ON JULY 11, 1975, FRAGILE country music star Barbara Jean starred at a political rally for independent presidential candidate Hal Phillip Walker on the steps of the Parthenon, the full-scale replica of the Athens temple in Nashville’s Centennial Park. Dressed in a flowing white chiffon gown, Barbara Jean had just sung her classic hit “My Idaho Home,” and while the crowd cheered, rhinestone legend Haven Hamilton strode onstage holding aloft a bouquet of flowers. At the moment he joined Barbara Jean at the microphone, a loner identified as Kenny Frasier, standing in the audience about ten feet from the stage, opened a violin case, removed a revolver, pointed it toward the stage, and fired four shots.
The first bullet slammed into Barbara Jean’s chest and knocked her onto her back, killing her. Hamilton was hit in the left shoulder but survived.
The killing of “Nashville’s sweetheart” was the climactic scene in Robert Altman’s film Nashville. Ronee Blakley scored an Oscar nomination for her role as Barbara Jean (inspired by Loretta Lynn, although originally based on Lynn Anderson, the role was to be played by Susan Anspach). Henry Gibson played the Roy Acuff stand-in, Haven Hamilton.
Yes, it was all just playacting, but the film and its shocking finale brought together many constants of country music: poverty, family values, mental illness, sexism, patriotism, right-wing politics, guns, Nudie suits—and tragedy. Untimely deaths, hours after performing or on the way to a show, are benchmarks in country music history, and primary in the legacies of the first two performers inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame when it was created in 1961.
Tuberculosis derailed Jimmie Rodgers’s career as a brakeman for the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad and helped push him full-time into the music business in 1924. The Singing Brakeman became country music’s premier yodeler and its first superstar—though he never did kick that TB. When he arrived in New York City on May 17, 1933, to record at RCA Victor Studios, the disease had him so weak that he was forced to sit down to sing and rest on a cot between takes. He died on May 26, thirty-six hours after his final session, hacking out a lung hemorrhage in his room at the Taft Hotel. He was thirty-five.
Country’s greatest star, Hank Williams, was known for his reckless lifestyle, alcoholism, and pill-popping long before he died in the backseat of his baby blue 1952 Cadillac convertible on New Year’s Day 1953, while a seventeen-year-old college kid was driving him to his next gig at the Palace Theatre in Canton, Ohio. Chloral hydrate, alcohol, and two shots of vitamin B12 that contained a quarter-grain of morphine were in his system when his heart gave out. He made it to twenty-nine.
Patsy Cline died in a plane crash. Ira Louvin went in a car wreck. Western swing star and convicted wife killer Spade Cooley was on furlough from a prison hospital when he died backstage after fiddling for a crowd of deputy sheriffs. Grand Ole Opry and Hee Haw star Stringbean and his wife were murdered by a pair of halfwit cousins who believed rumors the banjo-playing comedian had millions stashed away in his cabin. (Twenty-three years later, $20,000 in cash was found stuffed behind a chimney brick.) Conway Twitty’s gut busted on his tour bus, rolling through the Ozarks. Mindy McCready shot herself and her dog, but not in that order.
Yet a death onstage to rival Barbara Jean’s? There was but one.
The six-foot circle of wood that makes up center stage of the Grand Ole Opry House is sacred wood, removed from the historic Ryman Auditorium when the weekly Grand Ole Opry country music concert show moved from 116 Fifth Avenue North in Nashville to the Opryland amusement park in the suburbs in 1974. This sacred circle is ground zero not only of the tradition that was founded in 1925 but also of the genre itself.
Virtually every star of country music, from Hank Williams to Patsy Cline, George Jones to Brad Paisley, has stood at the microphone at the center of the Circle. Only one country music star died there.
His name was Onie Wheeler, and he was born on a farm in Senath, Missouri, on November 10, 1920. His daddy grew cotton. Onie learned to play guitar and harmonica when he was just a boy, but he didn’t perform until he joined the US Army. He enlisted at age eighteen and spent five years in uniform. Onie was stationed at Schofield Barracks on Oahu, in the line of fire when Pearl Harbor was attacked, and fought in the Guadalcanal campaign. He also won several talent contests, playing and singing. When he injured the index finger on his left hand, he just tuned the guitar to an open C so he could make chords by barring all the strings with one finger.
