Tennessee Two became the Tennessee Three as they barnstormed from Texas to Toronto, New York to California.

Out on the road, Cash and his band developed a reputation for pulling outrageous pranks wherever they went. At one hotel, they spray-painted their rooms black; at another, they strung a rope to every door handle on their floor late one night so no one could get out of the rooms. In Omaha, Cash bought five hundred baby chicks and turned some of them loose at every stop on the elevator. Other artists complained that Johnny Cash and his Tennessee Three were making it hard for any country act to book rooms at some hotels.

Cash knew that spending so much time on tour posed many dangers to the musicians who logged all those miles. Buddy Holly and three others had perished in a plane wreck trying to get to the next concert. On his way to a television appearance, Carl Perkins had been nearly killed in a car accident that took the life of two men, including Perkins’s brother. And Cash’s close friend Johnny Horton died on a country road in Texas when his car was hit by a drunken driver.

Life on the road held other perils, too. Every night, Cash would call Vivian to say how much he missed her and the girls, to reassure her that he would soon be back with them—and that he was being faithful. In truth, Marshall Grant had found it necessary to constantly remind his friend that he was a married man. But the road, Cash said, meant “adventure…creativity, freedom…. I love being a gypsy.”

If he was home more than ten days, he started to get very restless and had to get back out there again. They would get in a car and put the big bass guitar on the roof and drive two hundred miles and do a show. Sometimes drive and do two, three, four shows a day. Then drive all night, get someplace, do it again, afternoon show, evening show, drive all night, over and over.

Well, somebody finally said to Dad, when he was at the point of utter exhaustion, “Here’s how you get through it. You take this pill.” That was it. That’s how he got through it. But then you had to have something to come down off the pills, so he had to take something else. And then he was locked in a terrible, terrible cycle.

When my dad took that first pill, he didn’t take it to get high. He did it because he hadn’t slept in days and he had three shows to do the next day. “Here’s how you get from here to here. Here’s how you can keep this up and build your career. Take this pill, it’ll help you.” And that was a very slippery slope. And he went down it.

As his addiction to amphetamines increased, Cash did his best to hide it from his family—and from his fans, though part of his appeal was his image as a rebel, fueled in part by one of their favorite songs, “Folsom Prison Blues,” which he had written and recorded during his time with Sam Phillips.

It was inspired by a movie he had seen in the Air Force, Inside the Walls of Folsom Prison, and borrowed heavily from a song by Gordon Jenkins, “Crescent City Blues.” In his reworking of it, Cash reconfigured a line from his hero, Jimmie Rodgers’s first blue yodel: “I’m gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall.” In Cash’s song it becomes, “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”

Since its release in 1956, “Folsom Prison Blues” had been one of Cash’s signature songs. And though he’d never served time in prison himself, many fans assumed the song had been drawn from personal experience.

During an appearance at the Texas state prison rodeo in Huntsville, he was profoundly moved by the reception it received: the inmates begged him to sing it again, even when a rainstorm soaked everyone in the crowd and caused a power failure that required him to continue without electrical amplification. After the show, Cash asked to be booked for the New Year’s Day show at California’s maximum-security facility at San Quentin.

Sitting in the San Quentin audience that day was a young inmate named Merle Haggard, who had just turned twenty-one in prison. “He had blown his voice the night before at a New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco, and he had nothing but a whisper,” Haggard remembered. “But with that only, he was able to totally subdue the crowd—and in competition with strippers and all kinds of things, an eight-hour show. I was really worried for him because men are cruel in San Quentin. They don’t applaud unless they like you. But they were crazy about him. He identified with us. And he was the kind of guy that might have been in there with us had things gone the wrong way for him.”

Merle Haggard decided that if he ever got out of prison, he would try to follow in Johnny Cash’s footsteps.

TOOTSIES

My parents probably could not have made it in the creative industry that they chose to operate in if they hadn’t loved each other so dearly. My father brought the complete experience of music, the tremendous knowledge of how music works. My mother brought a tremendous desire to make it in popular music. I think that her biggest contribution was pushing my father as hard as he would allow anyone to push. This incredible love allowed her to push and push until he wrote.

She gave him incredible ideas. She had a tremendous amount of talent; he could polish, he could finish. And she made him finish and kept him excited. But my mother wanted it more than my father. My father wanted my mother more than anything.

DEL BRYANT

Boudleaux and Felice Bryant’s success writing hit songs for the Everly Brothers had allowed them to move from a tiny trailer on the outskirts of Nashville into a real house, and more artists were now interested in what they could offer.

Boudleaux had once written song ideas on scraps of paper he stuffed in his pockets, until one day, fourteen new songs were lost when his raincoat disappeared. His friend Chet Atkins bought him a leather-bound ledger—similar to the kind Stephen Foster had used, he said—and the Bryants became more systematic about their writing, filling ledger after ledger with songs they pitched to producers and artists in a setting that always worked for them: over a steaming plate of Felice’s spaghetti.

“There weren’t many Sicilians in Nashville, and she was an incredible cook,” Del Bryant explained. “So the fixings were there. The folks would arrive. The wine would be poured. The people were just waiting for the meal because you could smell it throughout the house and no one had had food like this, this good of that type. And you’d eat. You would drink. And then they would bring out their books, the ledgers that they wrote in. And then they would pitch songs. And, quite often, he would find something they liked. They really sold hard and fed well.”

If an artist performed one of their songs at the Grand Ole Opry, Felice had other tricks to improve its chances, Del Bryant said: “My mother would run out around the back and start screaming at the end of the song—because she could scream louder than anyone—and start an encore. And if you had an encore, they’d play it again. And you had a better chance of firmly setting something in the public’s mind.”

To promote their songs, she also courted radio disc jockeys—by writing them letters or sometimes going on the road to visit stations in person—and got their two sons involved in the family business. For “Georgia Piney Woods,” the Bryant boys got a thousand pine seedlings from a government agency and sent them to every country deejay in the nation.

