BY 1956, THERE WAS no one bigger. They were as big as Elvis; Elvis was as big as the Browns. They had won every major award there was in country music, and the Browns had been at it just long enough that they were beginning to get comfortable with their good fortune. Ascent was all they had ever known; how could there ever be anything else?
Few if any mapmakers can mark the precise moment of highest fame or pleasure in any life, whether an ordinary one or extraordinary; and rarer still are the travelers' own abilities to do so. Maxine, with the alcoholic's force of denial—and no matter that she is in recovery—still believes her apogee has not been reached, that all which has come before has been but a false plateau. A more detailed observer, however, might suggest that the peak came very early, and quickly: on the first night they appeared on the Grand Ole Opry.
In typical Brown fashion, it was a night of their highest high, and yet one of the lows that would most gnaw at Maxine for the rest of her career.
They had been chosen to share the headlines that night with Little Jimmy Dickens, one of the original stars of the Grand Ole Opry. How they had adored him, had spent their childhoods crowded around the static of their one radio listening to him on Saturday nights, and counting the days and nights until the next week's performance.
Meeting Jimmy Dickens then, backstage, the first time they made it to the Opry. Approaching him with stars in their eyes—this little man, this icon—but being rebuffed by him even before they could shake his hand. Already, he had seen more change than he had bargained for in his life, and the high nasal whine that was his trademark must have seemed to him the antithesis of these three attractive young people, and their own sound, and their sudden fame.
He sneered at them, wouldn't shake their hands, and instead snarled the one most cutting greeting anyone could have designed— "Y'all ain't country" —then turned on his heel and walked off.
There was no one from whom such rebuke could have been more painful. They were too young, too heartbroken, too desperately professional to do anything but smile and pretend nothing had happened and move on to their next greeting. The curtains about to lift. The biggest night of their lives.
The curtains lifting, then, to the applause. Not a single face was distinguishable to them on the other side of that wall of light, but such radiant love emanated from that place. It was only two minutes and thirty seconds of love, to be sure, but it was love nonetheless, and something else, too—not just power and voice and control in a hard world, but some other beautiful thing that they could not quite reach or touch.
The sound pouring out of them and the audience roaring, rising to applaud their youth and originality. Giving them a welcome, an ovation, the likes of which Little Jimmy, in all his years of trailblazing, had never known.
Drinks backstage, afterward. Little Jimmy glowering, shunning them, leaving early. Able, in his fury, to see something that no one else yet could: that they were attempting to leave behind forever the place they had come from in a betrayal, a disowning, that was to him of biblical proportions. Harlots and blasphemers. He knew they were friends with Elvis, and though Elvis was not yet as huge as he would soon become, Little Jimmy knew all he needed to know about Elvis, too. Jimmy Dickens knew that once the Browns had crossed one line—leaving Poplar Creek behind, and leaving it so quickly, and making that strange sound—there were surely no other lines they would not also cross. The sound, once unleashed into the world, flowing downhill, spreading and pooling. Powerful, beautiful, treacherous, unmanageable. He didn't want anything to do with it, and he understood that it would destroy all that he was about.