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AMERICA FELL IN LOVE WITH CHARLEY PRIDE’S VOICE BEFORE ANYONE KNEW WHAT HE LOOKED LIKE. When RCA released his first singles in 1966, the label sent them to country radio without publicity photos, credited simply to “Country Charley Pride.” The records were left to speak for themselves. The first two didn’t chart high, but the third, “Just Between You and Me,” climbed into the country Top Ten — and many fans only discovered Pride was Black when they saw the cover of his first album. The voice had already won them over. One person never needed convincing. In 1960, Rozene left Memphis with their young son to join Charley in Helena, Montana, where he recalled only three or four Black families living nearby. He loaded coal into a 2,400-degree furnace at the East Helena smelter, pitched for the semipro Smelterites, and sang for ten dollars before games and in local bars at night. They bought an 800-square-foot house on Peosta Avenue, and two of their three children were born while they lived in Montana. He called that little house “our little darling” for the rest of his life. Rozene stayed through the smelter years, the records, the road, and everything after. More than sixty years, from a Memphis wedding in 1958 until December 12, 2020 — when the voice America loved went quiet, and she was still there.

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America Fell in Love with Charley Pride’s Voice Before Anyone Knew What He Looked Like Before Charley Pride became a…

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THE DISEASE THEY TREATED KRIS KRISTOFFERSON FOR WAS ONE HE NEVER HAD. For years, doctors told him his failing memory was Alzheimer’s — or dementia from his boxing and football days. He took the medications. Some days, he couldn’t remember what he was doing from one moment to the next. But his wife, Lisa Meyers, kept booking appointments, because one detail wouldn’t leave her alone: Kris knew he was forgetting. “My memory’s shot. My memory’s gone,” he kept telling doctors — and as Lisa understood it, Alzheimer’s patients usually aren’t aware of their own decline. That, she said, was her biggest clue. In early 2016, a doctor watched the muscles in Kris’s forearms twitching and ordered a blood test. It came back positive for Lyme disease — likely from a tick bite years earlier. He stopped the Alzheimer’s and depression medication and went through three weeks of Lyme treatment. The bad days didn’t all vanish. But some days, Lisa said, he was perfectly normal again. After years of watching him fade, she summed it up in one line: “All of a sudden he was back.”

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The Disease Kris Kristofferson Was Treated For Was Not the One He Actually Had For years, the story around Kris…

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HIS DAD LOST HIS RIGHT EYE IN THE ARMY AND NEVER COMPLAINED. SIX MONTHS BEFORE 9/11, A HIGHWAY CRASH KILLED HIM — AND THAT’S WHERE THIS WEEK’S NO. 11 SONG BEGINS. H.R. “Hoss” Covel lost his right eye serving in the Army and came home without griping about it once. In March 2001 a highway crash killed him. Six months later his son watched the towers fall and wrote a song in roughly 20 minutes — for his dad. Then Toby Keith refused to record it. For months “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” lived only on USO stages, and the reason he wouldn’t put it on tape had nothing to do with his label. This week, after America’s 250th birthday weekend, it re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 11: 15.3 million U.S. streams, 2.6 million in airplay audience, 6,000 downloads, No. 2 on both Streaming Songs and Digital Song Sales. In 2002 it stalled at No. 25. “Red Solo Cup” got him to No. 15.

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The Story Behind Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” Some songs arrive like lightning. Others begin in…

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FORGET THE ARENAS. RILEY GREEN’S FAVORITE SEAT IS ON A BULLDOZER. Riley told Theo Von on This Past Weekend that the 1,780 acres he owns in Alabama, roughly two Central Parks, never came as one big purchase. It started with 141 acres belonging to uncle Bill, his granddaddy Buford’s brother, the ground Riley grew up running around on. He bought that piece first. Every trip home since, he’s been on the phone with the neighbors asking if anybody’s selling. Now all of it touches. He doesn’t hire the work out, either. He clears the fields, cuts the dirt roads and digs the ponds on his own equipment. Out on tour he’s already deciding which field is waiting for him when the bus pulls in. And here’s what it actually gives him. Not investment, not acreage, not something to brag about on a podcast. Riley said the seat of that machine is “one of the only places I forget about my phone.” The No. 1s are nice, he admitted, but they aren’t the thing that satisfies him. A country star with a sold-out tour, and the happiest he gets is alone on a bulldozer in Alabama, covered in dirt, nobody able to reach him.

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Forget the Arenas. Riley Green’s Favorite Seat Is on a Bulldozer. Riley Green may spend plenty of nights in front…

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IT TOOK CHRIS STAPLETON TEN MINUTES TO WRITE THE SONG. IT TOOK NEARLY A DECADE BEFORE HE’D RECORD IT. Sometime in the mid-2000s he was at his girlfriend’s apartment, waiting on her to get ready. Morgane wasn’t his wife yet. She told him that if he was going to hover, he might as well write a song. Ten minutes later he had “Daddy Doesn’t Pray Anymore.” His father was alive, and would be for years yet. Herbert Stapleton worked the Kentucky coal mines, a straight arrow who had said grace at every meal his son had ever eaten with him. So where does a man get the idea to write that title about a father like that? It came from one evening at his parents’ table in Staffordsville, over something that happened exactly once and never happened again. Herbert died at home in October 2013, at 67. Chris has said the song “got weight after my father passed away,” and only then did he cut it, for Traveller. At an industry event in Nashville in early 2015 he set a chunk of coal on a stool beside him — the first piece his father ever mined — and dedicated the next song to him. The title was true by then. It wasn’t true the night he wrote it, and he was still telling the story of that dinner ten years on.

