Country Music

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HIS FATHER SERVED IN THE ARMY, LOST HIS RIGHT EYE, AND FLEW A FLAG IN THE YARD UNTIL THE DAY HE DIED. H.K. Covel was killed in March 2001 when his pickup crossed a median on Interstate 35 and struck a bus. Six months later his son watched the towers come down, and “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” poured out of him in roughly twenty minutes. That is the part the country argued straight past. In 2002, ABC producers asked Toby Keith to perform it on their Fourth of July special hosted by Peter Jennings. By Keith’s account, the offer disappeared once Jennings objected to the lyrics — he was asked to soften them or choose another song, and he refused. ABC said the problem was scheduling, since Keith had a concert in Utah that night, and that a song that angry was not how producers wanted to open a three-hour family celebration. Fans mailed hundreds of cowboy boots to Jennings’s office. The decision was raised on the Senate floor. Keith mostly needled him in public, asking reporters, “Isn’t he Canadian?” The special aired without him. By late July the song sat at No. 1 on the country chart, and his father’s flag was still flying in the second verse.

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The Song, the Flag, and the Father Behind Toby Keith’s Angriest Anthem By the time Toby Keith wrote “Courtesy of…

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IN MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS OF MAKING RECORDS, ALAN JACKSON HAD NEVER WRITTEN A SONG WITH ONE OF HIS DAUGHTERS. He finally did in November 2021, and the reason was the worst thing that ever happened to his family. Three years earlier, his oldest daughter Mattie was on vacation near Jupiter, Florida, with her husband, Ben Selecman. Ben was 28, an assistant district attorney in Nashville, eleven months into the marriage. He reached out to help a woman step onto the boat dock, slipped, and struck his head. He died twelve days later, on September 12, 2018, roughly three weeks before their first anniversary. Jackson shelved the album he had been working on. He has said he spent a long time afterward angry at the world. Six years passed between records. The song he and Mattie wrote together is called “Racing the Dark,” and it was released on November 16, 2021, the same day her book about losing Ben, “Lemons on Friday,” arrived in stores. There is one more detail. Two months before Ben died, Mattie had co-founded a small organization supporting orphans, trafficked women and widows. At 28, she became one.

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Alan Jackson, Mattie Jackson Selecman, and the Song That Came From the Hardest Place For more than thirty years, Alan…

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LORETTA LYNN WAS ALREADY INSIDE THAT SPRINGFIELD HOSPITAL WHEN THEY BROUGHT CONWAY TWITTY THROUGH THE DOORS. She wasn’t there as anybody’s duet partner that night. Her husband, Oliver “Doo” Lynn, had been admitted with his own health crisis, and Loretta was sitting with him at Cox South when the man she’d recorded “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” with was rushed in off the highway. Hours earlier, on June 4, 1993, Conway had played the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson and boarded his bus for Hendersonville. He was fifty-nine and carried forty number one country hits — a record nobody touched until George Strait in 2006. A ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm stopped him somewhere on the road home, and the bus turned for Springfield instead. Surgeons went in. By the early hours of June 5, he was gone. Loretta got a few minutes with him before they took him to surgery. Then she stayed with his wife the rest of the night, waiting on news that never improved. Two decades of harmony, a run of CMA awards, a voice that could say “Hello Darlin'” like nothing else needed saying — and it ended with her sitting in a Missouri waiting room, refusing to go back down the hall.

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Loretta Lynn, Conway Twitty, and the Night Country Music Stopped Breathing On June 4, 1993, Conway Twitty finished a show…

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HOSPITAL CARE COULD NOT SAVE HIM, AND CHARLEY PRIDE PASSED AWAY AT 86 IN DALLAS ON DECEMBER 12, 2020 — JUST 31 DAYS AFTER HE WALKED OFF A NASHVILLE STAGE WITH 29 NUMBER ONE HITS TO HIS NAME. On the night of November 11, the sharecropper’s son from Sledge, Mississippi gave what would be his final performance at the 54th CMA Awards. He didn’t step away because of a fading voice or an empty room. At 86 he sang “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'” beside Jimmie Allen, accepted the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award, and spoke at length to a small, socially distanced room that rose and listened. Then he flew home to Texas. The turn was brutally fast. He tested negative more than once after the ceremony. By late November he had been diagnosed with COVID-19, and the virus overwhelmed a man who had outlasted every barrier ever put in front of him. By Saturday, the voice that broke country music’s color line was gone. The shockwave hit Nashville immediately. Dolly Parton called him one of her dearest and oldest friends and said she was heartbroken twice over — once for the loss, again for the way it came. For Jimmie Allen, who had shared that last stage with him and who credits Pride for every Black artist who followed, the grief was personal. Within hours, other artists were publicly demanding answers about how he had been exposed. Audiences will always remember that warm, easy baritone on “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’,” a 1971 hit about ordinary love that suddenly sounded like a goodbye. He never meant that November night to be a farewell — but what he said in that final speech, and how a Negro Leagues pitcher out of the Mississippi cotton fields became the first Black member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, remains the deeper chapter.