Over time, more than nine hundred of the Bryants’ songs would be recorded, selling more than half a billion records worldwide.

The Bryants may have been the first to prove that songwriters could make a good living in Nashville without being recording stars in their own right, but by 1960 more songwriters were following their trail. The city now was home to more than a hundred music publishers, as well as a thousand members of the musicians’ union—and so many booking agents, one magazine wrote, “they have to wear badges to keep from booking each other.”

The publishing companies hired salesmen called “song pluggers” to make regular visits to record producers and play them demo tapes of their writers’ newest material. But many of the songwriters did some of the plugging themselves at a hangout on Lower Broadway called Tootsies Orchid Lounge. Its back door opened onto the alleyway near the artists’ entrance to the Ryman Auditorium, making it a convenient place for performers to drop in for a beer between shows—and a good place for a writer to pitch a new song to an established star.

Its proprietress, Hattie Louise “Tootsie” Bess, had a big heart for songwriters, but little patience for troublemakers. “She wore her hair in kind of a bun, as I remember, and kept a big hatpin in there,” said songwriter Tom T. Hall, “and if somebody got out of hand, she’d take it and she’d just walk up and hit him on the butt with it. She got the attention of some pretty rowdy songwriters in those days…. I never got stuck.”

Among the new arrivals who began frequenting Tootsies were Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard, who signed with Pamper Music, a publishing company co-owned by Ray Price. The essence of a good country song, Harlan Howard said, was “three chords and the truth.” He had been working as a forklift operator at a printing company in California when Price made a hit out of his song “Heartaches by the Number” and encouraged him to come to Nashville, along with his wife, Jan, who often sang on Howard’s demos and would soon have a recording contract of her own.

Another aspiring songwriter who showed up was a twenty-seven-year-old from Abbott, Texas, who arrived in his 1946 Buick and rented a trailer for $25 a week for his wife and three children—the same trailer Roger Miller and Hank Cochran had once used. His name was Willie Nelson.

Born on April 29, 1933, Nelson was raised by his paternal grandmother after his mother abandoned him and his older sister. He grew up in central Texas during the Great Depression, surrounded by music. He would sit on a piano stool as his grandmother taught his sister to play the family pump organ; at night the radio brought him the songs of his first musical heroes, Gene Autry, Bob Wills, and Ernest Tubb.

“I think I knew what I wanted to do from the beginning,” Nelson said, “because I grew up with my sister Bobbie playing the piano and me sitting on a piano stool, trying to learn ‘Stardust.’ I just kind of felt like that’s what I wanted to do, and I seemed to have a talent. I had written poems earlier, before I could play the guitar.”

By age ten, he was good enough to accompany himself when he sang at the town’s barbershop, and to strum in a band that performed polkas and waltzes at local gatherings, earning more in a night than he had made picking cotton and baling hay. By twelve, he had written enough lyrics to fill a makeshift songbook he constructed with a cardboard cover and string holding the sheets of paper together.

After graduating from Abbott High School in 1950, he began a restless existence: marrying his first wife when they were both teenagers; moving from one Texas city to another and spending a short time in the Pacific Northwest before returning home; working as a radio disc jockey; performing on weekends with a series of country bands; and sometimes selling encyclopedias, Bibles, sewing machines, and vacuum cleaners door to door to support his growing family.

Along the way, he became fascinated with the jazz stylings of the guitarist Django Reinhardt. And during his time as a disc jockey, he became convinced, he said, that he could “write better songs than the ones I’m playing on the radio.”

After being fired from a job as a carpet installer because he spent most of his time writing lyrics, he moved to Houston, where he recorded a few songs that didn’t sell. He was always short on money. “I hocked my guitar so many times,” he said later, “the pawnbroker played it better than I did.”

Strapped for cash, he sold his writing credit on two songs for only $200, giving up all future royalties. One of them, “Family Bible,” became an immediate hit on country radio when someone else recorded it. The other, “Night Life,” would later go on to sell thirty million records.

Encouraged by the success of his two songs—even if he didn’t profit from them—Nelson decided to try Nashville. When he arrived in early 1960, Hank Cochran befriended him, persuading Pamper Music to take Nelson on for $50 a week. (Cochran gave up a raise for the same amount to seal the deal.)

Sitting in a converted garage, which served as his writing space, Nelson looked around one day and on a piece of cardboard jotted down some lyrics to a song he entitled “Hello Walls.” Then he went to Tootsies Orchid Lounge to play it for the other songwriters and singers gathered there. Ralph Emery remembered the moment: “People were making fun of the song. And they would say, ‘Hello glass,’ ‘Hello beer,’ ‘Hello picture frame.’ Just anything in the room, ‘Hello doorknob.’ And they were making fun of the song. Well, Faron Young thought it was a hit. He said, ‘I think I can do something.’ And so he recorded it.”

Before the record’s release, Nelson offered to sell Young the writing credit for just $500. Instead, Young gave him a loan of $500—if he promised not to sell it to anyone else. “Hello Walls” topped the country charts, became a top twenty pop hit, and was soon covered by Perry Como, Lawrence Welk, and Willie’s hero Ernest Tubb.

When his first royalty check arrived—for $14,000—Nelson rushed to Tootsies and in front of everyone else gave Faron Young a big kiss, square on the lips. “I ain’t never had nobody,” Young said, “kiss me that good in my life.”

THE NASHVILLE SOUND

There’s a fine line between art and business. Sometimes we make business decisions that affect the art. But we have to keep in mind, it is the music business. I mean, if you just want to be a troubadour, go play for fun; but if you want to do this for real and get it out to all the people, then you have to approach it from a business standpoint.

We don’t have a lot of geniuses like Owen Bradley and Chet Atkins who are capable of both sides of the art and the business.

CHARLIE MCCOY

It was a great relationship, because Owen and Chet had the big picture. The big picture is that whatever is good for Nashville is good for everybody. And they were great friends.

