Garth Brooks shakes hands with the next generation of country fans.
If you look at it over the last ninety years now, that it’s been recorded, it wouldn’t be one thing. It wouldn’t be anywhere close to one thing. It’s been a million different things in a million different ways. And that, to me, is the way it should be. I don’t think I would enjoy country music if it stayed the same. It’s not supposed to.
VINCE GILL
By 1984, despite the mainstream popularity of the smooth Countrypolitan sound, and the Urban Cowboy boom that seemed to broaden its appeal, actual sales of country music records had decreased by more than 27 percent. “Urban Cowboy Goes to Boot Hill,” Variety magazine proclaimed. “Those good times are gone,” The New York Times declared, “and they won’t be coming back.” “It’s not just the Nashville Sound that seems to be dying,” the reporter added, “it’s the Nashville dream.”
But no sooner had the dip in commercial success been noticed and mourned than it began reversing itself. Two new cable networks dedicated exclusively to country music—CMT and TNN—brought interviews and stories about a new generation of stars to fans across the nation, using music videos to promote their new songs. In the last half of the 1980s, sales would double—and never look back.
Within the broad embrace of its extended family, the age-old question of what is—and what isn’t—country music would only intensify. Could a music of everyday people, described as “three chords and the truth,” survive the changes of the late twentieth century with its soul and its simplicity intact? Would its stars and the music itself lose their way, or would they heed the old saying, “Don’t get above your raisin’?”
“Don’t get above your raisin’ is a term I associate with the South,” the music historian Bill C. Malone said. “It’s the kind of advice that parents would give their children: ‘As you go into the world, don’t forget where you came from. Don’t get so uppity that you forget us and you forget the values that you were taught back home.’ And I think for country music, it’s just a reminder to the music in general: Don’t forget where you came from.”
We are all related when it comes to country music and to country songs. We’re like “blood kin.” Anybody that loves country music, they’re related to you. You’ve got that in common.
DOLLY PARTON
By the mid-1980s, Johnny Cash was about to start his fourth decade in country music. To many people, he was country music—a living legend within the industry, already in the Hall of Fame, though he had just turned fifty-two. He no longer had a weekly network television show, but he and June Carter Cash hosted an annual Christmas program on CBS.
With his friends Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson, Cash formed a country super-group called the Highwaymen, who toured the world and appeared in a made-for-television version of the classic film Stagecoach. Then Cash reunited with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Roy Orbison—fellow artists who got their start at Sun Records in Memphis—for an album called Class of ’55.
From left, Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, and Johnny Cash remembered their days at Sun Records in Memphis by recording Class of ’55.
From left, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Cash, and Kris Kristofferson performed as the country music super-group the Highwaymen.
Appearing on David Letterman’s late-night show, he felt secure enough about his image to talk openly about the drug addictions that were part of his past. Saturday Night Live asked him to New York City to host an episode.
But despite his status as an icon, Cash’s solo records were no longer selling. Only two singles had reached the Top Ten in more than a decade; many of his recent albums failed to chart at all.
His last number-one hit, “One Piece at a Time,” back in 1976, was a novelty song—a talking blues about an autoworker who builds his own Cadillac out of parts he sneaks out of the assembly line in his lunch box. Now, Cash’s label hoped something similar might get him back on top. The song they chose told a silly story, made even sillier in the music video they also released: Cash undergoes a brain transplant, but the brain he gets is a bank robber’s, which transforms the singer into an outlaw. Cash’s brain gets placed inside a chicken—who begins performing across the nation as “The Chicken in Black.”
“Columbia Records was trying anything and everything, and John was trying anything and everything to find something that worked, that had any kind of fresh appeal to it,” said Marty Stuart. “ ‘The Chicken in Black’ is probably one of the low points.” Rosanne Cash agreed: “I was embarrassed about that. I just thought, ‘Why is Dad listening to these people?’ ” Cash would later say “The Chicken in Black” was the only thing he ever recorded that he hated—so much so that he begged Columbia Records to reclaim copies of it from stores and the music videos from television stations, and he canceled plans to promote it on tour.
Meanwhile, Cash’s eldest daughter, Rosanne, was carving out her own career in country music. She carried painful memories of her father’s neglect of her mother and sisters in the 1960s, when he was strung out on drugs and never at home. But she also shared his deep love of music and his fierce individualism as an artist:
I didn’t want people to think that I was using my dad in any way or trading on his fame, or trying to get doors open because of him. It was so important to me that I do it on my own. Even thought of changing my name.
And my dad didn’t say anything about that. He knew I was considering that; and then, when I didn’t, he said, “I’m so happy that you kept your name. I’m so proud of our name. I’m so happy you didn’t give it up.” And I realized that would have hurt him terribly.
Rosanne and her father, backstage at the Opry
Rosanne Cash in the studio. When she moved to Nashville from Los Angeles, she had trouble fitting in. But her records were topping the charts.
After making some successful albums in Los Angeles, Rosanne and her husband, Rodney Crowell, who was also her producer, had moved to Nashville, where she had trouble fitting in. “I had purple hair,” she said. “I was a little bit streetwise, urban girl, straight from Los Angeles, and brazen. And I really put people off. I remember walking onstage once, at this multi-artist show, and I had this Japanese parachute pink, big-shouldered jacket on. I walked out, just kind of proud of myself, and people in the audience actually laughed.”
Rosanne Cash was winning awards and charting hits with each album. King’s Record Shop went gold and produced four consecutive number-one singles.
But her 1985 song, “I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me” went to number one and won a Grammy; the album it came from produced three other singles in the top five. “She was selling records and the people were getting her music,” Crowell said, “and that will endear you to the establishment pretty quick, because it adds to the bottom line. You’d be surprised at how much respect you get when your records are selling. And you probably wouldn’t be surprised how little you get when they’re not.”
In 1986, Columbia Records abruptly dropped Johnny Cash from its roster. He had been with the label since 1958. No one—including Cash—saw it coming; he was on tour in Canada when the news broke. “It was like somebody had dropped an atom bomb in Nashville,” said record producer Tony Brown. “The guy that ran Columbia at the time, Rick Blackburn, everybody thought that he was the devil. Because Johnny Cash was more than an artist; he was a way of life for America. He was like John Wayne, and he was just bigger than music.”
But Johnny Cash was unceremoniously dropped from his label after twenty-eight years as one of Columbia’s major stars. The news, one insider remembered, hit Nashville like “an atom bomb,” and Cash felt adrift.
Dwight Yoakam considered it “regrettable and reprehensible that he was just kind of summarily, disrespectfully dismissed and cast aside by a label that had made millions and millions of dollars with Johnny Cash’s music. The fact that Columbia Records would drop Johnny Cash was an insult to anybody who had ever listened to music.” Marty Stuart—part of Cash’s touring band and the husband of one of his daughters, Cindy—had recently released his own first solo album for Columbia. When he protested Cash’s dismissal, he said, executives retaliated by cutting back on the album’s promotion. His next one would be with a different label.
Johnny Cash signed with Mercury Records, where his first album sold poorly. Country deejays didn’t play it, and USA Today named it one of the ten worst albums of the year. “In the ’80s, if you weren’t selling records, you couldn’t get a record deal,” said Kenny Rogers. “It is a business, after all. You can have the most talent in the world, but if you can’t sell records, who’s going to throw away their money? I remember Johnny Cash said something that just broke my heart when he said, ‘I feel like a stranger in my own hometown.’ ”
Rosanne Cash, however, was still on a roll. Her newest album, King’s Record Shop, was certified as a gold record, and produced four consecutive number-one singles, including “Tennessee Flat Top Box,” a song her father had first recorded in 1961. “I felt kind of guilty that I was having a lot of number-one records and getting a lot of attention at the same time my dad was dropped from Columbia and he was really floundering,” she said. “I felt bad for him, because he put a lot of stock in being Johnny Cash and everything that that meant, including the fame and the hit records. And to not have that, he was a little disconcerted and at sea, and depressed.”
In all things country music, we see a response. How far are they going to take country music? Well, it will come back around again. It’s always reminding itself who it is. And the old ghosts are always rising up and refusing to be cast aside.
KETCH SECOR
There is a tension, always. It’s how big can you make your audience, and how pure you can keep your heart. I think the way country music was puffed up and so hung up on itself and its sound and image, and all that—I think maybe it was a little prideful, and we needed to have a heart check.
RICKY SKAGGS
No one had more impeccable bluegrass credentials than Ricky Skaggs from eastern Kentucky. A prodigy on the mandolin, he had played for Bill Monroe at age six; appeared on the Flatt and Scruggs television show when he was seven; and as a teenager joined Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys.
But in the late 1970s, Skaggs had moved to Los Angeles to be part of Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band—infusing her music with a tinge of bluegrass, and at the same time learning a greater appreciation for electric guitars and drums. Now he was on his own, experimenting with a sound that combined the acoustic instruments of a string band with something more electric, more honky tonk. It was traditional. And it was brand new.
“The bluegrass purists, they didn’t like the electric part,” Skaggs said. “The real pure bluegrass people really saw me almost as a traitor.” At the same time, Skaggs’s music didn’t conform to the sound radio stations were playing on their Top Forty format. “It was so country, I mean, it was barnyard,” he said. “You could smell it, it was so country. The radio stations would say, ‘You’re just too country. We’re not going to play this stuff.’ But, you know, most people, they just loved it.”
Skaggs’s music caught on, and during the mid-1980s he released a steady stream of hits. He enjoyed nothing better than taking a song one of his bluegrass heroes had written and recorded a generation earlier, and injecting it with something fresh. He transformed “Don’t Get Above Your Raisin’,” an old Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs song, into something he called “a slamming kind of country song; it’s almost like rock and roll.”
Then he did it again with a remake of a song his mentor, Bill Monroe, had written back in 1950 about Monroe’s mentor, “Uncle Pen.” Monroe’s version had never charted; Skaggs’s jumped to number one. “I was at the Opry one night,” Skaggs recalled, “and Mr. Monroe come up to me and he said, ‘Ricky, I just got a powerful check on that song you put out. I’m telling you, it was a powerful check. I paid all my land taxes.’ And he said, ‘You can record all my songs if you want to.’ ”
Ricky Skaggs and bluegrass patriarch Bill Monroe recording together
Monroe even agreed to appear in a music video for Skaggs’s song “Country Boy,” pretending to be Uncle Pen from the sticks, paying a visit to his nephew in New York City. The video included a cameo by Mayor Ed Koch, mouthing the words “I’m just a country boy at heart,” showed kids break-dancing with Monroe on the subway to the music—and helped the album become Skaggs’s third number one in a row.