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Charley Pride’s Final Stage: A Last Song, a Sudden Goodbye On November 11, 2020, Charley Pride stood under the lights…

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TWO YEARS OF CHEMOTHERAPY, RADIATION AND SURGERY COULD NOT SAVE HIM, AND TOBY KEITH DIED AT 62 ON THE NIGHT OF FEBRUARY 5, 2024 — JUST 53 DAYS AFTER HE WALKED OFF A LAS VEGAS STAGE WITH 20 NUMBER ONE HITS TO HIS NAME. On December 14, 2023, the Oklahoma giant gave what would be his final performance at Dolby Live at Park MGM. He didn’t book those shows because he was healthy again. He booked them because he refused to disappear quietly — three nights, every seat sold, the first two gone in under two minutes. He appeared too weak to stand for much of the night. The voice never wavered. Twenty-three songs. He closed with “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue,” walked off, and told fans online that three sold-out nights in Vegas was a fine way to end the year. He was already mapping out a 2024 tour. Fifty-three days later, the stomach cancer he had been fighting since the fall of 2021 took him at home, surrounded by his family. The shockwave reached far past Nashville. Clint Eastwood, then 93, said he was extremely saddened by the loss of his friend. Willie Nelson, his duet partner on the six-week No. 1 “Beer for My Horses,” posted footage of the two of them onstage and one short line of goodbye. Both men were bound to the same song. Audiences will always remember him at the People’s Choice Country Awards on September 28, 2023, visibly thinner, accepting the Country Icon Award and then singing “Don’t Let the Old Man In” — a song he had written five years earlier for an 88-year-old Eastwood, never imagining it would become his own farewell. He fully intended to tour again. But what happened backstage in Vegas, and the vote the Country Music Hall of Fame cast six weeks after he was gone, remains the deeper chapter of his final months.

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Toby Keith’s Final Chapter: A Country Life Lived Loud On February 5, 2024, Toby Keith died at the age of…

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THEY HELD HIS FUNERAL IN PRIVATE. A PUBLIC SERVICE WAS PROMISED FOR LATER. WHAT SHOWED UP INSTEAD WAS A PETITION. Nineteen Top 10 country hits. Three No. 1s. “Chiseled in Stone” named CMA Song of the Year in 1989. Tammy Wynette called him “the only other singer who can hold a candle to George Jones.” Nashville called him The Voice, and nobody argued. He got there the long way. Sixth of nine children on an Alabama farm, singing on the family gospel radio show. Bluegrass in California in the 1960s, in a band that also held a young Chris Hillman. Then he quit — moved to Atlanta, ran a glass company through most of the ’70s, out of the business entirely. He was in his forties before his first Top 10 record. He was in his fifties before Nashville handed him its Song of the Year. A stroke hit him in the 1990s and he kept writing anyway. Another came in early April 2009. He died on the 28th in a Nashville hospital at 74, under hospice care — still renovating his tour bus for a June slot at CMA Fest. George Strait said Gosdin had helped him out on his very first tour. The burial at Mount Olivet was private. A public memorial was announced for a later date. What came first was a fan petition to get him into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He still isn’t in it.