They never viewed themselves as competitors. They rejoiced if one of them got a hit, because that meant four, five other artists were going to come to town and record. It was going to be good for the business. Which it was.

HAROLD BRADLEY

Back in 1958, a group of industry executives, concerned about the declining number of radio stations playing country and western records, had formed the Country Music Association (CMA) to actively promote their business with station managers and advertising executives, trying to counteract age-old stereotypes about the music’s fans. Jo Walker-Meador, a young college-educated Nashville woman who had never been to the Grand Ole Opry, became its executive director.

“We felt they had an image that people who liked country music were a bunch of unwashed hillbillies, to put it bluntly, people who didn’t have money to spend,” she said. “But that was not true. We were trying to tell them that country music sells. Country listeners do have money to spend, and you can make money with this music.”

By the early 1960s, the CMA had persuaded Billboard to refer to the music as “country” instead of “country and western,” and started a Hall of Fame—modeled after the one for baseball in Cooperstown, New York—to recognize important figures in the music’s history. The first three to be inducted were Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, and the influential song publisher Fred Rose.

But by now, most of the music being recorded in Nashville no longer sounded anything like that of Rodgers or Williams.

In their recording studios on Music Row, Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley had been experimenting with ways to reach a wider audience: adding a few sweet violins instead of a hard-driving fiddle; a soft piano; and the subdued background vocals of either the Anita Kerr Singers or the Jordanaires, a gospel quartet—all allowing the lead singer to be front and center.

“Chet Atkins, Owen Bradley were doing everything they could to make it more elegant, and more ‘listenable,’ more palatable,” Marty Stuart said. “They ‘de-twangified’ it, if you will. If that’s a word.”

“I wasn’t trying to change the business,” Chet Atkins said, “just sell records.” He helped Jim Reeves make the transition from a hillbilly singer doing novelty songs like “Mexican Joe” to a crooner of aching heartbreak with “Four Walls.” And over at his Quonset hut studio, Owen Bradley was moving Brenda Lee away from rockabilly with a song called “I’m Sorry.”

“I think rockabilly was more that raw, rhythmic sound,” Lee said. “ ‘I’m Sorry’ was more of your uptown, big ballad, classy kind of a sound. And it changed my sound because then I became a ballad singer.”

By 1961, despite her brief success with “Walkin’ After Midnight,” Patsy Cline hadn’t had a hit in four years and her family was barely getting by. They didn’t even have a telephone; people were told they could reach her by leaving a message at WSM. But once she was freed from her contract with 4 Star records, she signed with Decca, and for her first session Owen Bradley was looking for a song that could easily straddle the country and pop markets. He came across one written by Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard: “I Fall to Pieces.”

The song was set to a familiar 4/4 shuffle beat, but Cline at first resisted Bradley’s insistence on a hushed accompaniment and the addition of the Jordanaires, whose male voices, she feared, might overwhelm her own. She finally relented—and with “I Fall to Pieces” scored her first number-one country hit, and reached number twelve on the pop charts.

Ray Walker remembered Cline’s response to her change in fortune: “We’re on a session. She’s upstairs with Owen in the control room and she came down those steps, sassy, sassy. She put her hand on her hip, cocked her hip, threw her head back, and said, ‘Boys, they say I got a hit. Ain’t nobody taking my Frigidaire and my car now.’ And from then on she just loved us.”

As more and more artists turned to the Nashville Sound, “country music,” Time magazine proclaimed, “is now wearing city clothes.” The studios on Music Row were busier than ever.

Working with producer Don Law of Columbia Records, Ray Price put the shuffle beat momentarily aside to lay down a slow and bluesy version of Willie Nelson’s “Night Life.” Even though the steel guitar accompaniment was brief and so subtle that it was almost overwhelmed by the orchestral strings on Skeeter Davis’s melancholy ballad “The End of the World,” some pop stations initially considered it “too country” to play—until one deejay in New York put it on the air, and it became a million-seller.

Fred Foster, who had documented the stunning drop of country music sales when rockabilly burst on the scene in the mid-1950s, now decided the time was right to go to Nashville and start a record label and publishing company. He developed his first star, the former rockabilly singer at Sun Records, Roy Orbison, by encouraging him to branch out in a new direction with songs like “Running Scared,” “Only the Lonely,” and “Crying.”

Many purists complained that the drive to become more mainstream—and profitable—meant forsaking the raw, homespun roots that had always distinguished country music. But there was no disputing how well it sold.

“What is the Nashville Sound?” Chet Atkins was asked. He reached into his pocket and jingled his change. “That,” he said, “is the Nashville Sound.”

HONKY TONK GIRL

Country music, if you ain’t got a steel guitar or a fiddle, then you ain’t got no country band. That’s it.

JEAN SHEPARD

Some country artists preferred to stick with tradition. One of them was a sharecropper’s daughter from Oklahoma named Jean Shepard. Born in the depths of the Depression, one of ten children, she had grown up listening to Bob Wills’s broadcasts on the radio at noon, when her mother called the children in from the fields. She learned to yodel from the Jimmie Rodgers records her father would save for months to buy.

After her family migrated to California’s Central Valley, her parents pawned their furniture to buy Jean an upright bass so she could perform with a band called the Melody Ranch Girls at a nearby dance hall. One night in 1952, honky-tonk star Hank Thompson heard her singing and persuaded Ken Nelson of Capitol Records to sign her when she was still a teenager.

By 1955, Shepard had joined Kitty Wells as one of the few female lead singers in country music, releasing a string of honky tonk tunes that often pushed the boundaries of what a woman could say in a song. In “Beautiful Lies,” a woman wants to hear her lover tell her what she wants to hear, true or not; in “I Thought of You,” she tells a previous lover she still thinks of him while she’s with someone else. “Girls in Disgrace” is from the perspective of a woman still waiting for her lover to keep his promise to marry her.