Ricky Skaggs, Chet Atkins said, “saved country music.” But there were other young artists who were also reconnecting the music with its roots—and having great success.
When Skaggs added electric instruments and drums to the traditional bluegrass sound, some purists were outraged, but Monroe loved how it brought new fans to the music.
George Strait was raised on a ranch near his birthplace of Poteet, Texas, and studied agriculture at Southwest Texas State University. His music—influenced by Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, Ernest Tubb—had an old-fashioned dance hall feel to it, anchored by his smooth, easy voice and his no-frills approach. He took the song “Right or Wrong,” which had been recorded by Emmett Miller in the 1920s and Bob Wills in the 1930s, and in 1984 made it a number-one hit. Though it wasn’t fashionable among most country singers at the time, Strait insisted on dressing the way he had growing up: blue jeans, a big belt buckle, a pressed button-down shirt, and a clean Stetson cowboy hat.
Strait would go on to record sixty number-one singles—more than any other artist in any musical genre.
His first album, Strait Country, sold a million copies. So did every other album he released for the rest of the century. He would ultimately record sixty number-one singles—more than any other artist in any musical category.
The title of George Strait’s first album says it all about his sound.
Strait’s sound—and his clean-cut cowboy look—would affect a whole new crop of country stars. “I was going to the store with my dad and I remember coming out of Turtle Creek, up there where I was going to take a left by the blue church, heading north to Snyder’s IGA,” said Garth Brooks. “And Dad had the radio on and this lady said, ‘Here’s a new kid from Texas and I think you’re going to like his sound.’ And it was George Strait. And it was ‘Unwound.’ There’s something about the beat; something about that fiddle lick; and then that whole first opening line, when George opens his mouth, you just, there you are. And that’s what happened to me. And it was that day, I looked and said, ‘That’s what I want to be.’ ”
Meanwhile, in Charlotte, North Carolina, Randy Travis had barely survived a troubled youth—drugs, alcohol, scrapes with the police—when “Lib” Hatcher, the manager of a local club where he was singing, intervened and promised authorities she would take responsibility for keeping him out of trouble.
Hatcher brought him to Nashville, where Travis worked as a short-order cook while she took demo tapes to producers up and down Music Row. They admired his deep baritone voice, but thought it had too much twang in it and uniformly turned him down. Finally, after rejecting him twice, one label relented. To everyone’s surprise, his debut album in 1986, Storms of Life, ended up selling three million copies. Travis would sell thirteen million records by the end of the 1980s—and marry Hatcher in 1990. “Randy helped get the rudder back under country music,” said record producer Allen Reynolds, “because he was so pure country and the audience embraced him, a big audience. And that was evidence enough for me that the audience out there was bigger than people thought.”
Because of the way I talk and the way I sing, I can’t cross over that much. It’s a big old bar that comes up; the barriers do come up. My accent has been with me forever. And I’m very proud of my Oklahoma twang. Why would I get rid of it? God gave it to me.
REBA MCENTIRE
Record executives thought Randy Travis had too much twang in his voice—until his albums started selling in the millions.
Reba McEntire, with her brother Pake, on the family ranch in Oklahoma
The Singing McEntires, with Reba at the microphone
Reba McEntire grew up on an eight-thousand-acre cattle ranch near Kiowa, Oklahoma. Her father, a three-time world-champion calf roper, taught his four children to work hard and love horses. Her mother, who had an excellent voice, taught them to harmonize and love music.
By high school, Reba was performing with a brother and sister as the Singing McEntires—and competing in rodeos as a barrel racer. When she sang the national anthem at the National Finals Rodeo in 1974, her powerful voice prompted an invitation to Nashville, where she signed a recording contract and released several albums.
Reba competing in a rodeo
But as the years went by, she grew dissatisfied with the way her label tried to mold her into a Countrypolitan-style artist. “Of course, me, being a strong-willed third child out of four kids, and a redhead, I had my own opinion of how things would be done,” McEntire said. “And then when they’d say, ‘Well, you can’t do it that way,’ I’d just kind of sit back and bide my time. Later on, I got to do it my way.”
In 1984, a new label finally listened to her. “I said I would really like things more country,” she remembered. “I don’t want orchestra and violins. I want a steel guitar and a fiddle. I wanted to help to bring country music back to more traditional. That was really something that I loved: George Strait, Ricky Skaggs, Randy Travis, all in that era. That started me having more control of the songs that I recorded.”
McEntire’s songs touched on themes that women across America were facing, and she attracted legions of fans.
When she finally took control of what songs she would record, McEntire’s career took off.
McEntire’s instincts proved to be right. Just as Loretta Lynn had done in the 1960s, many of her hits touched on issues women all over America were facing: dealing with a troubled marriage in “Somebody Should Leave” and “Whoever’s in New England,” or deciding to finish their education after starting a family in “Is There Life Out There.” “I would be doing that song onstage and women would stand up in the audience, hold up their diploma,” she said. “They’d write me letters saying, ‘I didn’t get to go to college’ or ‘I didn’t get my high school diploma.’ ‘And so when the kids got out of the house, I went back and got my GED,’ or ‘I went back to college and got my degree there.’ And they said, ‘That song inspired me to do that.’ ”
By 1988, McEntire took even firmer control over her career. She formed an entertainment company that handled song publishing, concert booking, publicity, and recording facilities. But after a concert one night in San Diego in 1991, eight members of McEntire’s band perished in an airplane accident. For the tight-knit country music community in Nashville, it was the biggest tragedy since Patsy Cline and three others were killed in a plane crash in 1963, after a concert in which Cline had performed “Sweet Dreams,” a song she had recently recorded but not yet released. “Sweet Dreams” was the last song McEntire had sung that night in San Diego.
In the 1980s and ’90s, Reba McEntire would have twenty-two number-one singles and sell 33.5 million albums; be the first artist to be chosen the Country Music Association’s Female Vocalist of the Year four years in row; appear in movies, television shows, and on Broadway—and become the most successful female country artist of her era.
“I did find my own way,” she said. “But I went back to my teachers—Dolly, Loretta, Tammy. I saw what they did to pave the way for the women in country music. It’s women standing up for themselves in all walks of life. Any job you have, women have to work twice as hard, sometimes three times as hard. That’s just the way it is in life. And you do it. You do it with a smile. But you win.”
Reba with Kenny Rodgers in the made-for-television movie The Gambler Returns
George Strait, Reba, Randy Travis—there was a little community of us. And we all sort of burst down the doors of the pop stuff that was coming out of the Urban Cowboy genre. We were so gutsy and so real. Reba was discovered singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at rodeos, okay? George was a real cowboy down in San Marcos, Texas.
We were real. We didn’t need a focus group or a marketing meeting and any of that kind of stuff. And people were hungry for that.
NAOMI JUDD
Naomi Judd, holding Ashley and hugging Wynonna in Morrill, Kentucky
Back in 1976, Naomi Judd was a divorced mother of two strong-willed daughters, Wynonna and Ashley, living in Los Angeles, when she decided to move back to her native Kentucky. “Wynonna was twelve, Ashley was eight,” she said, “and I had taken them back home to a mountaintop in Kentucky to expose them to their ancestry. I wanted to plug the kids into their incredibly rich, eighth-generation Kentucky heritage. We lived on a mountaintop, Morrill, Kentucky, very isolated. No TV or telephone. It was in that splendid solitude that I handed the twelve-year-old nemesis, I handed Wynonna a plastic string guitar. And, voila!”
Wynonna had a different perspective: “The truth is, I wasn’t into music. I was not into even being a singer. I just was bored out of my mind, living on a mountaintop with a single parent and a sister who wouldn’t leave me the heck alone. And I think the guitar became my friend because I was just so lonesome.”
Ashley (left) and big sister Wynonna, with cousin Erin at a store in Morrill where the proprietor played the banjo
While Wynonna practiced the guitar, Naomi studied nursing, and the two of them managed to ease some of their mother-daughter tensions by learning to harmonize together. “We were studying the Delmore Brothers, and they had the most tempestuous relationship,” Naomi said, “and it occurred to me, if you look at the word ‘kindred,’ it’s ‘dread of kin.’ Hmm…And Lord knows, there are many times Wynonna and I couldn’t talk to each other. But we could sing together.”
After Wynonna started playing the guitar, she and Naomi often worked out their mother-daughter tensions through music.
They moved to Nashville, where they appeared on Ralph Emery’s local television show at five thirty each morning, before Naomi went to work at a hospital and Wynonna went to high school. Naomi spent her days off knocking on every door on Music Row, trying to get an audition with a record label. Finally, through the help of the family of a patient Naomi had nursed back to health, the Judds managed to get an appointment with Joe Galante, the head of RCA Records in Nashville, and two of his producers.
Joe Galante (right) and fellow RCA executive Robert Summer celebrate the label’s contract with the Judds over milkshakes.
“Wynonna and I had had a huge fight, of course, and we weren’t speaking,” according to Naomi. “It felt very much like going to the principal’s office,” Wynonna said, “and, yet, I knew that these were men who had a business that could help us, musically. I was used to singing. I just wasn’t used to being in a boardroom full of men.”
“So we go into this room,” Naomi continued, “and she was so scared and I felt very, I guess the word is guilty. I felt guilty that I had put her in that situation—I mean she was only like seventeen and a half years old, and she was terrified, just frozen. And I looked at her and I said, ‘Okay. Here you go, kiddo. We’re back on that mountaintop, and there’s a storm rolling in, and we’re sitting on the porch. Let’s just sing.’ ”
The moment was just as vivid in Joe Galante’s memory: “They came in, and Wy had braces, and Naomi was stunning, as always. And they opened up their mouths and it was…we all just kind of went, ‘Oh, my God.’ ”
Their first album, Why Not Me, released in 1984, hit the top of the charts. The Judds would be the dominant country music duo for the rest of the 1980s, until Naomi was diagnosed with hepatitis C and, after a 124-show farewell tour, retired. Wynonna went on to a successful solo career (and her little sister, Ashley, went into the movies).