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They Held Vern Gosdin’s Funeral in Private. What Came First Was a Petition. Vern Gosdin did not arrive in country…

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AFTER FOUR MONTHS APART, ALAN JACKSON CAME BY TO SEE HIS CHILDREN AND ASKED HIS OWN WIFE OUT ON A DATE. He and Denise had been married eighteen years by then — high school sweethearts from Newnan, Georgia, married that December of 1979, three daughters, a career she helped start when she stopped Glen Campbell in an Atlanta airport to tell him about her husband. Then it came apart. Denise wrote about all of it in her 2007 memoir, including his infidelity and the long work of forgiving it. They went to counseling. They renewed their vows on their anniversary in December 1998. Ten years after that date, on an album called Good Time, Jackson wrote a duet with Martina McBride called “Never Loved Before.” It’s fast and flirty and a little ridiculous, two people trading lines about not being able to think straight. He was forty-nine. He had loved the same woman since high school, had almost lost her, had won her back — and then he sat down and wrote the sound of falling for someone for the very first time.

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Alan Jackson, Denise Jackson, and the Second Chance That Changed Everything Sometimes the most important love stories do not begin…

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KRIS KRISTOFFERSON WROTE HUNDREDS OF SONGS. BUT ONE OF THEM NEVER REALLY LET HIM GO. Kris Kristofferson had written enough songs to fill a lifetime before most people fully understood what he was doing. He could write about love, sin, regret, freedom, loneliness, and the strange emptiness that waits after a night you barely remember. But there was one song that always felt different. When Johnny Cash recorded it in 1970, it became a defining hit and won CMA Song of the Year. People heard a lonely man walking through a Sunday morning with nothing but silence, regret, and the ordinary sounds of life happening around him. No tragedy. No dramatic collapse. Just emptiness so plain it almost hurt more. That was Kris’s gift. He understood that the saddest part of life is not always disaster. Sometimes it is waking up and realizing there is nowhere you truly need to be. And maybe that is why, whenever Kris sang it himself, the room seemed to get quieter. Because by the time Kris sang it himself, it no longer sounded like something he wrote. It sounded like something he had survived.

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Kris Kristofferson and the Song That Would Not Leave Him Alone Kris Kristofferson wrote with the kind of honesty that…

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BOB SEGER WROTE IT ABOUT RUNNING CROSS COUNTRY IN HIGH SCHOOL. FOUR COUNTRY OUTLAWS TURNED IT INTO A CONFESSION. Seger has said the title of “Against the Wind” came from his years as a high school cross country runner, head down, leaning into it mile after mile. He built that into a song about growing older and wishing you had known then what you know now. It reached number five in 1980 and carried the only album of his career to go to number one. Four years later, Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson recorded their own version in Nashville with Chips Moman producing. They had barely become a band. Cash had gathered the other three in Switzerland to tape his Christmas special, they stayed up trading songs in the hotel afterward, and Rosanne Cash said the whole thing “came out of pure friendship.” Their album went to number one on the country chart in May 1985. Between them those four had already collected the divorces, the addictions and the long fight with Nashville over how their own records should sound. Nobody had to act that lyric. Waylon died in 2002, Johnny in 2003, Kris in September 2024. Willie turned 93 in April and is still booked on the road into the fall — the only one left who can sing it.

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Bob Seger Wrote It About Running Cross Country in High School. Four Country Outlaws Turned It Into a Confession. Bob…

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MERLE HAGGARD SANG THIS ONE LIKE A MAN WHO HAD ALREADY GIVEN UP — AND THAT WAS THE POINT. “A Place to Fall Apart” came out in October 1984, written by Merle with Willie Nelson and Freddy Powers. Three of the best writers country music ever had, and what they turned in was almost unbearably plain: no clever lines, no big finish, just a man admitting he needs somewhere to come undone. Merle didn’t perform it so much as tell it. And when Janie Fricke’s voice arrives, she never once steps in front of him. Harmony only — no solo verse, no moment of her own. She stays a half-step behind, and that choice is the whole record. It went to No. 1 on Billboard’s country chart in early 1985 and held it for a week. Forty-one years on, it still lands, and the reason is the thing most duets get wrong: neither of them tried to win. Janie’s name is on that label not because she took the spotlight, but because she understood the song needed a second voice that had heard everything and had nothing to offer but company.