After becoming a star on the Ozark Jubilee television show, broadcast from Springfield, Missouri, Shepard joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. She soon fell in love with a charismatic cast member, Hawkshaw Hawkins, a six-foot-five West Virginian who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge and earned four medals in World War Two.

As a rising star on Wheeling’s WWVA, Hawkins had been booked for the Hank Williams concert in Canton, Ohio, on January 1, 1953, when the news arrived that Williams, his musical hero, had died en route. The show went on nonetheless, and Hawkins was said to have given one of the best performances of his career.

In 1960, when Hawkins proposed to Shepard, he told her he wanted to do what Williams had done in his second marriage: have the ceremony onstage, in front of several thousand people. After their wedding at a concert in Wichita, Kansas, Hawkins and Shepard moved to a home near Nashville, and set about starting a family.

That same year, another female singer arrived in town. Like Jean Shepard and Patsy Cline, Loretta Lynn had survived a childhood of abject poverty to emerge as a strong-minded, outspoken woman determined to make her mark on country music.

She was born on April 14, 1932, in a one-room cabin in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, an impoverished coal-mining region in the foothills of the Appalachians. The oldest girl in a family of eight children, she grew up wearing dresses made from flour sacks and tending to her younger siblings, singing them to sleep in a rocking chair. For entertainment, Lynn remembered, they listened to the Grand Ole Opry:

Well, there was one person in that hollow who had one of these little tiny radios. And, on Saturday night, everybody would end up at that one house. And we listened to the Grand Ole Opry. And I remember Ernest Tubb, Little Jimmy Dickens, Roy Acuff, and “the Wabash Cannonball.”

Daddy, when he got his job in the coal mines, we got a Philco radio. And that was the greatest thing that ever happened to us, was that radio. When Bill Monroe would start to singing the bluegrass, Mommy would hit the floor and start dancing. She’d do that little, I don’t know what you call it, “Hillbilly Hoedown.” And when Mommy would hit the floor and start dancing, you’d see Daddy, with his head down, and he’d look up and he would grin, you know, and put his head back down.

I’d go to sleep every night with that radio, with a blanket over the top of me. Sometimes I’d be froze to death, but I listened to the radio.

At age fifteen, she met Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, a twenty-one-year-old war veteran, who outbid everyone else for her pie at a schoolhouse social. He was the first boy she ever kissed—and they married within a month, beginning a turbulent relationship that included arguments and fistfights but never drove them apart. She and Doolittle moved to Washington State, near the Canadian border, where he had found work on a ranch. She had four children in quick succession while the couple scraped to get by.

Hearing his young wife sing to their kids, Doolittle bought Loretta a $17 guitar from Sears. She taught herself to play it, composing songs of her own and playing them to her children. “I’d line these kids up and I’d sing and sing,” she remembered, “and I’d say, ‘Now, which one, which one of these songs do you like?’ And, ‘Do you think Mommy can sing?’ And every one of them would say, ‘Yeah, Mommy, you can sing.’ ”

Soon she was performing with a small country band for five dollars a show at a local tavern and won a talent contest on a Tacoma television show hosted by Buck Owens. A wealthy lumberman offered to finance a recording of a song she had written, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.”

“I like the very first record she did,” Merle Haggard said. “I think that’s the best she ever sounded. I love that record. She had authenticity in it, and she was hungry and she wanted out of that life she was in. And kind of sung her way out of prison.”

To promote the record, the Lynns started sending it, along with a photograph of Loretta dressed in a cowgirl outfit, to disc jockeys around the nation. In a trade magazine, they read about Felice and Boudleaux Bryant publicizing songs by going from station to station, and in early 1960 decided to do the same thing—sleeping in their car, living on baloney and cheese sandwiches, washing their clothes in a basin in the back seat and drying them by holding them out an open window. Loretta said she fell into a routine on the trip:

I had one little dress. It was a little black and white dress. Doo got it for me for my seventeenth birthday. I had kept it all this time, you know, and I kept that one dress so I could go someplace. And I’d get in the back seat and change into my little black and white dress and pull my jeans off and go in the radio station.

Sometimes, I’d sit there for three or four hours before they’d play my record. It wasn’t easy, either. I walked in one station and there was my record down in the garbage can. He said, “I don’t know. I’ve never heard you sing. I don’t know if this record’s any good, or not.” And I told him, “Well, like you probably won’t ever find out, ’cause it’s laying in the garbage can.”

Then, when I’d come back [to the car], I’d pull my dress off, hang it back up, and we’d go on down the road to the next radio station. That’s how we did it.

In Tucson, they stopped at a station where young Waylon Jennings was the deejay; he liked her music and played it on air. By the time they reached Dallas, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” had reached number fourteen on the country charts. They decided it was time to head for Nashville. “I sat up in WSM till four o’clock in the morning before Ralph Emery played my record,” she said. “And he got off at four. So just before four, he played my record.”

She pestered officials at the Grand Ole Opry until they granted her a guest appearance, and the reception to “Honky Tonk Girl” was enthusiastic enough to win her a spot on the show.

Meanwhile, one of Loretta’s idols, Patsy Cline, was involved in a horrible automobile accident that killed two people. Patsy was catapulted through her car’s windshield and hospitalized in critical condition, with broken bones, a dislocated hip, and a deep gash that sliced across her forehead.

After an appearance on the Opry, Loretta was scheduled to be on Ernest Tubb’s Midnite Jamboree. She sang “I Fall to Pieces” and dedicated it to Patsy in the hospital. “So she sent her husband out to town to get me, to bring me to the hospital,” Lynn said. “And that’s where I met her, was in the hospital.”

Loretta and Patsy soon became close friends. As Cline slowly recovered—appearing once at the Opry in a wheelchair to show her fans she was mending—she started giving Lynn advice on her career, offering any help she could: money for rent, nicer clothes, and styling tips in Patsy’s gold-tiled bathroom. “I guess she saw in Loretta what she had seen in her own career,” Ralph Emery said: “having a hard time making it.”