“That song became our anthem, ‘Why Not Me,’ ” according to Wynonna. “My mom would say, ‘We wake up every day and we just look up and say, “Why not me?”’ I’ll never forget her saying that, because we were America’s sweethearts, in a sense, because everyone wanted us to make it. We were a mother-daughter; they knew our story. And they knew that we had nothing, and they wanted to see us make it. We were the underdog. And ‘Why Not Me’ became our anthem.”
Naomi and Wynonna Judd, Reba McEntire, Randy Travis, George Strait, and Ricky Skaggs were all part of a group that came to be called the neo-traditionalists. “I think there was just a general feeling among many people, that something needed to be done to revitalize country music and move it away from what seemed to be just an all-out, unending fusion with pop music,” said Bill C. Malone. “The new traditionalists were there because country had now gone so far into pop music and was so consumed with making a buck that we had forgotten what it was like to cry in our beer,” added Ketch Secor. “I mean, we had forgotten what it was like to go honky tonking.”
“Well,” said Ricky Skaggs, “they were calling me ‘neo-traditionalist’; and I didn’t even know what ‘neo’ meant. I had no idea.”
The Judds became the dominant country duo of the 1980s. In their farewell concert in 1991, before Wynonna went on to a successful solo career, they performed with the Jordanaires.
My earliest memory, probably at three, four years old, was [being] wedged in that great womb-like squish that you’ll get between your mother and your aunt. And we were singing at the record player—not with it, but directionally at it. It was in this little den that my aunt had at her house, and it was on a Saturday evening, and I was squished between them.
They were singing one of the popular crossover hits of the day, “Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On.” And we, literally, it was just with abandon that I sang with them. We were hollering. It was, “Send me the pillow that you dream on, so darling I can dream on it too.” That’s my first memory.
DWIGHT YOAKAM
For Dwight Yoakam (seen with his grandmother in Kentucky), music was part of his life from the beginning. His earliest memory was singing “Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On” with his mother and his aunt.
Dwight Yoakam was born in Pikeville, Kentucky, in 1956. His earliest musical influences were his mother’s collection of country music records—Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Buck Owens, Johnny Horton—and the hymns his family sang each week at the Church of Christ, a denomination that encouraged a capella gospel singing, readings from the Bible—and total abstinence from alcohol.
He started playing guitar at the age of six. The Yoakams moved to Ohio when Dwight was one, but returned constantly to his grandparents’ home in Floyd County, Kentucky. One day, at age ten, sitting on their porch, he began singing the Hank Williams song “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It,” which includes the line, “I can’t get no beer” in its chorus. “I didn’t really know what it was about, ‘I can’t buy no beer,’ ” he said. “My mother came out on that porch, and she looked at me and she said, ‘I don’t believe you need to be singing that’—because it was a guy drinking beer. And about that time, we heard across the holler—about two acres down, there was an older couple, the Hunleys—I heard her voice come across as my mother had scolded me, she said, ‘That was good. Do it again.’ She had been listening across the holler.”
Yoakam (seated at left, with guitar) with some young friends. When he sang a Hank Williams song about drinking, his mother scolded him—but a neighbor asked for more.
In high school, Yoakam was active in theater and formed a rockabilly band called Dwight and the Greasers. Then, after dropping out of college, he headed to Nashville to see if he could make it as a singer. He auditioned for the Opryland amusement park, which had live performances throughout the summer, but failed the audition and headed back home.
Yoakam, in gold lamé, with his high school rockabilly band, Dwight and the Greasers
Inspired by the early records that Emmylou Harris was recording in Los Angeles, his next stop was the West Coast. “The beacon that I navigated toward was Emmylou Harris,” he said. “I would not have become the artist I became without her first two albums, because they are the direct tissue connection, if you will, musically, to Buck Owens and Merle Haggard for my generation. I’ve often said, ‘I was born in Kentucky. I was raised in Ohio. But I grew up in California.’ ”
He worked as a short-order cook, drove delivery trucks, and formed Dwight Yoakam and Kentucky Bourbon, a bar band that played regularly at the Palomino nightclub in North Hollywood.
Yoakam preferred the hard-core honky tonk tunes he had heard in his mother’s record collection, or the Bakersfield Sound that Buck Owens and Merle Haggard had popularized in the 1960s. But it was the early 1980s, and they were constantly told to perform popular songs from the Urban Cowboy craze. They refused and got fired.
The band changed its name to Dwight Yoakam and the Babylonian Cowboys—and found work instead within LA’s post-punk rock scene, opening for groups like the Blasters, Gun Club, and Los Lobos. Young, hip audiences went wild for Yoakam and his music—songs he’d written himself, as well as one that Johnny Horton had released back in 1956, the year Dwight was born, “Honky Tonk Man.” “I started doing it with the band, and the audience responded very immediately to it,” he said. “In December of 1985, we went and recorded it, and it launched what I was about to do for the next thirty years of my life.”
According to Marty Stuart, “He brought a spark and a sass, and an interesting sensibility to country music that country music so needed at that time. He brought style back; he brought absolute swagger, a rock-and-roll swagger with absolute hard-hitting country music. He single-handedly kind of kicked it and restarted it.”
Yoakam’s first album, released in 1986, also included a song of his own, which included the line “guitars, Cadillacs, and hillbilly music.” His label told him to drop the hillbilly reference. “Warner Music, Nashville, was not prepared to have us release a song with the term ‘hillbilly music’ in it,” he said. “They were ashamed of the term ‘hillbilly.’ They thought it was derogatory. And I said, ‘Oh, no. That’s something I’m proud of.’ I’m proud of it because I watched my own family submitted to ridicule and being called hillbillies. But, generationally, I didn’t have the same open wound. So I was able to be proud of what that musical legacy was about.”
With a later band, Dwight performs at the Palomino Club in North Hollywood.
Yoakam “brought a spark and a sass” back to country music, Marty Stuart said. And as his second album’s title proclaimed, he was proud to call himself a hillbilly.
Yoakam stuck to his guns about the song’s lyrics, though the label titled the album Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc. When the album sold more than two million records, his label had no problem at all with the title of his next album: Hillbilly Deluxe. For its cover, Yoakam asked Manuel Cuevas, who had once been the head tailor at Nudie Cohn’s shop in Hollywood, to design him a jacket—just as Cuevas had done for country stars ranging from Little Jimmy Dickens to Johnny Cash, Porter Wagoner to Gram Parsons. Yoakam wanted a bolero-style jacket, similar to what his hero Buck Owens had worn. The album’s popularity prompted thousands of requests from all over the world for a jacket just like Dwight’s.
But Yoakam’s outspokenness put him at odds with some industry insiders in Nashville. He had used a string of profanities when reporters asked him about Johnny Cash being dropped by his label, and his opinions about Music Row’s Countrypolitan sound were equally harsh. “The rawness,” he complained, “has left country music.”
“Dwight Yoakam was a big influence on me,” said Darius Rucker. “He ain’t afraid to be old school, dirt country, all the time. He ain’t afraid to sing about any subject he wants to sing about. I said, to myself, ‘I’m going to make a country record someday. I want to do this.’ ”
Yoakam found a good friend in Buck Owens, who had always chafed at what he considered Nashville’s slights toward country artists from California—a tension that had prompted the creation of the Academy of Country Music on the West Coast, a rival of the Nashville-based Country Music Association. “Buck was keenly aware of being the outsider and relished in it,” Yoakam said, “although he resented that he didn’t get the respect he was due.”
Like Johnny Cash, by 1988, Owens had faded from the limelight. He was surprised to be asked to perform at the CMA awards—and reached out to his young friend, knowing that Yoakam, too, had made some enemies in Nashville. The song Owens suggested they sing together was one he had recorded back in 1972, with little success, “The Streets of Bakersfield.” Its chorus makes a blunt statement: “You don’t know me but you don’t like me. You say you care less how I feel. But how many of you that sit and judge me, ever walked the streets of Bakersfield.”
“He sent a cassette down to me, and I started playing it in the car,” Yoakam recalled, “and I thought, ‘They’re going to tar and feather us. They’re going to run us out of town on a rail.’ I said, ‘Buck, honestly, I don’t think this is a good idea, I just don’t think it’s smart.’ And he said, ‘Now, Dwight, you just, you leave it to old Buck. They’re going to like that we came and sang’:
So, we went down there, against my better judgment, but Buck was right. The larger theme, which addresses the displaced from anywhere, which belies time and place, but has to do with the universal that we all feel, going back to those that came on the Mayflower to now, of being “less than”—that’s what “The Streets of Bakersfield” was about.
And I realized at that moment it will be cheered by people who are the outcasts, the outsiders in every culture. And when Pete Anderson and I decided to record our version of it, that Buck came and sang on, we added Flaco Jiménez playing the Tex-Mex California border culture accordion, because I thought, “That’s also part of displaced groups of disparate people, from the white Okies from the Dust Bowl to the migrant workers of those same fields around Bakersfield by the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.” It was a marriage of that that Buck just had a sense of, because of his own outsider credentials.
When it was released, the Dwight Yoakam–Buck Owens duet of “Streets of Bakersfield” gave Owens his first number-one single in sixteen years and briefly revived his career. He went back on tour for a while and started releasing his own albums again. Dwight Yoakam, he said, “should have been one of my sons.”
Yoakam, Buck Owens said, “should have been one of my sons.” Their duet of “The Streets of Bakersfield,” which Owens had first recorded back in 1972, provided Buck with his first number-one hit in sixteen years.
Darius Rucker was in the rock band Hootie & the Blowfish at the time, and a fan of Yoakam’s music, which prompted him to buy a Buck Owens record: “So I go home and I put on this Buck Owens record and I was like, ‘Man, I see exactly what Dwight was listening to as a kid.’ There’s a chain you can see from here to here to here—Jimmie Rodgers to Buck Owens to Dwight Yoakam. You see that chain, and I love it.”
When he recorded “The Streets of Bakersfield,” Yoakam invited Flaco Jiménez to add a Mexican-American sound with his accordion.