After the war, Onie returned to Missouri and got his first taste of the music business when he got his own show on KWOC radio in Poplar Bluff. That’s where he met Little Jean, a teenage gal who had her own radio show. Onie married Little Jean when she was seventeen, and they’d have two children. Onie’s radio career would take him to KBTM in Jonesboro, Arkansas, and stations in Michigan and Kentucky.
He formed his own band in 1950; Onie Wheeler and the Lonesome Ozark Cowboys were all Missouri boys. A. J. Nelson played lead guitar and sang baritone. His brother Doyle Nelson played rhythm guitar and sang high tenor. Ernie Thompson was on drums. The quartet traveled to Nashville in 1953 to record four sides for Okeh/Columbia Records. None of the songs was a hit, but Lefty Frizzell took one of Onie’s compositions, “Run ’Em Off,” and took it to the Top Ten. Onie’s career as a songwriter was underway.
Two years later, Onie was recording solo for Columbia. During this period, he moved into country boogie, music that was distinguished by his deep voice, distinctive harmonica, and rhythmic bass. For a time, he toured with young Elvis Presley; Onie got top billing. He and Elvis became fast friends, and any time Onie showed up at Graceland, the big gates would swing open to let him in.
“Onie’s Bop,” his rocking single from 1956, was so close in spirit to Elvis’s early recordings that it was natural when Onie signed to Elvis’s first label, Sun Records in Memphis, in 1959. Onie toured with the other members of the Million Dollar Quartet—Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins. He turned out some impressive rockabilly but didn’t reach the heights of the others.
For a time, Onie moved his family to Venice, California, where he wrote songs that were covered by stars like George Jones, Flatt and Scruggs, and Little Jimmie Dickens. He returned to Nashville, and in 1964 joined Roy Acuff and His Smoky Mountain Boys as harmonica player. He recorded for a number of labels and was in demand as a session player with his harmonica. He finally had his first and only hit record in 1973. “John’s Been Shucking My Corn” made it to number 53 on the Billboard country chart.
By then, Onie was best known among Grand Ole Opry fans as the first performer to use his mouth to produce the train whistle sounds during “Wabash Cannonball.” “Whoooooooot!” “All aboard!” It sounded like the real thing, from deep in his throat, and always got a cheer.
In the late 1970s and into the ’80s, Onie Wheeler owned a guitar repair shop in Nashville. He continued to perform with Roy Acuff at the Grand Ole Opry, and everything was going well, until 1984.
That February, he had surgery for a stomach aneurysm and spent weeks recovering. During this time, he wrote and recorded some gospel numbers with A. J. and Doyle Nelson, the brothers who’d played with him from the start. When Onie was well enough to rejoin Roy Acuff at the Opry, he wasn’t allowed to imitate the train whistle, because it required too many stomach muscles. Roy did allow Onie to come up and play the harmonica.
So Onie Wheeler was looking forward to Friday, May 25. Memorial Day weekend always means big business at Opryland, but the holiday that kicked off on that Friday was even more special for Onie. He’d perform as usual that evening with Roy Acuff, but after the show, he’d return to the stage with the Nelson brothers to sing with a cavalcade of Opry performers in the taping of a gospel television special.
They’d rehearsed that Thursday at Onie’s daughter’s house. Karen Wheeler was a country music star herself. She’d gotten her first contract with Columbia Records when she was fifteen. Usually, she’d come to the Opry to watch Daddy perform, but Friday was her daughter’s birthday, and she had to attend to the party.
After Roy Acuff’s Opry show had ended, about fifteen hundred people remained in the forty-four-hundred-seat theater for Rev. Jimmie Snow’s Grand Ole Gospel Time. The taping got under way close to midnight. Sometime around then, Onie Wheeler was standing at the microphone, in that circle, on the holy wood from the Ryman, the Nelson brothers beside him, singing his gospel tune “Mother Rang the Dinner Bell and Sang.”