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How Chris Stapleton Wrote “Daddy Doesn’t Pray Anymore” in Minutes, Then Waited Years to Record It Some songs arrive like…

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MERCURY SAID THE ALBUM HAD NO HIT ON IT. TOBY KEITH BOUGHT IT BACK — AND ONE SONG OFF IT SAT AT NO. 1 FOR FIVE WEEKS. Near the end of his Mercury deal, Toby was told the record he’d made didn’t have the hit they wanted. He talked his way out, paid to own the songs, and took them to DreamWorks. Even there, nobody wanted “How Do You Like Me Now?!” as the first single. Radio had gone female-driven, they argued; a man couldn’t sing that line to a woman. So the ballad “When Love Fades” went out instead, and it never cracked the Top 40. Toby quit waiting on them and picked up the phone himself, working down a list of about 30 radio programmers. Whatever he said on those calls, the label’s plan didn’t survive the week. The song went to No. 1 and stayed five weeks. Billboard named it the top country song of 2000. So what does a man say to 30 strangers that his own label wouldn’t say for him?

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Toby Keith, the Label That Said No, and the Song That Wouldn’t Quit At the end of Toby Keith’s Mercury…

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IN 1987, WAYLON JENNINGS TURNED HIS WHOLE LIFE INTO TEN CHAPTERS ON ONE ALBUM. CHAPTER EIGHT WASN’T A PLACE OR A YEAR. IT WAS JUST HER NAME. He called A Man Called Hoss his audio biography. Littlefield. The rough and rowdy days. The drugs. Then Chapter Eight, titled simply “Jessi,” carrying a song called “You Deserve the Stars in My Crown.” They’d been married eighteen years by then, and that’s where he set her down: right in the middle of his own story, in his own handwriting. Fourteen years later, on the morning of February 13, 2002, Jessi came home from an appointment to their house in Chandler, Arizona, and found him in the living room. Paramedics tried. He was 64. No stage, no band, no last verse. Days later she told the press that Waylon kicked ass right to the end, and that he’d won the final round anyway, because he went out his way, at home. But when Jessi talks about the end, she doesn’t start in February. She starts twelve weeks earlier, in a hospital room at Thanksgiving, with a question Waylon asked her that nobody who knew the outlaw would have believed came out of his mouth.

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When Waylon Jennings Made Jessi Colter a Chapter in His Own Story A life in ten tracks In 1987, Waylon…

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IN 1957 SONNY JAMES HAD THE BIGGEST CROSSOVER HIT IN COUNTRY MUSIC — AND A LINE IN HIS CONTRACT THAT LOCKED HIM OUT OF THE ROOMS WHERE THE REAL MONEY WAS.”Young Love” had moved more than two and a half million copies. Las Vegas came calling with the kind of money a farm boy out of Hackleburg, Alabama had never been offered in his life. Sonny turned it down, and he’d already made sure he had no choice: written into his contracts was a line naming the kind of rooms he would not sing in. Three things, specifically, that he wanted nowhere near his name.That same July, down in Dallas, he married Doris Shrode. They stayed married 58 years, right up to the day he died in a Nashville hospice in 2016.Everybody assumed a man that careful was guarding his image, or his marriage, or his faith. Then a Dallas columnist asked him straight out about the Vegas money in May of 1957, and Sonny answered. It had nothing to do with what he was keeping out, and everything to do with who he refused to lock out.

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Sonny James, Young Love, and the Contract Line That Changed Everything In the spring of 1957, Sonny James stood at…

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AT 12, JOHNNY CASH ASKED HIS BROTHER TO GO FISHING. JACK CHOSE WORK — AND DIED A WEEK LATER. In May 1944, Cash later recalled asking Jack to join him at the river. Jack went to work instead, helping earn money for the family. Before the day was over, Johnny’s father found him near the river in the preacher’s car and told him Jack had been gravely injured in a table saw accident. What Jack said during the days that followed became one of the memories Johnny carried for the rest of his life. Jack died a week after the accident. Cash spoke of the guilt he felt for being out fishing while his brother suffered, even though the choice had never been his to make. Long before the records and prison concerts, that loss had already shaped the boy behind the voice. What did Johnny hear at Jack’s bedside that he was still repeating decades later?