That chain of connection runs throughout American music, jazz musician and composer Wynton Marsalis said:
Everybody has an ethnic heritage of some sort. It’s more integrated than we think. But we have a human heritage that’s much more fundamental and greater. There are things that are a part of the landscape of human life that we all deal with: the joy of birth, the sorrow of death, a broken heart, jealousy, greed, envy, anger. Music, because it is the art of the invisible, it gets inside of that and it does not get inside of it less for you than it does for me.
I think a lot of our music is the same. If you just deal with the church music, “I let God down. I need to go do this to find redemption.” What else are they talking about? “Man, look what I did to my old lady.” Or, “Oh, boy, look at my old lady, what she did to me. Damn.”
Now, it’s coming out in different forms, but the root of it is that. And if you can tell those stories that way, then you are Patsy Cline. Hank Williams, he had that thing. You hear that cry and that yearning in it.
There’s a truth in the music. And it’s too bad that we, as a culture, have not been able to address that truth. That’s the shame of it. And not letting that truth be our truth.
The rise of the new traditionalists helped resuscitate the sales of country music records, which in 1984 had dipped to $393 million, its low point for the decade, before starting to climb back up. But country artists of all ages—and all styles—were also contributing to the rebound.
Willie Nelson was still on the road and still hosting his annual Fourth of July picnics. Now he added another outdoor extravaganza: Farm Aid, an outdoor concert, organized with Neil Young and John Mellencamp, to raise money to help the nation’s embattled family farmers. Nelson’s guests were as eclectic as his musical tastes—from young rockers to some of his older friends in country music. Eighty thousand people attended the first Farm Aid concert in 1985, which raised $9 million. They would still be holding the annual event more than thirty years later.
Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt, and Emmylou Harris released Trio—and asked Manuel Cuevas to design Nudie suits for them to wear on the album’s cover.
In 1987, Merle Haggard had his thirty-fourth number-one single with a song he had written, “Twinkle, Twinkle Lucky Star.” That same year, Dolly Parton released an album with Emmylou Harris and Linda Ronstadt, which included a Jimmie Rodgers song, as well as ones Parton had written. It won two Grammy Awards and sold more than four million copies. For the album cover, Manuel Cuevas designed special embroidered cowgirl outfits for each of them.
After Rosanne Cash’s album King’s Record Shop went gold, her husband and producer, Rodney Crowell, came out with his own album that did the same—and included an unprecedented five number-one singles.
With his rocking party song “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight,” Hank Williams Jr. was bigger than ever—the hell-raising host who welcomed millions of television viewers to Monday-night football every week and the artist with an unbroken stream of gold or platinum albums over the course of thirteen years. In 1989, he came across a previously unissued recording of his famous father singing “There’s a Tear in My Beer.” Williams overdubbed himself singing along—and, thirty-six years after Hank Senior’s death, created a music video that made it appear as if they were performing together at last. The Grammys gave the father-and-son duet its award for best vocal collaboration.
With his song “All My Rowdy Friends Are Coming Over Tonight,” Hank Williams Jr. welcomed football fans across the nation on television every Monday night.
Regardless of whether it was new traditionalists or old traditionalists, country-rock or Countrypolitan, all of it was good for Music City, according to Joe Galante:
We were making music at that point, reaching lots of different audiences and beginning to go around the world. So we were getting more notoriety from the companies, because we were delivering more money to them.
With that, I had the ability to take on even more from New York and take them out of the loop. We were a self-sustaining company. We made our decisions on our own; we made the calls. And that was a big defining moment. I don’t want to say we were declaring independence, but the Nashville labels were starting to be no longer satellites; we were really full-fledged offices at that point and we were profit centers.
The financial resurgence made room for other artists who were harder to categorize. Lyle Lovett, a singer-songwriter from Texas with an edgy voice and a quirky perspective, came out with albums tinged with everything from folk to honky tonk, gospel to rhythm and blues. He even released his own version of Tammy Wynette’s “Stand by Your Man.”
Nanci Griffith had been a kindergarten teacher before making a name for herself with plaintive ballads and songs she described as “folkabilly.”
In Alberta, Canada, k. d. lang adopted a persona as a punk reincarnation of Patsy Cline and began touring in fringed cowgirl dresses and singing with a voice as powerfully expressive as Cline’s. She came to Nashville, recorded an album produced by Owen Bradley, and won a Grammy singing a duet with Roy Orbison, before moving on in new musical directions.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP, LEFT Nanci Griffith, Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, and k.d. lang each brought unique sensibilities to country’s sound and look.
As a rebellious teenager, Steve Earle had dropped out of high school and claimed Townes Van Zandt as his songwriting mentor and role model. He struggled for ten years to get known, until 1986, when he emerged with a sound somewhere between country and early rock. His album Guitar Town went to number one.
We kind of all think of it as a Golden Age in country music, where everybody was welcome. You heard Nanci Griffith on the radio. You heard Steve Earle’s voice on the radio. You heard Lyle Lovett. It was like all of the fringes were welcome.
My picture of it in my mind is these big doors opening up, instead of being like the gatekeepers who were just letting a few people in. Suddenly everybody was welcome. I mean, we were country music. We didn’t know it was going to last for such a short amount of time.
KATHY MATTEA
Kathy Mattea started out with folk music, before leaving West Virginia for Nashville, where she worked as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Growing up in West Virginia, Kathy Mattea originally sang folk music and bluegrass. Her tastes broadened when she took a job as a tour guide at the Country Music Hall of Fame—and broadened again when she started earning extra money singing on demo tapes for songwriters pitching their tunes on Music Row.
Along the way, Mattea got a recording contract and ended up with Allen Reynolds, an independent producer who had learned to trust his own instincts working for many years with the iconoclastic Cowboy Jack Clement. “I always have felt that we’re all so many snowflakes,” Reynolds said, “so what you try to do as a producer is help the artist find their own uniqueness and lift that forward.”
Mattea with her producer, Allen Reynolds. His early advice to her was, “It’s the song. It’s not all the bells and whistles.”
He had decided to leave the business and sell his recording studio when he met Mattea. “I liked her mind and I liked her talent,” he said, “and I got to working with her and it ended up being very nourishing for me. Her roots were more folk music, but she wanted to be a country singer. She was very clear about that. She didn’t want to straddle the fence and be country-pop or that kind of thing. She wanted to present herself as a country singer, but brought something fresh to country music.”
Mattea remembered the first advice Reynolds gave her: “He would look at me and say, ‘It’s the song, pal. It’s the song. It’s not all the bells and whistles. It’s a good song, sung honestly, and well framed. Don’t ever forget it. When they start telling you it’s about all this other stuff, you just come back to that and you will always be okay.’ And he got that from Cowboy Jack.”
Under Reynolds’s guidance, Mattea had a string of hits, including Nanci Griffith’s “Love at the Five and Dime”; a truck driver’s love song called “Eighteen Wheels and a Dozen Roses”; and a tune written by Susanna Clark and Richard Leigh, “Come from the Heart,” whose chorus declares, “You’ve got to sing like you don’t need the money.”
Among Mattea’s hits were songs written by Nanci Griffith and Susanna Clark.
Early in her career, Mattea began performing regularly at a newly opened dinner-and-music venue five miles from downtown Nashville—an intimate space that welcomed young singers and songwriters, called the Bluebird Café. Its founder was Amy Kurland, the daughter of a classical violinist who had become one of the lead session musicians in Nashville’s recording studios.
Her original interest, Kurland said, was to be in the restaurant business, but she was dating a guitar player who suggested that she put a stage in the dining room, so he and his friends could perform. “I was just trying to keep my boyfriend happy,” she admitted, “and it wasn’t until I had been running it for a few months that I realized what I had gotten myself into. Once the Bluebird was up and running, at that point, I just followed where it took me.”
Soon, the music became more important than the menu. (Kurland focused on finger food to keep the noise of the diners down, and to encourage them to look at the performers instead of their plates.) She held auditions for aspiring songwriters and opened a weekly writers’ night for the winners to perform; then she added a special “writers in the round” format, in which four of them could sit in the middle of the audience, rather than on a stage, and exchange stories and new songs.
In 1988, a songwriter from Minnesota named Jon Vezner took the stage at the Bluebird. He and his friend Don Henry had written a song based on an event in Vezner’s life, and he decided to sing it that night in front of an audience.
Kathy Mattea was there; she was now Vezner’s wife and knew the story behind the song. His grandmother had been hospitalized and was suffering from dementia, unable to recognize visitors and not talking with anyone. Then Jon brought his grandfather into her room in a wheelchair. “She just kept looking at him and looking at him,” according to Mattea. “And she said, ‘Where’ve you been?’ And that was the last thing she said; she died days after that.”
Amy Kurland (far left) and friends at the opening of the Bluebird Café, 1982. It soon became a favorite venue for aspiring songwriters to be heard.
The song, “Where’ve You Been,” describes the couple’s lifelong love, from their courtship to their marriage to her dementia and that final moment together. Recording labels and artists throughout Nashville told Vezner what a powerful song it was, but everyone had turned it down—including his wife. “I loved it,” Mattea said, “but I was so scared because it was so personal for Jon. And it was so sad.”
Minnesota songwriter Jon Vezner performs a new song at the Bluebird. The crowd’s emotional reaction to “Where’ve You Been,” about his grandparents’ love and final moment together, persuaded his wife, Kathy Mattea, to record it.
“Around Nashville,” Amy Kurland explained, “sometimes a songwriter will write a great song, take it out to their publisher, or record label, and be told, ‘Yeah, a great song, but that’s a Bluebird song.’ In other words, it’s too long; it’s too serious; it’s too meaningful; it’s not going to fly, so to speak, on the radio. But that night, in the Bluebird, the people were weeping. And suddenly it became obvious, this is a song that can make a real impact, and it’s okay that it’s slow and it’s a little long. And it’s about death. This song can be a hit.”
“And I was sitting in the audience, I feel so lucky to have gotten to have this experience,” Mattea remembered. “You could hear audible sobs all over the room. People were like dumbstruck. They didn’t even clap at the end of it. They just stopped for like a couple of beats before they clapped. That night, at the Bluebird, when he played it, I got to see, collectively, the universal poignancy of that song. And I just became obsessed with recording it, because I felt that it needed to be heard.”
“And she knew how she wanted to record it,” Allen Reynolds said. “She wanted two bass players and a guitar player, an acoustic piano. It was that simple. Kathy just gave this great performance of the song, and all we did was try to be true to the song. We weren’t thinking about it as a single—and it certainly was not jumping to the front in the eyes of the record label as a single. And, of all things, radio [stations] began to call for that as a single, and it was a strong enough call that the record label said let’s try it. And people loved it.”
