The Greatest Oldies Music

Country

When Loretta Lynn was asked which song she wished had received its own single release, she remembered an afternoon on Patsy Cline’s front steps. Patsy had died two months earlier, aged thirty, in the March 5, 1963, plane crash near Camden, Tennessee. Their friendship had lasted less than two years, but Loretta would describe her as the big sister she had never had. Sitting outside the house, Loretta looked up and spoke a short sentence. It supplied the title of a song she wrote within minutes. Listeners could hear it as a woman mourning a lost romance in a once-shared home. Nothing in the lyrics named Patsy. Loretta, however, made its inspiration clear: she had written it about her friend. Decca released it in 1964 beneath an upbeat honky-tonk A-side that reached No. 3. The song Loretta cherished remained on the flip side, never promoted on its own. She explained the decision in the language of the time: “unless you had some little up-tempo thang you didn’t make it.”

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The song is “This Haunted House.” Loretta Lynn wrote it about two months after Patsy Cline died, sitting on the steps of her late friend’s home, and she finished it…

Country

For more than twenty years, a song Johnny Cash wanted Porter Wagoner to hear waited inside an envelope Marty Stuart had forgotten to deliver. In the early 1980s, Stuart was touring with Cash when they started listening to Wagoner’s records. Cash had a song in mind for him and entrusted Stuart with a cassette to pass along. Once they returned home, the errand slipped his mind. It resurfaced when Stuart began selecting songs for Wagoner’s *Wagonmaster*. He remembered the tape, tracked it down, and finally brought the song to Wagoner in the summer of 2006. By then, Cash had been dead for nearly three years. Wagoner recorded it for the album released in June 2007. It would be his last. He died that October, aged eighty. Cash never heard the finished performance. But the cassette eventually fulfilled its purpose: the singer he had chosen finally gave the song his voice. Can you name the song that took more than two decades to reach Porter Wagoner?

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Johnny Cash gave Marty Stuart a simple assignment: deliver a song to Porter Wagoner. More than twenty years passed before Marty Stuart finished the job. By then, Johnny Cash was…

Country

Before John Carter Cash produced Loretta Lynn’s final four studio albums, she had looked after him backstage while his mother performed. Born in 1970 to Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, John spent his childhood around musicians who would remain part of his life. When Loretta appeared on Johnny’s touring shows, June sometimes left him in her care before taking the stage. “Take care of Johnny,” she would say. Years later, their connection brought Loretta to Cash Cabin, the Hendersonville, Tennessee, studio Johnny had built on his property. Beginning in 2007, John Carter and Loretta’s daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell, produced sessions that eventually yielded more than ninety recordings. Loretta was seventy-five when they started. Among the songs were mountain tunes her mother had taught her long before Nashville, back in Butcher Hollow. *Full Circle* arrived in 2016, when she was eighty-three, and became her highest-charting album on the Billboard 200. Three more studio albums followed from the sessions, concluding in 2021. Loretta appreciated the turn their lives had taken. The child she once watched while June sang was now helping preserve her own voice. “So now he’s recording me,” she said.

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In the early 1970s, when Loretta Lynn shared the road with Johnny Cash, there was a small job that came with the tour. While June Carter Cash sang, somebody had…

Country

When Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers sang “I Will Always Love You” at Dollywood’s twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration in 2010, the song offered a fitting expression of their friendship. Dolly had written it in 1973 as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, conveying affection and gratitude as she prepared to leave their professional partnership. Singing it with Kenny gave those familiar words another personal setting. Her clear, rising voice met his warm, weathered delivery, bringing tenderness to a performance shaped by years of shared music and easy understanding. Amid the anniversary festivities, the duet became a quiet acknowledgment of what they meant to each other. Its appeal rested in that familiarity: two longtime friends singing words of appreciation that needed little explanation.

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A breathtaking portrait of a legendary kinship, where the world’s most famous farewell song becomes a tender, living tribute to a lifelong bond. In 2010, during the milestone television special…

Country

Billy Joe Shaver’s last reported performance took place in his kitchen. He sang “Live Forever,” the song he had written with his late son, Eddy. In April 2020, with the pandemic keeping musicians home, longtime guitarist Jeremy Lynn Woodall visited to record Billy Joe for a local radio station. There was no audience or stage lighting—just a familiar song in the room where he lived. Eddy had brought him the melody years earlier. Billy Joe worked for months on the lyrics before father and son finished it together. After Eddy died on New Year’s Eve in 2000, the song remained in his father’s repertoire. Billy Joe died on October 28, 2020, aged eighty-one. In 2022, Willie Nelson and Lucinda Williams recorded “Live Forever” together for a tribute album that also included George Strait, Miranda Lambert, and Steve Earle. By then, neither of its writers was alive to hear it. But a song they had built together was finding its way into other voices, carrying their partnership beyond that final kitchen performance.