Looking for a contract with a major label, Loretta got to know Brenda Lee through Owen Bradley, who, Lee said, had an offer to make: “He brought me in and he said, ‘There’s this new girl. Her name is Loretta Lynn. She brought me a song yesterday. It’s called “Fool Number One.” I don’t think it’s a good song for her, but I think it’s a great song for you. So here’s what I’m gonna do, and tell me what you think. I’m gonna offer her a contract with Decca if she’ll give me “Fool Number One” for you.’ She took the deal. I got the song. I had a number-two record with it, and look what Decca got: They got Loretta.”

CRAZY

God, you know, that’s another voice that just transcends any genre of music. Someone might hear Patsy Cline sing “Crazy” and think, “What the heck is that?”

That performance and that record—all of a sudden, there’s this window that they’re looking through into a genre of music that they would never think about otherwise. That’s the beautiful thing about those transcendent voices.

KATHY MATTEA

Patsy Cline’s near-fatal car accident had generated a wave of publicity—and sympathy—for her, and fueled even more sales of her song “I Fall to Pieces.” As soon as she felt up to it, Owen Bradley brought her back to his studio to record an album featuring more of the Nashville Sound.

She performed an eclectic assortment of songs: “Foolin’ Around” by Harlan Howard and Buck Owens, and a Mel Tillis tune called “Strange”; Cole Porter’s “True Love” and the pop standard “The Wayward Wind”; and covers of Bob Wills’s “San Antonio Rose” and Gene Autry’s “South of the Border.” But the song that produced the album’s biggest hit was the one she had the most trouble recording: a slow, soft lament Willie Nelson had written during his time in Houston. He had originally entitled the song “Stupid,” but changed his mind and called it “Crazy.” Once again, as Nelson recalled, the story of getting one of his songs recorded started at Tootsies Orchid Lounge:

Charlie Dick, Patsy’s husband, was there. He and I were having a beer. I had a demo on “Crazy,” and I got it on Tootsies jukebox. And he heard it and said, “That would be a great song for Patsy. Let’s go play it for her.” And I said, “It’s a little late,” you know, it was about midnight. And he said, “That’s okay.”

So we went over to her house. It was about twelve thirty, one o’clock when we got there, and I wouldn’t get out of the car. So he went in, and Patsy came out and made me get out of the car and come in, and listened to the song.

I thought it was a good song. You know, when you write one, you know whether it’s good or whether it’s not great. But I always thought it was a really good song. And I played it for Patsy Cline, and she thought it was a great song.

“I’m glad you woke me up,” Cline said. “I’m recording it.” But in the studio, as Owen Bradley and his musicians struggled at first to compile an arrangement, Patsy was having trouble herself. Her bruised ribs from the accident made it hard to sustain some notes, and she couldn’t get Nelson’s unique phrasing on his demo version out of her head.

A Nashville recording session usually laid down three or four songs in three hours. This time, even after adding an extra hour in the studio, Bradley still didn’t have a completed take. “It was just a constant back-and-forth,” said Harold Bradley, a guitarist on the session. “Owen was refining [the arrangement] while she was having that problem. He finally told her, ‘There’s no use beatin’ yourself up. Why don’t we just make a track?’ ”

Bradley sent Cline home while he and the musicians finished the background track. Two weeks later, she returned to lay down her vocals over it—an unusual procedure at the time—and in her first take delivered the kind of performance they had been searching for: turning her powerful voice into an intimate, quavering instrument that matched the anguish and vulnerability of the lyrics.

“I think the thing was that Patsy finally figured out how to style it herself, where she felt it,” Harold Bradley said. “And I think she just took it and made it her own.”

“When you hear her sing, it sounds to me like she is in the room, right here. And you feel the emotion in every lyric,” according to country star Trisha Yearwood. “For me, she was the example of when you sing, you want to make people feel what you’re feeling. And she did it so well. If you can find that perfect song and then you marry it with that, with the voice it’s supposed to go with, it’s timeless.”

“Of all the versions of my songs covered by other artists,” Nelson would say, “it’s my favorite…a perfect rendition” sung with “delicacy, soul, and perfect diction.” He added: “She understood the lyrics on the deepest possible level.” Released as a single, “Crazy” quickly crossed over to the Top Ten on the pop charts, just as Owen Bradley had wanted.

That fall, at the annual country deejay convention in Nashville, still needing crutches to get around, Cline walked up to accept the award as Billboard magazine’s Female Artist of the Year, ending Kitty Wells’s unbroken string dating back to 1952. Then she embarked on an arduous tour to promote her new sound—and a new look. Instead of a fringed cowgirl outfit, she now appeared in elegant dresses, with a new hairdo and heavy makeup meant to mask some of her facial scars.

She joined an Opry entourage that played New York City’s Carnegie Hall. It included Jim Reeves, Faron Young, Marty Robbins, Minnie Pearl, and Bill Monroe, and won a review from The New York Times, which praised her “convincing way with ‘heart songs,’ the country cousin of the torch song.” But she paid more attention to a biting column in the New York Journal-American by Dorothy Kilgallen, who disdained all country music and referred to the visiting musicians as “hicks from the sticks” and the “Carnegie Hallbillies.” Outspoken as ever, Cline fired back at her next concert. Kilgallen, she said, was “the Wicked Witch of the East.”