“Where’ve You Been” was declared Song of the Year by the Academy of Country Music, which named Mattea as that year’s top female vocalist; was chosen as Single of the Year by the Country Music Association; and it won two Grammy Awards—one for Jon Vezner and Don Henry for writing it; one for Kathy Mattea’s performance of it. But it would not be the only surprise hit to come out of the Bluebird that night and prove that record executives’ initial instincts could be wrong.
“Where’ve You Been” was a commercial and critical success for Mattea and Vezner (seen here with one of the awards it won) and his cowriter Don Henry.
I don’t know whether you write the song, or the song writes you. The language has been around for longer than any of us, you know, and it’s just our job to pick pieces of language up that move us and tie them together.
VINCE GILL
Like many young artists in Nashville, Vince Gill often appeared at the Bluebird.
By 1989, Vince Gill had been in Nashville for seven years, struggling to make it in country music. He had started out in bluegrass, where his high tenor voice and supreme skill on stringed instruments had made him a local star in his home state of Oklahoma, then Kentucky and California.
In Los Angeles, he switched gears to become lead singer in the country-pop group Pure Prairie League, before Rodney Crowell persuaded him to join the Cherry Bombs and back up Rosanne Cash.
On Music Row, Gill found work as a session musician and harmony vocalist while he tried to launch his solo career as a singer-songwriter.
Gill soon moved to Nashville to record his own albums, but they didn’t sell well enough to support himself and his family. He sat in on other artists’ sessions as a guitarist and harmony vocalist, kept writing songs and playing them at the Bluebird Café—and, because of his talent and easygoing nature, became well liked within Music City’s country family. George Jones affectionately called him “Sweet Pea.”
Impressed by Gill’s guitar playing, Mark Knopfler of the rock band Dire Straits asked him to leave Nashville and join the group on a world tour. “I was struggling to pay the house note at the time,” Gill said. “This would have cured everything for me, financially, and it would have been a great experience. You know, the musician in me wanted to do that so badly, because I love the way he plays and sings. But I told myself, ‘If you’re not going to believe in you, who else is? And I’m going to have to say no. I don’t want to say no, but I have to try. I think I have something to offer for this world of country music.’ ”
Working with Tony Brown, a former member of Emmylou Harris’s Hot Band and now a producer at RCA, Gill came out with an album that included a Western swing duet with fellow Oklahoman Reba McEntire and songs he had co-written with Rosanne Cash and Guy Clark. The album’s title song, “When I Call Your Name,” was one Gill had co-written with Tim DuBois.
“At the end of the day, all I’ve ever wanted out of music was to be moved,” Gill said. “All I wanted someone to do was play something that just makes me go, ‘Oh!’ I love the emotion of music. There’s something that it does to my DNA that I can’t explain. I just think that’s all it ever is, is you want to hear somebody do something that moves you.”
The album went to number one and sold two million copies. The song was named Single of the Year by the CMA and won the special praise of Roy Acuff, the aging King of Country Music.
That same year, Gill began work on another song that was even more emotional—and more personal. In his early bluegrass days, Gill had played in a band with Ricky Skaggs and Keith Whitley. Whitley was now a rising country star, married to singer Lorrie Morgan, and many people believed that the young couple would be the next George Jones and Tammy Wynette.
Vince Gill (center) backed up Rosanne Cash in California before coming to Nashville
He and George Jones became friends, and the Possum gave Gill an affectionate nickname: Sweet Pea.
Roy Acuff particularly liked Gill’s song “When I Call Your Name.”
But Whitley was an alcoholic. Sometimes his wife tied their legs together at night so he couldn’t sneak off to drink some more. On May 9, 1989, while she was performing on the road, he was discovered at home, dead from alcohol poisoning at the age of thirty-three.
Like many others in Nashville, Vince Gill was devastated by the news. In his grief, he began writing a song, “Go Rest High on That Mountain.” The first verse was “centered around Keith,” Gill said, “with the words, ‘I know your life on earth was troubled and only you can know the pain. You weren’t afraid to face the devil. You were no stranger to the rain.’ That was his song. Then I just put it down. I didn’t finish it. I felt a little uneasy about it for some reason; I don’t know why. And I never kept going.”
When Keith Whitley, a rising country star and friend of Vince Gill’s, died of alcohol poisoning, Gill began work on a new song, but put it aside.
Four years later, Gill’s brother died: “All of a sudden, I remembered that verse, and I said, my brother had that story. You know, my brother really struggled in his life. And I pulled that out and finished that song. So, in the real sense, it really is about my brother. But those first few lines were because of a friendship with Keith and admiration for him. I had written it and had no intention of recording it. Tony Brown heard it and said, ‘You’ve got to record that.’ ”
After the death of his older brother Bob (seen here holding Vince in 1958), Gill finished the song “Go Rest High on That Mountain” in his honor.
With Ricky Skaggs and country star Patty Loveless singing harmony, Gill released the song, and won another CMA award and two more Grammys. In time, “Go Rest High on That Mountain” would become a classic, joining “Amazing Grace” and “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” as a song grieving people request to hear when they’ve lost a loved one.
Nearly twenty-five years after he first started writing it, Vince Gill would be asked to sing it at George Jones’s memorial service at the Grand Ole Opry House. That day, overcome by emotion, he had trouble finishing it again.
Patty Loveless tries to comfort Gill as he struggles to perform “Go Rest High on That Mountain” at the memorial service for George Jones.
The same night that Jon Vezner sang “Where’ve You Been” in public for the first time at the Bluebird Café, another singer-songwriter also performed there. His name was Garth Brooks.
Garth Brooks performing at the Bluebird Café
Growing up in Yukon, Oklahoma, in the 1960s and ’70s, the youngest of six children, Brooks was exposed to every kind of music—the country stars like George Jones and Merle Haggard his parents liked, and the younger artists his older siblings listened to, “bands like the Eagles, guys like James Taylor,” Brooks said, “everything from Townes Van Zandt to Tom Rush, everything from Janis Joplin to Rita Coolidge and Emmylou Harris.”
He attended Oklahoma State University on a track scholarship; worked as a bouncer at a local night spot called the Tumbleweed Ballroom; and formed his own band, Santa Fe, that became a favorite at Willie’s Saloon near the campus, where he learned to play whatever the audience wanted.
In 1987, Brooks moved to Nashville and began making the rounds at publishers and record labels. He worked as the manager at a store selling cowboy boots, got paid to sing on demo tapes for other songwriters, and, like many unknown musicians at the time, played at the Bluebird whenever they would let him. Amy Kurland remembered his first audition:
He blew me and everybody else in the room away. I don’t remember the name of the song right offhand, but I do remember that it was about loving a woman, putting her up on a pedestal, and I’m thinking, “I want to be that woman.”
And then he came back and played the writers’ night, maybe a month or so later. And again, the audience was just blown away. I think it’s the first time I ever saw a standing ovation in the middle of a song—you know, end of the first chorus, and people were like going crazy.
Another time, Garth Brooks and Tony Arata and two other friends were playing In the Round one night. Nobody had a record deal; nobody had a publishing deal. They were just hanging out. And Tony played a song he had written by himself called “The Dance.” Garth always says he was the only one listening. And he said, “If I ever get a record deal, I’m going to record that song.” To which I’m sure Tony thought, “Well, I’m not going to go spend that money right now.”
By the spring of 1988, Brooks had been rejected by every record label in Music City. On May 11, he was back at the Bluebird, on the same bill with Jon Vezner. At the last minute, when one of the other singers didn’t show, Brooks was moved up to an earlier slot on the program. He began singing a song he had co-written, “If Tomorrow Never Comes.”
Sitting in the audience was Lynn Shults, an executive for Capitol Records, who had come to hear the singer who hadn’t shown up. Only a few days earlier, Shults had turned down the chance to sign Garth Brooks, but something about the performance at the Bluebird that night changed his mind.
The sheet from Brooks’s audition for songwriters’ night at the Bluebird Café.
A record executive who had previously turned Garth down heard him at the Bluebird and decided to sign him for his first album.
With a modest advance of $10,000, Brooks was assigned to a producer to create his first album. It was Allen Reynolds. Their initial session got off to a rocky start, according to Reynolds: “He was doing, I don’t remember what song, but it sounded like someone else. It didn’t sound like Garth to me, and I was questioning him about it, and he said, ‘Well, I’m trying to put a little of that George Strait thing in there.’ I just stopped everything right then, and I said, ‘Look, we’ve already got a George Strait. We don’t need another one. And what I’m trying to do is get the best Garth Brooks to step forward.’ ”
Brooks recalled the moment, too: “And he says, ‘Look, man, just be yourself. That way, if you’re yourself, there’s never been anybody else like you. And anybody that comes after you is going to be called a copycat. So just be yourself and if it doesn’t work, then you go down being true to yourself, because that’s who you have to live with the rest of your life.’ ”
For his debut album, in addition to songs he had co-written—like “If Tomorrow Never Comes” and “Much Too Young (To Feel This Damn Old)”—Brooks asked Reynolds about including “The Dance,” the song he had heard Tony Arata sing at the Bluebird writers’ night: “I said, ‘Allen, I’m worried it’s not country enough. I really am.’ And he said, ‘Look, don’t worry about what’s country and what’s not.’ He says, ‘You’re country. That’s all that matters. And I’m going to tell you this: If you don’t cut ‘The Dance,’ it will be the biggest hit you never had.’ ”
Brooks in the studio with his producer, Allen Reynolds (center), who advised him to “just be yourself”
Released in 1989, the album sold well at first, but not spectacularly—until “The Dance” came out as a single, and the sales doubled in a single month.
Garth Brooks now joined another generation of young artists who were beginning to make their mark.
Vince Gill’s When I Call Your Name was topping the charts. Alan Jackson, a lanky singer-songwriter from Georgia, who had been working in the mailroom at TNN for four years, finally got to record his own album, Here in the Real World. And a former construction worker and part-time bar singer from Houston, Clint Black, broke out on the charts with Killin’ Time.