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Johnny Cash, Jack Cash, and the Bedside Memory That Never Left Him When Johnny Cash was 12 years old, a…

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TOBY KEITH SAW A MAGAZINE PROMISING A “FIGHT TO THE DEATH.” DAYS EARLIER, HE HAD LEARNED HIS BEST FRIEND’S TWO-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER WAS DYING OF CANCER. In 2003, Toby’s feud with Natalie Maines had become country music spectacle: insults, concert-screen images and the infamous F.U.T.K. shirt. Then Scott Webb—the friend who had helped start Toby’s first band—was facing something no headline could rival. His daughter, Ally, was nearing the end of her battle with kidney cancer. Why did one glance at that magazine cover finally make Toby stop escalating the fight? Ally died on August 6, one month before her third birthday. Toby later admitted the feud suddenly felt insignificant, and within months he was reflecting publicly on how vicious it had become. The loss also helped inspire something far more lasting than the argument: Ally’s House, founded in 2004 to support Oklahoma families caring for children with cancer.

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Toby Keith, Natalie Maines, and the Moment a Family Loss Changed Everything In 2003, Toby Keith found himself in one…

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AMERICA FELL IN LOVE WITH CHARLEY PRIDE’S VOICE BEFORE ANYONE KNEW WHAT HE LOOKED LIKE. When RCA released his first singles in 1966, the label sent them to country radio without publicity photos, credited simply to “Country Charley Pride.” The records were left to speak for themselves. The first two didn’t chart high, but the third, “Just Between You and Me,” climbed into the country Top Ten — and many fans only discovered Pride was Black when they saw the cover of his first album. The voice had already won them over. One person never needed convincing. In 1960, Rozene left Memphis with their young son to join Charley in Helena, Montana, where he recalled only three or four Black families living nearby. He loaded coal into a 2,400-degree furnace at the East Helena smelter, pitched for the semipro Smelterites, and sang for ten dollars before games and in local bars at night. They bought an 800-square-foot house on Peosta Avenue, and two of their three children were born while they lived in Montana. He called that little house “our little darling” for the rest of his life. Rozene stayed through the smelter years, the records, the road, and everything after. More than sixty years, from a Memphis wedding in 1958 until December 12, 2020 — when the voice America loved went quiet, and she was still there.

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THE DISEASE THEY TREATED KRIS KRISTOFFERSON FOR WAS ONE HE NEVER HAD. For years, doctors told him his failing memory was Alzheimer’s — or dementia from his boxing and football days. He took the medications. Some days, he couldn’t remember what he was doing from one moment to the next. But his wife, Lisa Meyers, kept booking appointments, because one detail wouldn’t leave her alone: Kris knew he was forgetting. “My memory’s shot. My memory’s gone,” he kept telling doctors — and as Lisa understood it, Alzheimer’s patients usually aren’t aware of their own decline. That, she said, was her biggest clue. In early 2016, a doctor watched the muscles in Kris’s forearms twitching and ordered a blood test. It came back positive for Lyme disease — likely from a tick bite years earlier. He stopped the Alzheimer’s and depression medication and went through three weeks of Lyme treatment. The bad days didn’t all vanish. But some days, Lisa said, he was perfectly normal again. After years of watching him fade, she summed it up in one line: “All of a sudden he was back.”

Uncategorized

HIS DAD LOST HIS RIGHT EYE IN THE ARMY AND NEVER COMPLAINED. SIX MONTHS BEFORE 9/11, A HIGHWAY CRASH KILLED HIM — AND THAT’S WHERE THIS WEEK’S NO. 11 SONG BEGINS. H.R. “Hoss” Covel lost his right eye serving in the Army and came home without griping about it once. In March 2001 a highway crash killed him. Six months later his son watched the towers fall and wrote a song in roughly 20 minutes — for his dad. Then Toby Keith refused to record it. For months “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” lived only on USO stages, and the reason he wouldn’t put it on tape had nothing to do with his label. This week, after America’s 250th birthday weekend, it re-entered the Billboard Hot 100 at No. 11: 15.3 million U.S. streams, 2.6 million in airplay audience, 6,000 downloads, No. 2 on both Streaming Songs and Digital Song Sales. In 2002 it stalled at No. 25. “Red Solo Cup” got him to No. 15.

Uncategorized

FORGET THE ARENAS. RILEY GREEN’S FAVORITE SEAT IS ON A BULLDOZER. Riley told Theo Von on This Past Weekend that the 1,780 acres he owns in Alabama, roughly two Central Parks, never came as one big purchase. It started with 141 acres belonging to uncle Bill, his granddaddy Buford’s brother, the ground Riley grew up running around on. He bought that piece first. Every trip home since, he’s been on the phone with the neighbors asking if anybody’s selling. Now all of it touches. He doesn’t hire the work out, either. He clears the fields, cuts the dirt roads and digs the ponds on his own equipment. Out on tour he’s already deciding which field is waiting for him when the bus pulls in. And here’s what it actually gives him. Not investment, not acreage, not something to brag about on a podcast. Riley said the seat of that machine is “one of the only places I forget about my phone.” The No. 1s are nice, he admitted, but they aren’t the thing that satisfies him. A country star with a sold-out tour, and the happiest he gets is alone on a bulldozer in Alabama, covered in dirt, nobody able to reach him.