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In April 2020, Billy Joe Shaver gave what would become his final widely reported performance. There was no concert hall, no cheering audience, and no stage waiting for one of…

Country

Toby Keith’s support for American troops began with the Army veteran who raised him. His father taught him to respect the flag and the people who served beneath it. After his father’s death in 2001 and the September 11 attacks, Toby wrote “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” in roughly twenty minutes. Its anger drew strong criticism, but he defended the song. In 2006, he put that conviction plainly: “If you believe in it enough, it’s worth fightin’ for.” “American Soldier” expressed another side of his respect, focusing on service members balancing duty with the families they had to leave behind. His commitment also took him overseas. Beginning in 2002, Toby joined USO tours, performing at military bases and remote outposts in dangerous war zones. By 2014, he had entertained more than 250,000 service members across seventeen countries. Toby never served in uniform. He found his own way to contribute: making the trips, spending time with troops, and bringing music to places far from home. The support he sang about became a recurring commitment on his calendar.

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“If you believe in it enough, it’s worth fightin’ for.” — Toby Keith, 2006 When Toby Keith spoke those words during a CBS News interview in September 2006, they weren’t…

Country

Kris Kristofferson hadn’t expected to find his songwriting in *Taxi Driver*. Then he saw Robert De Niro holding his album and heard a familiar description: “a walking contradiction.” The song had appeared five years earlier on Kris’s 1971 album, *The Silver Tongued Devil and I*. Its complicated central figure drew on men he knew well, including Johnny Cash, Chris Gantry, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and Dennis Hopper. Later, Kris acknowledged how much of himself he had put into that character, too. In the 1976 film, Betsy, played by Cybill Shepherd, gives Travis Bickle the record and uses the song’s words to describe him. A character Kris had assembled from friends—and his own contradictions—had found an unexpected place in Scorsese’s story. Recalling the scene in a 1999 interview, Kris spoke warmly about seeing his album and hearing his words onscreen. He regarded the inclusion as one of the kindest things Martin Scorsese had done for him. Can you name the Kris Kristofferson song Betsy quoted in *Taxi Driver*?

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In 1976, audiences watching Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver heard an unexpected name: Kris Kristofferson. During a conversation with Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, Betsy, played by Cybill Shepherd,…

Country

John Anderson agreed to record Merle Haggard’s song before he had heard a note. Merle had called with a compliment that made the decision easy: “I’m writing this song and the more I write it the more it sounds like you.” John told him to finish it. He would record whatever Merle brought him. About six months later, they met again, and John asked whether it was ready. Merle smiled, reached into his back pocket for the lyrics, and asked for a guitar. Then he sang it for the man he had been thinking of while writing. The song appeared on John’s 2015 album, *Goldmine*. John wrote or co-wrote twelve of its thirteen tracks. The remaining one came from his hero. Years afterward, John still counted that private performance among the highlights of his life. Before listeners heard the recording, he had heard Merle play it just for him.

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John Anderson wrote or co-wrote twelve of the thirteen songs on the 2015 album Goldmine. The exception had a story John Anderson would remember as one of the highlights of…

Country

Before Johnny Cash’s comeback at Folsom Prison, he faced a quieter test: singing for a high school audience without the pills he had depended on for years. Only weeks earlier, in October 1967, Cash said he had entered Tennessee’s Nickajack Cave intending to die. His 1997 autobiography described losing his light underground before eventually finding the entrance. Details of that account remain disputed. The addiction that had overtaken his life does not. With June Carter and her family helping him, Cash began attempting to work without drugs. On November 11, 1967, he performed at a high school in Hendersonville, Tennessee. He later recalled being frightened before the show. Once onstage, however, he settled enough to laugh and joke with the audience. Two months later, on January 13, 1968, he recorded the Folsom Prison concerts that produced a No. 1 country album. That smaller November show had offered something he needed first: evidence that he could still perform without pills.