“We were all betting on Clint Black,” said Ralph Emery, who now was a host on TNN’s popular talk show. “We thought he was more handsome and we thought his songs were just as good. And he could sing better. Garth came on and he surprised all of us, I think, with his showmanship. I began to hear about his stage shows and how different they were, how big the crowds were, and how the crowds were reacting to him.”
Garth Brooks would surpass them all. Out on the road, he could hold an audience spellbound with his sensitive and soulful ballads. But he absolutely tore them up with his rocking songs. He applied what he had learned while playing in college bars, and in watching the bands he admired growing up—Alabama, Queen, and KISS—to his stage performances.
“The first time I ever saw Garth Brooks, he was opening the show for me, I think in Davenport, Iowa, 1990,” said Reba McEntire, “and I thought he was the wildest guy on a stage I’d ever seen.” “He had a very country sound,” added Trisha Yearwood. “But what made Garth different was his show wasn’t country. He didn’t walk out there and stand in one spot. There’s nothing pop about Garth Brooks; his show is pop, but his music is ‘countrier’ than I’ll ever be.”
Clint Black and Alan Jackson were also breaking out with big hits.
His biggest crowd pleaser was “Friends in Low Places,” written by Dewayne Blackwell and Earl Bud Lee, who had asked Brooks to sing it as a demo back when he was selling cowboy boots. Now, Brooks added it to his second album, No Fences. “That’s what kind of song you want to write,” said Darius Rucker, who remembered the first time he heard it on a jukebox. “You want to write a big drinking song like that, where everybody’s in the bar singing it at the same time. Even people that don’t know it, by the second chorus, they know it.”
Propelled by the astonishing popularity of “Friends in Low Places,” Brooks’s second album sold 700,000 copies in its first ten days and reached number four on the pop charts. It would soon become the first country album to hit five million in sales.
His third album would debut at number one on the pop charts—another first for a country artist—and sell more than eight million copies. Magazines put him on their covers. Forbes called the Brooks phenomenon “Led Zeppelin meets Roy Rogers…country conquers rock.” NBC devoted a prime-time television special to him and his music.
“And he did this without ever once allowing his record label to promote his records across into other markets, like the pop market,” said Allen Reynolds. “His loyalty was to country radio and his attitude was, ‘Let them come to us. Let’s be so good at what we do that they come to us, and leave pop radio or whatever kind of radio and come listen to country.’ ” “And when they do,” Brooks added, “they’re going to get to hear Vince Gill, Alan Jackson. They’re going to hear the great ones, Strait, McEntire, Keith Whitley—I don’t know if there’s ever been a greater voice to sing country music than Keith Whitley. So that was our job, to anybody that said, ‘Hey, I didn’t know anything about country music.’ Well, come over, and while you’re here, take a look around because you’re going to be impressed.”
“It wasn’t about being hip,” Kathy Mattea said. “I think country music had kind of been self-conscious for a long time about, ‘Are we cool? Do the big people in New York accept us? Are we kind of the unwanted stepchild? Are we kind of the afterthought?’ And, all of a sudden, this guy is selling out the stadiums and doing specials, and blowing the tops off record sales across the board. And he’s one of us.”
In 1993, Brooks announced that he would be doing a concert at Texas Stadium. All 65,675 seats were sold out within ninety-two minutes, beating a previous record held by Paul McCartney. A second show was added—and sold out in the same time. So did a third. Angered when he heard about the extravagant prices being charged by scalpers, Brooks announced a fourth concert—with free tickets.
His wild energy onstage, particularly with songs like “Friends in Low Places,” helped propel Brooks to a new level of country stardom—and onto the cover of magazines like Forbes.
The four concerts were like nothing any country star had ever delivered. In front of the massive crowd, preparing for the biggest stunt he had ever attempted—being lifted by a wire and ascending over the audience, all the way to the high seats at the back of the stadium—he remembered the first Queen concert he attended, when he was seventeen:
I’m standing in the thirteenth row, on my chair. And all I want that whole night is for Freddie Mercury to look at me for three seconds so I can go, “Thank you, dude. Thank you. It’s what I listen to before I play football; it’s what I listen to when I’m down. Thank you. Thank you.”
And it was funny, you start to get to do this for a living, you’re the guy that gets to do it for a living, and now all I do is scan the audience, every night, for that three seconds, to go, “Thank you. Thank you.” Coolest gig ever.
I’ve got to tell you, flying over a crowd at Texas Stadium, singing, I’d love to tell you, “Oh, it was nothing.” It scared me to death. But it was such a rush, so much fun. You could see every face as they passed underneath your boots. And then you saw all the people out there. And then the last night, I told the guy that was operating, the Foy flyer guys, I said, “How close you want to get?” And it was that night, I felt someone clap the boot on the very top row. I said, “A little too close for me.” But that’s great.
At Texas Stadium, Brooks broke sales records with four concerts—and then astonished the crowds by being launched toward the upper tiers.
Garth refused to have his records promoted on anything but country stations, where, he said, listeners would also hear “the great ones,” like George Strait. At Fan Fair he posed with a cardboard cutout of his hero.
Starting in 1991, Billboard had instituted a new way of gauging a record’s success. Instead of taking a telephone poll of record store clerks, it now relied on SoundScan, which used bar codes to keep track of actual sales. What the new system proved was that Garth Brooks and his contemporaries were doing even better than anyone had imagined. “If you were making country music records in the ’90s, you were selling records,” said Trisha Yearwood. “And it was largely due to Garth.”
Between 1989 and 1991, sales of country music had doubled, from $460 million to nearly $1 billion; then, between 1991 and 1994, they doubled again. In 1995 alone, twenty-seven country albums sold more than a million copies and went platinum. The number of radio stations playing country music had jumped from 1,800 to 2,600—and with seventy million listeners, it had become the biggest format on the airwaves.
“It was just unbelievable,” producer Tony Brown said. “Every record label was selling millions of records. My first George Strait record I produced, Pure Country [1992], sold six million records. Up to that point, he had only sold a million. Then my first record on Wynonna Judd sold six million records. And then Garth Brooks was selling ten, fifteen, twenty million, every record. It just changed the whole landscape of what the expectations were of Nashville.”
Marty Stuart, now working with Tony Brown at his new label, had a string of gold records, proudly embracing a flamboyant hillbilly image and honky tonk sound. So did his good friend Travis Tritt. Neither of them conformed to the clean-cut cowboy look projected by George Strait, Alan Jackson, Clint Black, and Garth Brooks—the so-called “hat acts.” Stuart and Tritt announced a “No Hats” tour of the United States. It was a huge success. “Tradition was still alive, but the sky was the limit,” Stuart said. “Everybody was buying tractors and trailers and big sound systems, and we were putting on stadium shows. And it was about how big can you get it; how loud can you get it; and how many people can you get to come see you.”
Marty Stuart (right) and Travis Tritt on their hugely successful “No Hats” tour
From Canada, Shania Twain burst onto the scene with a sassy persona and performance style that filled big arenas and sold records in the tens of millions, as she edged her version of country music further toward pop and rock.
Shania Twain, who sold more records than any previous woman country star
Mary Chapin Carpenter, from Princeton, New Jersey, was more folk oriented, but still had five platinum albums.
Mary Chapin Carpenter, whose songs were more folk oriented but had five platinum albums
I was a teenager, just graduated from high school, when Reba really hit it big. She was the first kind of, I would say, contemporary artist for me. I had grown up on the classic women of country. I listened to Patsy; I listened to Loretta; I listened to Tammy Wynette.
When I heard Reba, it was kind of, okay, this is the next step for me. If Loretta and Tammy opened the door for Reba, Reba opened the door for me.
TRISHA YEARWOOD
Trisha Yearwood treasured the autograph she got from Reba McEntire, who “opened the door for me.”
When Trisha Yearwood arrived in Nashville in 1985 and entered Belmont College, it was the farthest she had ever been from home: the small town of Monticello, Georgia, only three hundred miles away.
As a college student at Nashville’s Belmont College, Yearwood played in a bar band. Merle Haggard’s “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink” was a favorite number.
She took a part-time job as a receptionist at a record label; led tours of the old RCA Studio B, which was now considered a part of Music Row history; and started singing in a student bar band. (A Merle Haggard song, “I Think I’ll Just Stay Here and Drink,” became one of her favorite numbers.) After graduation from Belmont, she got work singing on demo tapes for ten to twenty dollars a song. For duet demos, she had been put together with a young Garth Brooks, before his career took off.
When Yearwood got her own record deal, Brooks invited her to be the opening act on one of his early tours as she promoted her first album. Its signature song, “She’s in Love With the Boy,” hit number one on the country charts, and she became the first female country singer to have a debut album sell more than a million copies. (Fourteen years later, Yearwood and Brooks would marry.)
Before either one became a star, Trisha and Garth Brooks sang duets on demo tapes for ten to twenty dollars a song. He then helped launch her career by inviting her to be an opening act on his tours. More than a decade later, the two got married.
For the record labels, the expectations that defined success in country music had ballooned. But the expectations of country fans were unchanged: Don’t get above your raisin’.
“Minnie Pearl said, ‘Love them, and they’ll love you back.’ That was always her advice about country music fans,” said Dierks Bentley. “These fans are not just investing in a song. They’re investing in you as a person. It all goes back to the songs. They get woven into the fabric of people’s lives, and they associate you with that song. You really feel like you know them, even if you’ve never met them before.”
“Part of the journey of being a country music star, you go talk to your fans,” said Kathy Mattea:
You sign autographs. You look them in the eye, and when you look those people in the eye, they are you and you are them. There is no being above.
People come through and they’re like, “This song changed my life.” “I had this song sung in my wedding.” “My grandmother died the same way.”
There was a moment, where I was signing autographs, and this woman just walked up to me on the line and she just looked at me. And I looked at her and she didn’t say a word and she just started crying, tears just came down her face. And I just looked at her and she looked at me, and we just hugged.
And her husband just leaned down and he grabbed her arm, [and] when they were walking away, he said, “She buried her mom this morning, but she really wanted to come and see you tonight.” And, I mean, that’s it, you know? That’s it. That’s country music.
For decades, the Country Music Association had hosted Fan Fair, a chance for people to hear some live music, but most of all meet their favorite stars and get their autograph. Five thousand fans showed up for the first one, in 1972, held in Nashville’s Municipal Auditorium; by the mid-1990s, it was an outdoor event with a crowd of 24,000.