Just as she had befriended young Brenda Lee on the road years earlier, Cline now took a thirteen-year-old steel guitar prodigy named Barbara Mandrell under her protective wing. “She was loving and caring, and soft and feminine, and motherly,” Mandrell said. “She wanted me to room with her. So, of course, gladly, I would do that.” Patsy let young Barbara comb her hair every night before performances, and the future star would stand in the wings and watch Cline interact with the audiences:

And I remember Patsy said, “I just had this song that you all made a hit, called ‘I Fall to Pieces,’ and I was in this horrible car accident.” And I remembered in combing her hair, that she had a scar here, here, and here. And I was told that, in the wreck, the first thing she saw was just a big flap of [skin], you know, it was horrible. So, anyway, she said, “ ‘I Fall to Pieces,’ and then I had this horrible wreck.” She says, “I’m going to premiere a new song for you tonight that’s brand new, coming out, and I’m a little worried about it for me because it’s called ‘Crazy.’ ”

MODERN SOUNDS

What’s interesting about “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and Ray Charles and country music is that country music claims triumphs of the heart and traumas of the heart as the most elemental space. Well, I think that he was able to bring jazz and a kind of refinement, a different kind of black refinement of cool to country. He refined country music while keeping it still rooted.

ALICE RANDALL

Country music was crossing over as never before. Owen Bradley’s reworking of Brenda Lee—using her big voice to turn out records that mixed pop, country, and rhythm and blues—made her a sensation in Europe as well as the United States. England’s Melody Maker magazine ranked her as the top female artist in the world.

Touring in Hamburg, Germany, her opening act at the Star Club was the Beatles, who were still struggling to break through. Brenda, a teenager at the time, was captivated by their music, their look, and their irreverent personalities. She brought home a photograph and a demo recording—and tried without luck to interest Decca into signing them. Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World” became an international number one song, and she toured briefly with the Rolling Stones.

The boundaries between musical genres had always been porous. But in 1962, no one proved it more than a blind rhythm and blues singer and piano player named Ray Charles. Given creative control of an album for the first time in his career, he surprised everyone—and had to overcome initial reluctance by his label—by recording a collection of country songs.

“He’s listening to the radio, is he not going to hear country music?” said the jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis. “We tend to think of it one way, like these white musicians heard these black musicians play. The black musicians were listening to the white musicians, too.”

For his album Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music, Charles chose songs like Hank Williams’s “Hey Good Lookin’ ” and “You Win Again,” the Everly Brothers’ “Bye Bye Love,” Eddy Arnold’s hit “You Don’t Know Me,” and country singer Don Gibson’s song “I Can’t Stop Loving You.”

“Ray didn’t have to go out and make that record; he could have kept making the records he was making,” Darius Rucker said. “He was a huge star. But he loved country music so much, he wanted to go make a country record. And he did, and it’s one of the all-time classic records in American history.”

“When you hear Ray Charles singing some great Hank Williams song or a great Don Gibson song, and in a way that was soulful and more from an R&B place,” said Vince Gill, “to me, it showed how great these songs were.”

“You take country music, you take black music,” Ray Charles said, and “you got the same goddamn thing exactly.” “And he was absolutely right,” said Ronnie Milsap, also a blind singer and piano player with hits that crossed over between country and pop. “ ‘I Can’t Stop Loving You’ hit the radio, and that whole summer of 1962, it just played all summer long. He took the song into a brand-new place.”

Within just three months of its release, Modern Sounds of Country and Western Music was already certified gold—with 500,000 copies sold—and replaced the soundtrack of West Side Story as the nation’s best-selling album. As a single, “I Can’t Stop Loving You” topped the charts in the United States and Britain, won a Grammy for best R&B release, and sold so briskly, one Atlanta record store owner reported, “people who don’t even own record players are buying it.”

“That was a huge record for us, maybe even more so than for Ray,” according to Gill, “for us to be able to hang our hat on how soulful this music could be.” Ralph Emery agreed: “Ray Charles was a step. That was another step in popularizing what many considered to be a ‘second-class music.’ He made country music more popular. And I think he caused people to take a second listen, who might have said, ‘I don’t like country music.’ He gave them a second choice, and people here [in Nashville] really appreciated it. We’d been looking for legitimacy for years. And this was just another step. We all thought, like what Kennedy said, ‘When the tide comes in, all the boats rise.’ We thought that would help all the boats rise here in Nashville.”

Ray Charles, Willie Nelson said, “did more for country music than any one artist has ever done.”

“Music is always striving to the best thing. And the best thing is the mix, you know? It always is,” said the singer Rhiannon Giddens. “You have these two things, which are pretty cool on their own. Then you put them together and all the strengths multiply and become this beautiful thing. And I think that’s one of the reasons why American music has taken over the world—because everybody can feel that it comes from one plus one equals a hundred.”

LOVE IS A BURNING THING

Being the daughter of a really famous guy was fraught with so much anxiety, partly because of my mother. She was so afraid of fame, and she was afraid we’d be kidnapped.

She didn’t want anything in the papers and she wanted a quiet life, a contained life. And my dad did not have a quiet and contained life. So there was always this conflict and struggle about that.

ROSANNE CASH

By the early 1960s, Johnny Cash was on the road more than ever, consuming twenty amphetamine pills a day to feed his addiction and keep him going, then using alcohol and barbiturates to get to sleep.

He had appeared in a low-budget film, Five Minutes to Live, which bombed at the box office. Another concept album, Ride This Train, failed to sell many records. Arrested in Nashville for public drunkenness, he spent a night in jail; later, he was stopped for driving more than ninety miles an hour on a California freeway.

Cash’s interest in Jimmie Rodgers had grown into an obsession: he collected Rodgers memorabilia; recorded two of his songs, “In the Jailhouse Now” and “Waiting for a Train”; and even considered producing a movie about Rodgers’s life in which he would play the lead role.

“Jimmie Rodgers was a profound influence,” said Rosanne Cash. “I think it was his own restlessness and Jimmie Rodgers’s restlessness. There’s so many songs about travel in country music, about longing for home, being away from home, never going to get back home, never going to see Mother again, hoboing, waiting for a train. Those themes are central. And Dad really responded to that restlessness.”