Suddenly, Onie stopped, stricken. He fell forward onto the stage and landed on his face, flat down dead, dead of a heart attack, dead center in the Circle. Rev. Jimmie Snow called for the Opry curtain to be drawn. A nurse who was in the audience jumped onto the stage and attempted CPR, but there was nothing to do.
So what did the Grand Ole Opry performers do? They stood along the perimeter of the Circle and joined hands to form a prayer circle. They prayed in a prayer circle around the Opry Circle over Onie Wheeler. When the ambulance came to take Onie to Memorial Hospital, Rev. Jimmie led the crowd in prayer.
Back at home, Karen Wheeler’s phone rang around 12:30 AM. Karen tells us, “We were gonna have some friends over, and I got a call from Mama, and she said, ‘Your dad has collapsed onstage.’” Karen and her mother arrived together at the hospital in Madison. No one told them that the doctors had set Onie Wheeler’s official time of death at 12:59 AM on May 26. No one told them that Onie was dead at sixty-two.
“We got inside the hospital,” says Karen, “and they came up to me and said, ‘Are you Mrs. Wheeler?’ and Mama said, ‘No, I’m Mrs. Wheeler.’ And the nurse started giving us his things. Mama said, ‘What are you giving us his things for?’ We thought everything was OK. I said, ‘Where is A. J. and Doyle Nelson?’ She said, ‘In that waiting room.’
“And we walked in the waiting room, and A. J. said, ‘He didn’t make it.’ I just crumbled, and Mama was just a mess.”
Back in Opryland, longtime announcer Grant Turner was clearly shaken. “This is the first time this has happened,” he told the reporter from the Tennessean on Saturday night. “I can’t recall ever having a death on the Opry stage before.”
Among the stars who spoke of Onie Wheeler was Boxcar Willie, an Opry member who was backstage when his colleague fell. “A deejay friend of mine was waiting to interview him when he came offstage. That’s how I had first gotten to know him, when I was a disc jockey,” said the man born Lecil Travis Martin, who’d hit it big singing in the guise of a classic train-hopping hobo. “I used to play his records. A lot. Onie was a great showman. He could make that harmonica talk. He’ll be missed here at the Opry by everybody.”
The most lavish praise came from Onie’s boss, Roy Acuff, “the King of Country Music,” and the model for Henry Gibson’s Haven Hamilton in the movie Nashville. “Onie Wheeler was a man of very fine morals. Excellent. I don’t know of anyone else at the Opry finer,” he said. “He was a real gentleman. Onie was an individual. He had such a fine singing voice, wrote such good songs and was such a good player. That’s why I hired him. I’ve recorded several of his songs myself.”
“It haunted A. J. Nelson,” Karen Wheeler reveals. “He said, ‘I started with Onie, and it’ll end with Onie.’ He never picked up a guitar again.”
A couple of months after Onie’s funeral, Roy Acuff convinced Karen to come onstage at the Opry and blow that train whistle the way her daddy taught her. “I couldn’t hardly do it,” she says. “But I blew the train whistle because Daddy had asked me to blow it. I was mad at Roy Acuff for making me do that, but later he said, ‘I know you’re mad at me, but I had to find some way to get you on that stage, because your daddy died there and it’s not right that you avoid the Opry.’ And I couldn’t go by the Grand Ole Opry without hating it, because I remember that my dad died onstage in that very building.”
In 2017, thirty-three years after the death of her father in the Circle onstage at the Grand Ole Opry, Karen Wheeler pulled out a cassette tape she’d been holding for decades but had never played. “I’ve got a tape of him that night and his last breath. It took me thirty-three years to listen to that, but I listened to it. He was trying to sing the words as he was falling and tried to mumble out the words, but he was gone. He was gone when he started falling. I cried because it had his last breath on it.
“I admire that he was doing something that he loved,” she says, “but death is death.”