At the peak of his unprecedented popularity, Garth Brooks showed up—not to play, but to sign. “He went there unannounced,” Yearwood remembered. “He drove in his truck. He got out of his truck and he went and stood under a tent somewhere, not a Garth Brooks booth, and just stood there. And I think somebody said, ‘Oh, my gosh, there’s Garth Brooks.’ And it started. And people lined up.”
Minnie Pearl and Kathy Mattea carry on a country music tradition connecting with the fans.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP, LEFT Hawkshaw Hawkins, Johnny Cash, Eddy Arnold, Charley Pride, Brenda Lee, Little Jimmy Dickens sign autographs.
FROM TOP LEFT Merle Haggard, Waylon Jennings, Dolly Parton (with Porter Wagoner), June Carter, Emmylou Harris, Loretta Lynn with their fans
Kathy Mattea remembered that day, too: “Usually you have a window and everyone knows when it is. And so that people don’t get disappointed, you have someone stand at the end of the line and say, ‘Look, this is the last person, we’re not going to take any more.’ But Garth just didn’t stop. He just decided he was going to sign until everybody was done.”
He stayed at it for more than twenty hours.
Garth Brooks carries on the tradition—for more than twenty hours at Fan Fair.
Record labels have a terrible tendency to chase whatever is the current hit. I have always said that marketing men would clone today’s number one forever, without a sense of guilt, if they could get away with it, just because it would eliminate risk.
ALLEN REYNOLDS
Country music may have been bigger than ever, but by the mid-1990s, record sales were concentrated on a smaller and smaller number of new releases. Executives at the labels in Nashville were under increasing pressure to only produce albums that sold in the millions, at the expense of experimenting with new artists and new sounds and giving them the opportunity to find an audience over time.
By the 1990s, sales were soaring, but the Mother Church of Country Music was shuttered and decaying. Many older, established artists felt that they were being neglected and forgotten.
“Expectations became part of the creative decision making,” according to Rodney Crowell. “That means that the record companies’ bottom line had risen to such great heights with the likes of Garth Brooks and Shania Twain that their shareholders were never going to be happy if they were out trying to develop a new act who sold one-fifth, or one-one-hundredth of what those artists sold. It just wasn’t going to happen.”
Then, a change in federal law allowed large corporations to consolidate their ownership of radio stations across the nation. Decisions on which songs would be broadcast were being made by fewer people. Playlists got shorter. It became even harder for new, unconventional artists to break in, and harder for many established artists to hold on.
“The days of an artist dropping in to see a disc jockey, like was the case with Loretta Lynn, those days are virtually gone,” said Eddie Stubbs of WSM. “And now,” Allen Reynolds added, “instead of having a lot of possibilities to get to try your record out and see if the public will respond, you’re going through the eye of the needle, one person who is programming for thirteen, fourteen hundred stations and his say-so is the say-so. And if he says no, that’s it.”
Many artists found themselves in a musical no-man’s land, seemingly shut out from being heard. Emmylou Harris recalled being at a radio station to talk about a new album, when the news was announced that Loretta Lynn was to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame: “And I said, ‘Oh, this is so fantastic. Let’s play something by Loretta Lynn.’ And he said, ‘Oh, we can’t do that, because she’s not on our playlist.’ ”
But some independent stations still existed and continued featuring alternative country artists, as well as the classics. To prove that it and other roots music still had an audience, a new term had to be invented, with its own chart—and later, its own awards. It was called Americana.
No one was more supportive of the movement than Emmylou Harris. Twenty years earlier, when she became a convert to country music, her best-selling albums, featuring songs by older stars, had shone a spotlight on what was being overlooked. “Every so often,” Johnny Cash told a reporter, “country has to get back to Emmylou Harris.”
“She made people remember Buck Owens,” Vince Gill said. “She made people remember Merle Haggard, and made people remember Kitty Wells and the Louvin Brothers. Every now and then, there’s someone that’s going to be the great conduit to connect you back to where we come from.”
By the 1990s, Harris decided to do an all-acoustic album. To record it, she chose the Ryman Auditorium, which had been closed since the early 1970s. “It was just an old building where the Grand Ole Opry used to be, and with an old history that was tired,” Marty Stuart said. “The windows were broken out, and pigeons were flying around, and they conducted two-dollar tours.”
When Emmylou Harris and the Nash Ramblers recorded an all-acoustic live album at the Ryman, it boosted a campaign to renovate the historic structure to its old glory.
When Harris and her band recorded their live album at the decaying Ryman, the crowd that was permitted to witness it was restricted—for safety reasons—to only two hundred people, all gathered near the stage to make it appear that the audience was much larger.
The only guest she invited to perform with her was Bill Monroe, the aging patriarch of bluegrass, who had first appeared at the Ryman back in 1939 and now danced with Emmylou when he came onstage. “For country music, perhaps it’s a reminder of where we all came from, and not to forget that,” Harris said. “Not to just constantly be recycling that and trying to go back, because you can’t go back. Every generation is different. But we mustn’t forget where we came from, because it’s going to make the music that we make in the future better.”
Emmylou and Bill Monroe sing and dance at the Opry.
The event—and the album that it produced, At the Ryman—reminded people of the building’s incomparable acoustics, as well as its place in music history. Harris and others joined a campaign to save the Ryman from destruction, and the owners of WSM and the Grand Ole Opry invested more than $8 million to completely restore it. The Mother Church of Country Music reopened as a performance venue on June 3, 1994, with Little Jimmy Dickens, Porter Wagoner, and Marty Stuart cutting the ribbon.
The next year, when the Grand Ole Opry celebrated its seventieth birthday, two of the show’s favorite stars were no longer there. Roy Acuff, who had joined the cast in 1938, had died. Minnie Pearl had delivered the news from Grinder’s Switch every Saturday night since 1940, but she was now incapacitated by a stroke and would pass on a few months later.
But Bill Monroe, at age eighty-four, showed up. In tribute to him, more than fifty fiddlers performed his song “Uncle Pen,” and Vince Gill sang Monroe’s signature tune, “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Monroe and Emmylou Harris danced again for the crowd. Then a seven-foot statue of the Father of Bluegrass was unveiled.
By now, Monroe had put aside the bitter feuds that had splintered bluegrass music for so long. He and Lester Flatt had made amends with each other. And when Carter Stanley had died, Monroe attended the funeral and sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” in his honor.
But Monroe’s health began failing, and he spent most of his time alone at his farm. Marty Stuart paid a visit to take photographs of his mentor: “I loved that old man. And toward the end of his life, I thought, ‘I want to go hang out with him one more time and just spend the afternoon with him.’ And at the end of it all, we were standing by his barn, just me and him, playing mandolins. We played a couple of tunes together, and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, ‘You learned pretty good, boy. You learned pretty good.’ ”
As Monroe faded even more, Ricky Skaggs made pilgrimages to his bedside: “I could tell, in his last few days, that he was really concerned about where bluegrass was going, what was going to happen to it, where’s it going to end up. And I just said, ‘Bill, listen, this music is bigger than you. You got to hear it first. You got to play it first. And you got to sow great seeds with this music. I’m part of your seed. Marty’s part of your seed. Vince is part of your seed. All of us that love bluegrass are part of your seed. It’s never going to die. So you can go home and rest in peace. Don’t worry about where the music’s going. We’re going to take care of it. Just be free.’ I made a promise to him that I would play this music all the days of my life. And I would always tell people where it came from.”
During Bill Monroe’s final days, Marty Stuart brought his camera to Monroe’s farm, where they talked and played music together.
After Monroe died on September 9, 1996, Ricky Skaggs, Marty Stuart, and Vince Gill were among the performers at his funeral, held at the newly restored Mother Church of Country Music. Ralph Stanley was there, too, and sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” over Monroe’s casket, just as Monroe had done for Stanley’s brother.
Patty Loveless, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, and Marty Stuart perform at Bill Monroe’s funeral, held at the renovated Ryman Auditorium. Both Stuart and Skaggs would refocus their careers in his memory. “I left charts behind,” Stuart said, “and I simply followed my heart.”
In the wake of Monroe’s death, both Ricky Skaggs and Marty Stuart would refocus their careers. “I just kept hearing this deep calling-unto, deep thing in me,” Skaggs said. “And it was like, ‘simple life, simple life, simple life.’ I can take these acoustic instruments, I don’t have to have microphones. I don’t have to have amps. If we wanted to pull off the road and go to a little schoolhouse, we could go play and entertain the kids. Back into the kitchen, that’s just where I wanted to take it. I wanted to take it back to the front porch. And so that’s what I did.”
Stuart had been touring constantly, playing big venues and chasing record sales; his marriage to Johnny Cash’s daughter had ended in divorce. “I had become a success machine,” Stuart said. “I simply wanted success. I wanted to be accepted, and my heart got left behind. And one day I was riding through the woods and I was noticing barns and cows and tractors, and clothes blowing on the line, and the smell of the country, and I listened to the kind of music I was making, and it did not line up with what I was looking at. And then I went back and started listening to the Carter Family, and I listened to Bill Monroe, and Tammy Wynette, and George Jones, and Hank Williams. And I started to cry. My heart came back to life, and I went, ‘I think I know what I need to do: Go back to myself and start again, and take it up again.’ I left charts behind. I left demographics behind. And I simply followed my heart.”
A year later, Stuart married country star Connie Smith—just as he had predicted he would do when he was eleven years old and got her autograph at the Choctaw Indian Fair in Mississippi.
Stuart and his wife Connie Smith. He had taken her picture and gotten her autograph when he was eleven.
Take every piece of American music, every piece of that stream, all those tributaries that go into that pool of whatever we call it, country music, American music—from blues, gospel, bluegrass, rock and roll—that was all in John. I mean it was all in him.
EMMYLOU HARRIS
I was always so averse to using my dad or appearing to use my dad, or trading on my dad in any way. I so wanted to be my own agent, as he always was.
ROSANNE CASH
Rosanne Cash was proud of her album Interiors, but label executives said they couldn’t promote it. “Stay true to yourself,” her father said. She left Nashville for New York City.