Booked for a concert at Carnegie Hall, Cash showed up onstage wearing his hero’s railroad outfit and carrying his lantern, intending to open with a set of Rodgers’s songs. (He had been taking Dexedrine diet pills to lose enough weight to fit into Rodgers’s clothes and was “as skinny as rain,” one band member said.) The audience sat in confused silence for a few minutes—and then started calling out for “Folsom Prison Blues.” Cash handed the lantern to someone onstage and, in an almost inaudible voice, launched into his regular set of songs. “It was just a nightmare,” he later recalled, “awful, start to finish.”

Cash and Vivian now had four daughters, and he moved them to a big house in Casitas Springs, an hour from Los Angeles, though he was seldom at home—and when he was, the tensions with Vivian were palpable. “I wasn’t going to give up the life that went with my music,” Cash said later, “and Vivian wasn’t going to accept that. So, there we were, very unhappy. There was always a battle at home.”

After one road trip, Cash brought his whole band to the house, along with Patsy Cline, who was part of his tour. Vivian became friends with Patsy, but not with another woman now appearing regularly with her husband: June Carter.

Carter had divorced her first husband, Carl Smith, and married her second, Edwin Nix, who operated a body shop in Nashville while June pursued her career. When Rose Maddox departed from Cash’s package show—partly because of all the cancellations and postponements caused by his drug use—Carter had been hired to replace her.

Cash soon added June’s mother, Maybelle, and her sisters to the act, and they appeared with him at a big show at the Hollywood Bowl, where eighteen thousand fans came to hear him, Patsy Cline, Roger Miller, Marty Robbins, Don Gibson, and Flatt and Scruggs perform. Vivian took the girls to the concert. When it was over, they watched as Johnny jumped into a waiting Cadillac to drive off with June. “The look on Vivian’s face,” one band member remembered, “was pure anguish.” Patsy Cline was upset enough to upbraid June Carter about it the next time they saw each other.

By the end of 1962, Johnny Cash and June Carter’s affair had deepened. “A lot of people were in the dark about it,” said Carlene Carter, June’s daughter. “But it was pretty evident to even me, a small child, that there was something there between them, a special bond.” But Johnny and June were conflicted about it: they were both still married to other people and had children of their own to consider.

June poured her feelings into a new song, co-written with Merle Kilgore, that her sister Anita recorded. “When she wrote ‘Ring of Fire,’ I believe that she wrote that about John,” Carlene Carter said. “It was about something real. It was about true passion and true love—and the scary factor of that. You know, ‘I fell into a burning ring of fire’—that is scary.”

Anita Carter’s “Ring of Fire” had not resulted in a hit record, so in March 1963 Cash decided to record it himself. To help him, he turned to “Cowboy” Jack Clement, a friend from his Sun Record days, who enjoyed pushing musical boundaries. In Memphis, Clement had persuaded Sam Phillips to record Roy Orbison and Jerry Lee Lewis, and had written and produced two hits for Cash, “I Guess Things Happen That Way” and “Ballad of a Teenage Queen.” Now he was working as a producer in Beaumont, Texas.

Cash wanted something fresh for “Ring of Fire”—maybe even Mexican mariachi horns—to give his “boom chicka boom” sound a new twist, and he thought Clement was just the man he needed. “The phone rang and Johnny Cash said he’s going to cut a record in Nashville with trumpets on it,” Clement remembered. “And he wanted me to come up and help him figure it out. So I flew up and got in there and he had these two, two or three trumpets and they didn’t know what they were going to do. They had music, but it was blank.” Clements suggested the notes the trumpets should play—and they became the signature sound of “Ring of Fire.” “I remember I went back to Beaumont and a few days later, I’m hearing it on the radio, all over the place,” Clement said. “It was good.”

“Ring of Fire” spent seven weeks at number one on the country charts, and an album featuring it lasted more than a year on the pop charts, earning Cash his first gold record when it sold more than 500,000 copies. Afraid he might leave for another label, Columbia signed him to a new five-year contract guaranteeing Cash half a million dollars.

Vivian hated “Ring of Fire”—and did her best to avoid the radio stations that seemed to play it constantly. She associated it with June Carter, whose voice could be heard on the record, singing backup with her sisters. “The mere mention of her name annoyed me,” Vivian would remember. “I longed for the days when Johnny told me he’d always walk the line for me.”

SWEET DREAMS

I think there were people in Nashville, in the early days, when I came here, in the late ’50s, early ’60s, I think they wished we’d go away. I think there were people here that actually wished that there was no such thing as the Grand Ole Opry.

I think there was a certain amount of people that were ashamed of it—who were these hillbillies coming down here, wiping the mud off of their boots on our sidewalks?

And when tragedy struck, some people in Belle Meade, or the fancy places in Nashville, couldn’t have really cared less, I think it just brought us together that much more because it hurt us all. It was like one person got cut and we all bled.

BILL ANDERSON

Nashville’s music industry was thriving, even if the city’s leaders still viewed the singers, songwriters, and session players with barely concealed disdain. The recording studios on Music Row were pushing out hits, and every Saturday night, thousands of people from hundreds of miles away converged on the Ryman Auditorium to see their favorite stars on the Opry—a place many Nashville residents studiously avoided.

“They didn’t come to the Opry,” according to Ralph Emery. “The Opry was a tourist business. I was onstage at the Opry one night and I looked down and saw this guy, part of the Belle Meade group, and I said, ‘What are you doing down here?’ Because I knew he wouldn’t come on his own. He said, ‘Oh, I got these people from out of town; they insisted I bring ’em to the Grand Ole Opry.’ ”

When they were home from the road, the artists tended to stick together. Everyone knew everyone else—personally as well as professionally. Jan Howard and her songwriting husband, Harlan, often hosted friends like Patsy Cline at their house on Music Row. Roger Miller and Hank Cochran attended “pickin’ parties” at their home, where songwriters sang their latest creations; June Carter came by whenever she was in Nashville. The Howards were especially close friends with Jean Shepard and Hawkshaw Hawkins.

Hawkins and Shepard now had a son, named Don Robin in honor of two other friends in the close-knit musical community, Don Gibson and Marty Robbins. The day the boy was born, Hawkins was so proud that he rushed to Ralph Emery’s all-night show on WSM to announce his arrival and his name.