Shawn Jones believed in miracles. He saw his own life as proof they existed and spread that word across the country. In the end, though, he didn’t have a prayer.
The handsome thirty-two-year-old pastor of New Thing Empowerment Church in Auburn, Alabama, was known throughout the South as leader of the black gospel quartet Shawn Jones & the Believers. Deep into the old-fashioned, foot-stomping, hand-raised-to-heaven, make-me-wanna-shout school, Jones was a little bit Rev. Al Green and a little bit Sam Cooke (in fact, one of his popular songs, “You Saved Me,” was simply a rewrite of Cooke’s secular “You Send Me”).
On the evening of Saturday, November 18, 2017, Jones & the Believers were raising the roof at the Event Center in Pensacola, Florida. The auditorium-sized room was popular for banquets, weddings, and school reunions. The stage at one end, three steps up from the dance floor, was the perfect platform for Jones to get the audience up, singing and clapping along.
Looking smart in his shiny brown suit and designer glasses, he started strong with the hand-clapping “Me, My God and I.” The three dudes who completed his quartet moved in step behind him, the five-piece band chugged along, and Jones growled, howled, and praised, bringing the crowd to its feet and their hands in the air as the song built to a close:
Everybody that’s saved, let me hear ya holler one time!
Hallelujah! God is good . . .
Then he led into “Return No More,” a song about the afterlife and his desire to leave this world for one in which he “won’t have to deal with heart attacks and strokes, and sugar diabetes, high blood pressure.” Sexy, soulful, and stirring, Jones stood at the edge of the stage, removed his glasses and wiped the sweat from his face. Less than fifteen minutes into the show, he’d transported his audience out of the big, echoey hall into something intimate, hot, and holy.
“They were doing a fantastic job. It was a nice show,” the center’s manager Kenneth Woodson told the Christian Post. “This fellow was blowing. It had a little jazzy feel to it and this was my first time hearing him, but I was very impressed. I said, ‘Wow, this is gonna be nice. I can’t wait to hear some more music from this guy and his band.’ They were tight.”
Shawn Jones was nothing if not a showman. He kicked right into “Worthy Is He,” a guaranteed showstopper in which he’d testify, half-sing and half-preach—with more than a little risque humor. “You got folks coming out the closet, you got men loving men, you got women loving women, so I might as well come out of the closet tonight!” he preached. “I’m in love with a man! I’m in love with a man! Every night, my wife sleep between two men! And I tell you, if I had to kick somebody out the bed, sure wouldn’t be my man!”
There were shouts and whoops and more than a few shrieks of shock. “Ain’t no use in you all you lookin’ at me funny tonight, because the clothes you got on, my man bought ’em! The car you drove tonight, my man paid for it! Ain’t nobody but Jesus! Ain’t nobody but Jesus!”
The Lord giveth. Shawn Jones took off his designer glasses once more and wiped his dripping face with a silk handkerchief. He took a sip of water, and collapsed.
The Lord taketh away. “I guess the young man got hot,” Woodson said. “He took some water and he drank some more water, sat down and was speaking and he passed out. Everyone went into shock. It was a shock because he is a young man. They contained themselves well and they were praying for him in their own little spirit. They took him to the back and were trying to revive him but then, of course, the sorrow was in the building. There were several medical people in the building and they tried to revive him. They tried to do what they could for him before the EMT got there.”
The entire gospel community was shocked when it was reported that Shawn Jones had died of a heart failure caused by a blood clot. Those closest to him shouldn’t have been surprised at all. He’d been having heart trouble for more than a year. His most recent hospitalization was a month earlier, and, despite doctors’ warnings, he was back performing two days later.
The most startling warning was recorded before an audience in the summer of 2016, when Jones testified during a song at a revival in Alexander City, Alabama. As the band kept the beat, he told the crowd that he’d recently suffered a “light stroke” onstage in Baltimore but refused medical treatment for three days. He’d believed the attack was from the devil and that he could fight the devil by thinking about the song he was singing.
That song was “Worthy Is He,” the same one he was performing when he collapsed and died. The Lord works in mysterious ways.