As the 1990s began, Rosanne Cash was coming off a string of number-one singles and successful albums. But her relationship with Nashville was as complicated as the one she had with her famous father, who had been absent for much of her and her sisters’ childhood. “I was kind of famous, when I was in Nashville, for not touring,” she said. “I grew up thinking that becoming famous was about the worst thing that could happen to you, because then you had to go on the road. And if you went on the road, you got divorced and you didn’t see your kids and you got on drugs. And everything fell apart. My mother thought that, too, so it was something kind of ingrained in us, ‘This is not a good way to live.’ ”
As he aged, Cash had taken to writing poignant letters to his daughters, asking them to forgive him for his many absences. But he and Rosanne shared the same stubborn willingness to take artistic risks. He had recorded a prison album over his label’s reluctance and, in keeping a promise he had made to his mother after his brother’s death, continually released gospel albums—ten of them by now—even if they didn’t sell. Now it was Rosanne’s turn.
Following the phenomenal success of King’s Record Shop, she told her label she wanted to produce a different kind of album—all of the songs to be written by her, “very acoustic, really rooted, really pristine.” She was proud of the finished product, Interiors, but, she said, the executives at Columbia told her “there’s nothing here we can work with; there’s nothing we can send to the radio on this record.” When she saw that they weren’t pushing it, “I was just devastated,” she said, “and I called my dad and I said, ‘What do I do?’ He said, ‘Screw ’em, do what you want. Stay true to yourself.’ Eventually I moved to New York. I didn’t have any more hits. But I was happy. I was writing my own songs.”
Rosanne was in New York City when her father came to town for a concert. He asked her if she’d join him onstage for a song—one he had co-written and recorded back in 1958: “I Still Miss Someone.” She refused at first:
I was mad at him about something. Some childhood transgression he had committed, or something I was going through, something he hadn’t done. I don’t even remember what it was. And I very petulantly said, “No, I don’t think I will.” Can you imagine? And he said, “Okay.”
And he turned and he walked out of the room. And, as he walked out, I looked at his back and I thought of the thousands of times I had seen his back from sitting in the wings offstage, and seen his back with the light coming down on him and his guitar. And there’s something about his back—I mean, that image of his back is as powerful to me, about my dad, as anything.
So, I said, “Dad, I’ll do it.” That night, he called me out and we sang “I Still Miss Someone” together. It’s one of his most beautiful ballads. And everything got dissolved; everything got fixed, just looking at him.
He worked out all of his problems onstage. That’s where he took his best self; that’s where he took all of his anguish and fears and griefs, and he worked them out with an audience. That’s just who he was. And got purified by the end of the night. So that happened with me that night with him. That just all got fixed.
Johnny Cash’s own career seemed to have bottomed out. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1992, at age fifty-nine, but his albums on his new label still sold poorly. Like many fading country stars, he and June Carter found themselves encamped in the tourist town of Branson, Missouri, where a group of theaters had sprouted up and turned the old business model of live performances on its head: it was the audience who showed up in big buses; the musicians stayed in one place and gave two or three shows a day.
His career fading, Johnny Cash still toured, though his crowds were getting smaller.
“It’s not what I wanted to do with my life,” Cash said. “I wanted to…do something new.” Some days, he looked out at the 2,500-seat theater and fewer than two hundred people were in the seats.
Then, in 1993, a young producer named Rick Rubin—who had helped popularize hip-hop music, and recorded successful rap, punk, and heavy metal artists—approached Cash about doing an album for his label, American Recordings. Many of Cash’s friends and family—with memories of “The Chicken in Black” fiasco in mind—were against it, afraid the collaboration would be damaging to his already faltering career. He went ahead anyway.
Cash and Rubin began their collaboration, according to John Carter Cash, with Rubin saying, “Let’s just think about the song. Let’s think about where your heart is.” “And so, they began to focus on material,” John said. “And they put together this collection of songs that was very diverse, but everything was honestly connected with my father and who he was as a person: songs of faith; songs of my dad’s love for my mother; songs of his humor; songs of the elemental darkness within him.”
Released in the spring of 1994, American Recordings won rave reviews for its sparse arrangements, Cash’s still-commanding voice, and his song choices—from a traditional cowboy tune to compositions by Tom Waits, Leonard Cohen, and Kris Kristofferson, and the nearly century-old murder ballad “Delia’s Gone.” The Los Angeles Times called it a “milestone work” that “peer[s] into the dark corners of the American soul.” Rolling Stone said it was “at once monumental and viscerally intimate, fiercely true to the legend of Johnny Cash and entirely contemporary.”
“He came back to the simplicity not only of his roots, but of the roots of country music, and proved that you could have this simple sound, this pure sound of a voice and a guitar,” said John Carter Cash. “He was casting back and looking upon the sound of the Carter Family. He was remembering what it sounded like to stand in front of a Victrola and hear Jimmie Rodgers. It was all from him going back to his roots. It was all from him just stepping up there with a guitar and saying, ‘This is me. This is what I do.’ ”
With producer Rick Rubin, Cash went back to the studio with just his guitar and remarkable voice to record a selection of songs Cash personally selected. “Let’s think about where your heart is,” Rubin told him. The album won a Grammy in the folk category.
Rosanne Cash noted a change in her father: “Everything was new again. He was back. It was like the light shined on him again. And he was so grateful and relieved that somebody saw his essence and who he was, and just wanted to bring that out, just wanted him to be Johnny Cash again.”
Most country radio stations ignored the album, claiming it didn’t fit their playlist. But it sold 150,000 copies—more than any album of his since 1971—and won Cash a Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album. Young audiences began turning out to hear him at rock clubs and auditoriums. At an outdoor concert in England, where he shared billing with rock star Peter Gabriel, an interviewer asked him, “How does it feel to be cool again?” “It feels,” he answered, “like no time has passed.”
Two years later, in 1996, Cash and Rubin came out with the equally successful Unchained, with Marty Stuart and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers as backup musicians. When it won a Grammy for Best Country Album, Rubin took out a full-page ad in Billboard, using a photograph that had been taken backstage in 1969 at Cash’s San Quentin concert of him defiantly giving the middle finger to the camera. “American Recordings and Johnny Cash,” the ad said, “would like to acknowledge the Nashville music establishment and country radio for your support.” Willie Nelson put it on the wall of his tour bus. “John,” he told a reporter, “speaks for all of us.”
From left, Tom Petty, Cash, Rick Rubin, and Marty Stuart working on Unchained, the second in a series of American Recordings. It won a Grammy as Best Country Album.
Over the next several years, even as his health deteriorated and he could no longer make live appearances, Cash would record three more albums with Rick Rubin, with an equally wide range of songs: from ones Cash had written to those by Bono, Sting, and Lennon and McCartney, as well as Marty Robbins, Hank Williams, and the Carter Family.
One of the albums, The Man Comes Around, opened with a song that Cash had recently written, based on passages from the Bible’s Book of Revelation. But the track that got the most attention was “Hurt,” written by Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails. The album would eventually sell nearly two million copies, earn Cash yet another Grammy—and, as a sign that the country music industry wanted him back as one of their own, won the CMA’s award for Album of the Year.
Shortly after the album’s release, on May 15, 2003, June Carter Cash died. Johnny hung on for four months without her. “In the last few months of his life, it seems like I sang a lot of Carter Family songs to him,” Rosanne Cash remembered. “It comforted him. I read the Psalms to him, and I read some poetry to him. The last song he heard was ‘The Winding Stream.’ That’s what I sang to him when he was dying. It was June’s favorite Carter Family song, and I just liked to sing it, and he liked to hear me sing it. The Carter Family songs on the radio when he was a kid, that pulled him forward; and Carter Family songs sent him out, sent him away.” He died on September 12, 2003.
After June died, Cash went back to perform at the Carter Fold in Virginia, where she had been born and raised. Their son, John Carter Cash, helps his father tune his guitar.
At his funeral, people sang “Will the Circle Be Unbroken”—and then Johnny Cash was buried next to June Carter Cash in the Memory Gardens cemetery near their home in Hendersonville, Tennessee. Later, a memorial tribute concert was staged at the Ryman Auditorium, with performances by a grand array of stars. It began, as his mother would have liked, with the Fisk Jubilee Singers doing a gospel song. Then Rosanne stepped to the microphone and sang “I Still Miss Someone”—this time, on her own.
In his last days, Rosanne Cash read the Bible and sang songs to her dying father—and sometimes simply held his hand. The last song he heard was a Carter Family tune, “The Winding Stream.”
“Take every piece of American music,” Emmylou Harris said of Johnny Cash. “It was all in him.”
It was now 2003, and a new century was under way. As a commercial enterprise, country music was still less than a hundred years old. But as a uniquely American art form, it was ageless—a complicated chorus of American voices, joining together to tell a complicated American story, one song at a time. It has been handed down from generation to generation, moving from farm fields and churches and family porches into every corner of the country, changing and growing at every turn, tethered to its past but always reaching toward its future.
Ketch Secor, center, and Old Crow Medicine Show perform on The Grand Ole Opry, 2014.
A boy plays his homemade banjo under his father’s guidance on their front porch in Perry County, Kentucky.
It rose up out of nothing—uneducated, from the soul—and came into what it is, which is probably never been anything like it and there will never be anything like it again.
MERLE HAGGARD
It’s always going to be connected to the past, but we don’t want to stay there. We’ve got to move ahead, but we carry it forth with us. Who was it that said, “You never step into the same river twice”? Music has to change, too.
The river has to constantly be changing. And all those tributaries that move into that river of country music—it’s the same and yet it’s different.
EMMYLOU HARRIS
It’s so rich and so vast, and nobody has to stake a claim or make a line or draw a definition. It’s not a religion that you have to stick to this doctrine. There are multitudes. We contain multitudes.
ROSANNE CASH
There will be songs that should have been hits that never were. There will be songs that are hits that shouldn’t have been. There will be people that you’ll fall in love with and they’ll be gone in three weeks, or after the next record. Then there will be stars that come and get inside of your heart and stay with you for the rest of your life.
Somewhere along the way you’ll discover an old country song that will speak to that divorce you’re going through or that tax problem you’re going through, or you losing your best friend. Country music has something for everybody, and it’s inside the songs. It’s inside the lives of the characters. It’s really colorful in here. I invite you in.
MARTY STUART
Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten picks her guitar in Rhode Island.
Dellie Norton strums her banjo while her laundry dries in North Carolina.