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In October 1967, Johnny Cash later said he entered a Tennessee cave expecting to die. Just weeks afterward, Johnny Cash stood before a high school audience in Hendersonville, Tennessee, facing…

Oldies Musics

James Arness almost turned down the role that would occupy the next twenty years of his life. When CBS offered him Marshal Matt Dillon in *Gunsmoke*, he was still pursuing a film career—and television looked like a risky detour. Arness had already appeared in movies with John Wayne. In the mid-1950s, films carried a prestige television had yet to earn, and he worried that an unsuccessful series could leave him branded a television actor without giving him a lasting job. His doubts grew strong enough that he considered withdrawing before filming began. Wayne urged him to reconsider. Having built his own career in Westerns, he saw an advantage Arness was overlooking: a weekly series could introduce him to an enormous audience and keep him in front of it. That kind of recognition could be difficult to achieve through films alone. Arness accepted the advice. Wayne backed it publicly, appearing before the first television episode in September 1955 to introduce the man viewers were about to meet as Marshal Dillon. What followed was far more than a useful career opportunity. *Gunsmoke* ran on CBS for twenty seasons, helped establish the adult television Western, and became one of America’s longest-running prime-time dramas. Across hundreds of episodes and later reunion films, Arness made Dillon inseparable from his own screen identity. His original concern—that one television character might define him—proved accurate. What he had underestimated was how much that character would give him: decades of work and a place in viewers’ lives that few movie roles could have offered.

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JAMES ARNESS NEARLY WALKED AWAY FROM GUNSMOKE—UNTIL JOHN WAYNE TOLD HIM TO TAKE THE JOB James Arness was close to walking away from Gunsmoke before America had ever seen him…

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You Missed

Country

When Loretta Lynn was asked which song she wished had received its own single release, she remembered an afternoon on Patsy Cline’s front steps. Patsy had died two months earlier, aged thirty, in the March 5, 1963, plane crash near Camden, Tennessee. Their friendship had lasted less than two years, but Loretta would describe her as the big sister she had never had. Sitting outside the house, Loretta looked up and spoke a short sentence. It supplied the title of a song she wrote within minutes. Listeners could hear it as a woman mourning a lost romance in a once-shared home. Nothing in the lyrics named Patsy. Loretta, however, made its inspiration clear: she had written it about her friend. Decca released it in 1964 beneath an upbeat honky-tonk A-side that reached No. 3. The song Loretta cherished remained on the flip side, never promoted on its own. She explained the decision in the language of the time: “unless you had some little up-tempo thang you didn’t make it.”

Country

For more than twenty years, a song Johnny Cash wanted Porter Wagoner to hear waited inside an envelope Marty Stuart had forgotten to deliver. In the early 1980s, Stuart was touring with Cash when they started listening to Wagoner’s records. Cash had a song in mind for him and entrusted Stuart with a cassette to pass along. Once they returned home, the errand slipped his mind. It resurfaced when Stuart began selecting songs for Wagoner’s *Wagonmaster*. He remembered the tape, tracked it down, and finally brought the song to Wagoner in the summer of 2006. By then, Cash had been dead for nearly three years. Wagoner recorded it for the album released in June 2007. It would be his last. He died that October, aged eighty. Cash never heard the finished performance. But the cassette eventually fulfilled its purpose: the singer he had chosen finally gave the song his voice. Can you name the song that took more than two decades to reach Porter Wagoner?

Country

Before John Carter Cash produced Loretta Lynn’s final four studio albums, she had looked after him backstage while his mother performed. Born in 1970 to Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, John spent his childhood around musicians who would remain part of his life. When Loretta appeared on Johnny’s touring shows, June sometimes left him in her care before taking the stage. “Take care of Johnny,” she would say. Years later, their connection brought Loretta to Cash Cabin, the Hendersonville, Tennessee, studio Johnny had built on his property. Beginning in 2007, John Carter and Loretta’s daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell, produced sessions that eventually yielded more than ninety recordings. Loretta was seventy-five when they started. Among the songs were mountain tunes her mother had taught her long before Nashville, back in Butcher Hollow. *Full Circle* arrived in 2016, when she was eighty-three, and became her highest-charting album on the Billboard 200. Three more studio albums followed from the sessions, concluding in 2021. Loretta appreciated the turn their lives had taken. The child she once watched while June sang was now helping preserve her own voice. “So now he’s recording me,” she said.

Country

When Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers sang “I Will Always Love You” at Dollywood’s twenty-fifth-anniversary celebration in 2010, the song offered a fitting expression of their friendship. Dolly had written it in 1973 as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, conveying affection and gratitude as she prepared to leave their professional partnership. Singing it with Kenny gave those familiar words another personal setting. Her clear, rising voice met his warm, weathered delivery, bringing tenderness to a performance shaped by years of shared music and easy understanding. Amid the anniversary festivities, the duet became a quiet acknowledgment of what they meant to each other. Its appeal rested in that familiarity: two longtime friends singing words of appreciation that needed little explanation.