Patsy Cline was now a mother of two. Following the success of “Crazy,” she was in demand for appearances everywhere, and to cut down on her time away from home, she now often flew to and from concerts in a four-seat Piper Comanche flown by her guitar player and manager, Randy Hughes.

Her latest single, “Leavin’ on Your Mind,” was climbing the charts when she and Owen Bradley started work on a new album in February 1963. Over four days, Cline and Bradley recorded enough material for it: songs that ranged across all musical genres, from Bill Monroe’s “Blue Moon of Kentucky” and the old standard “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home” to Irving Berlin’s “Always” and Ray Price’s “Crazy Arms”—and a dreamy version of Don Gibson’s “Sweet Dreams.”

Cline called Jan Howard one day to invite her to the recording session in Bradley’s Quonset hut studio. One of the tracks they laid down that night was an old Bob Wills fiddle tune, “Faded Love,” which Bradley planned on being the album’s title song. He had reworked it to incorporate the Nashville Sound—with the Jordanaires again singing background vocals, Floyd Cramer on the piano, Harold Bradley on guitar, and a smooth string section.

“I went to the session,” Howard recalled. “I had always heard ‘Faded Love,’ the Bob Wills version, which was great. But when she sang ‘Faded Love’ it was just unbelievable. When she changed keys and hit the high note and then went to the low note, that did it. It gives me cold chills.”

With the album completed, Patsy made an appearance on the Opry, hosted by Cowboy Copas, a former member of Pee Wee King’s band and now a solo artist known as “the Country Gentleman of Song.” Then she flew off to a string of concerts—Lima and Toledo, Ohio; New Orleans; Birmingham—before a few weeks’ break at home in early March.

That February, Hawkshaw Hawkins was excited about a new single of his that had just been released, a swinging heartbreak song written by Ernest Tubb’s son, Justin, entitled “Lonesome 7-7203.” He was even more excited that Jean was pregnant with their second child.

Hawkins was just starting to promote his new record when word reached Nashville that a popular disc jockey in Kansas City, “Cactus” Jack Call, had been killed in an automobile accident. Call had no insurance, and a local promoter was putting together a benefit concert to help his family. A troupe of Opry stars agreed to come to Kansas City for the show, including Hawkins. “He was one of the first ones to volunteer because, back then, you did stuff like this,” Jean Shepard said. “If you had a friend in need, you went and helped fill that need.”

Before he left for Kansas City, Hawkins told his pregnant wife, “I hope this one’s a boy, too,” and stopped by the WSM studio to hand-deliver a copy of his new single. “Play the hell out of it,” he urged Emery, and headed to the concert.

Besides Hawkins, the benefit show in Kansas City’s Memorial Building on Sunday, March 3, included Dottie West, Billy Walker, George Jones, Cowboy Copas—and, as a last-minute addition to the roster, Patsy Cline, who had flown in from her recent tour. She was tired and had come down with a bad cold, but she closed the concert with a set of her hits, along with a few she had just recorded, including “Faded Love” and “Sweet Dreams.”

The audience response to Cline was so overwhelming, Dottie West remembered, that “she was moved to tears and thanked them. Patsy said how much they meant to her and that she’d be nowhere without them.”

The concert raised $3,000, and the next morning the musicians prepared to make their separate ways home. Billy Walker had learned in the night that his father had suffered a heart attack; Hawkins gave him his commercial airline ticket and said he’d fly back later with Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas on Randy Hughes’s small plane.

After a day’s delay because of bad weather, the four-seater finally departed Kansas City early on the afternoon of March 5. West of Nashville, they flew into dense rain clouds as darkness fell. Hughes was not trained to fly by instruments.

Word began to spread on country radio stations that the plane and its four famous passengers were missing. Jean Shepard had put her son to bed and dozed off when her phone rang. “It was about ten o’clock, ten thirty, and Hawk had a fan club president out of Minneapolis who took care of his fan club,” she remembered. “And she said, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m trying to go to sleep.’ And she said, ‘Oh, my God, you don’t know.’ I knew then.” Friends started showing up at the house, including Jan Howard and Minnie Pearl, who helped her through the long night as they waited for more news.

Early in the morning, Bill Anderson also got a phone call, from the wife of a friend: “She said, ‘Go turn on WSM right now.’ So I turned on the radio and they were talking and they were crying. You could actually hear the tears in their voice as they were telling their audience, and the world, for the first time, that this plane had gone down.”

Meanwhile, a frantic search was under way near Camden, Tennessee. Roger Miller, who had been visiting Patsy Cline’s husband, joined the team combing the forest, calling out his friends’ names in the darkness. As the sun came up, he climbed a fire tower, saw some torn treetops, and led the group to the crash site, which was littered with debris: a hairbrush, gold slipper, and cigarette lighter of Patsy’s; Hawkshaw Hawkins’s leather belt, one of his cowboy boots, the broken neck of his guitar.

No one had survived. “It was like a cloud fell over country music and Nashville and the Grand Ole Opry,” Jan Howard said. “It was devastating to everybody. It was just a horrible, horrible time. Four good friends.” The four became five on the day of the funeral. Jack Anglin, of the singing duo Johnny and Jack, was killed in a car accident going to Patsy Cline’s memorial service. Jan Howard, on her way to the funeral home with Anita Carter, heard the ambulance sirens. “And we got to the funeral home and it was like chaos,” she said. “When Ernest Tubb heard that Jack Anglin had been killed, he just fell apart.” Bill Anderson was there and got the news at the same time. “My goodness,” he thought, “when is this going to stop?”

A short time after the funerals for Hawkshaw Hawkins, Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, Randy Hughes, and Jack Anglin, the Grand Ole Opry paid tribute to them all at the start of its Saturday-night program. The country music family was grieving and in shock, but wanted to give their lost friends a proper good-bye.