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Merle Haggard Sang This One Like a Man Who Had Already Given Up — And That Was the Point Some…

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HIS FATHER SERVED IN THE ARMY, LOST HIS RIGHT EYE, AND FLEW A FLAG IN THE YARD UNTIL THE DAY HE DIED. H.K. Covel was killed in March 2001 when his pickup crossed a median on Interstate 35 and struck a bus. Six months later his son watched the towers come down, and “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” poured out of him in roughly twenty minutes. That is the part the country argued straight past. In 2002, ABC producers asked Toby Keith to perform it on their Fourth of July special hosted by Peter Jennings. By Keith’s account, the offer disappeared once Jennings objected to the lyrics — he was asked to soften them or choose another song, and he refused. ABC said the problem was scheduling, since Keith had a concert in Utah that night, and that a song that angry was not how producers wanted to open a three-hour family celebration. Fans mailed hundreds of cowboy boots to Jennings’s office. The decision was raised on the Senate floor. Keith mostly needled him in public, asking reporters, “Isn’t he Canadian?” The special aired without him. By late July the song sat at No. 1 on the country chart, and his father’s flag was still flying in the second verse.

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IN MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS OF MAKING RECORDS, ALAN JACKSON HAD NEVER WRITTEN A SONG WITH ONE OF HIS DAUGHTERS. He finally did in November 2021, and the reason was the worst thing that ever happened to his family. Three years earlier, his oldest daughter Mattie was on vacation near Jupiter, Florida, with her husband, Ben Selecman. Ben was 28, an assistant district attorney in Nashville, eleven months into the marriage. He reached out to help a woman step onto the boat dock, slipped, and struck his head. He died twelve days later, on September 12, 2018, roughly three weeks before their first anniversary. Jackson shelved the album he had been working on. He has said he spent a long time afterward angry at the world. Six years passed between records. The song he and Mattie wrote together is called “Racing the Dark,” and it was released on November 16, 2021, the same day her book about losing Ben, “Lemons on Friday,” arrived in stores. There is one more detail. Two months before Ben died, Mattie had co-founded a small organization supporting orphans, trafficked women and widows. At 28, she became one.

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LORETTA LYNN WAS ALREADY INSIDE THAT SPRINGFIELD HOSPITAL WHEN THEY BROUGHT CONWAY TWITTY THROUGH THE DOORS. She wasn’t there as anybody’s duet partner that night. Her husband, Oliver “Doo” Lynn, had been admitted with his own health crisis, and Loretta was sitting with him at Cox South when the man she’d recorded “Louisiana Woman, Mississippi Man” with was rushed in off the highway. Hours earlier, on June 4, 1993, Conway had played the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson and boarded his bus for Hendersonville. He was fifty-nine and carried forty number one country hits — a record nobody touched until George Strait in 2006. A ruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm stopped him somewhere on the road home, and the bus turned for Springfield instead. Surgeons went in. By the early hours of June 5, he was gone. Loretta got a few minutes with him before they took him to surgery. Then she stayed with his wife the rest of the night, waiting on news that never improved. Two decades of harmony, a run of CMA awards, a voice that could say “Hello Darlin'” like nothing else needed saying — and it ended with her sitting in a Missouri waiting room, refusing to go back down the hall.

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HOSPITAL CARE COULD NOT SAVE HIM, AND CHARLEY PRIDE PASSED AWAY AT 86 IN DALLAS ON DECEMBER 12, 2020 — JUST 31 DAYS AFTER HE WALKED OFF A NASHVILLE STAGE WITH 29 NUMBER ONE HITS TO HIS NAME. On the night of November 11, the sharecropper’s son from Sledge, Mississippi gave what would be his final performance at the 54th CMA Awards. He didn’t step away because of a fading voice or an empty room. At 86 he sang “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'” beside Jimmie Allen, accepted the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award, and spoke at length to a small, socially distanced room that rose and listened. Then he flew home to Texas. The turn was brutally fast. He tested negative more than once after the ceremony. By late November he had been diagnosed with COVID-19, and the virus overwhelmed a man who had outlasted every barrier ever put in front of him. By Saturday, the voice that broke country music’s color line was gone. The shockwave hit Nashville immediately. Dolly Parton called him one of her dearest and oldest friends and said she was heartbroken twice over — once for the loss, again for the way it came. For Jimmie Allen, who had shared that last stage with him and who credits Pride for every Black artist who followed, the grief was personal. Within hours, other artists were publicly demanding answers about how he had been exposed. Audiences will always remember that warm, easy baritone on “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’,” a 1971 hit about ordinary love that suddenly sounded like a goodbye. He never meant that November night to be a farewell — but what he said in that final speech, and how a Negro Leagues pitcher out of the Mississippi cotton fields became the first Black member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, remains the deeper chapter.