The Greatest Oldies Music

Country

A cot waited in a rehearsal hall at RCA Victor’s New York studio while Jimmie Rodgers made his final recordings. Between songs, he lay down to recover enough strength for another take. It was May 1933. Rodgers was 35 and had battled tuberculosis since 1924. As his health deteriorated, his earnings had dwindled. Victor was paying $250 per recorded side, and he wanted to provide for his wife, Carrie, and their daughter, Anita. The sessions started on May 17. Within days, standing to sing became impossible. He worked from an easy chair, supported by pillows that brought him close enough to the microphone, then returned to the cot. On May 24, two musicians accompanied him through three songs. After they left, Rodgers recorded one more with only his guitar: “Years Ago.” He had completed twelve songs in eight days. The following night at the Taft Hotel, severe coughing gave way to hemorrhaging in his lungs. The hotel doctor could not be located. Rodgers fell into a coma and died on May 26, roughly 36 hours after his last recording. Before music made him famous, he had worked as a railroad brakeman. A Southern Railway train carried his body home to Meridian, Mississippi, in a baggage car. According to accounts of the journey, the engineer kept sounding the whistle along the way.

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In the spring of 1933, Jimmie Rodgers was the biggest name in what people then called hillbilly music. He was also dying. Tuberculosis had been in his lungs since 1924,…

Country

Randy Owen sometimes stopped his tour bus at truck stops to call radio DJs from pay phones. Alabama had already made him a country star. These calls were about persuading stations to help children at St. Jude. He knew what it meant to grow up with little. On his family’s sharecropper farm near Fort Payne, Alabama, he picked cotton and corn to help put food on the table. At school, other children mocked his scarred hands and the cotton dust on his clothes. Years later, after millions of record sales, Owen met St. Jude founder Danny Thomas in Atlanta. Thomas asked him to bring the country music community into the hospital’s fundraising work. When illness prevented Thomas from speaking at Nashville’s Country Radio Seminar, Owen took his place and proposed a nationwide radio effort. Winning support required persistence. He later described himself as “begging, pleading” with DJs. Some stations remained unconvinced. The first Country Cares radiothon aired on November 19, 1989: twelve hours, 45 artists and more than 800 stations. It raised approximately $1 million. By its 35th year in 2024, the initiative had brought in more than $1 billion. Owen has said helping St. Jude may be his most important work beyond being a husband and father. That enormous total began with individual requests, including calls made beside the highway between shows. Owen kept asking stations to participate. Across the country, their listeners kept answering.

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Around 1989, Alabama was the biggest band in country music. The Academy of Country Music had just named them its artist of the decade, and their lead singer, Randy Owen,…

Country

Lorrie Morgan saved the card Keith Whitley gave her at the Nashville airport for her flight home. When she finally opened it, her husband was dead. It was early May 1989. Lorrie was heading to Alaska to promote her first RCA album, while Keith was enjoying the strongest run of his career. Just weeks earlier, “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” had become his third consecutive No. 1. At home, success had brought little reassurance. Keith had struggled with alcohol for years. A period of sobriety beginning in 1987 lasted about six months. Lorrie later described the fear surrounding his drinking as living with a ticking time bomb. In her 1997 memoir, she recalled tying her leg to his while they slept so she would know if he got up to drink. During her trip, he began drinking again that weekend. On Tuesday morning, May 9, his brother-in-law, Lane Palmer, visited the house in Goodlettsville. They drank coffee and discussed golf and lunch. Palmer left around 8:30 a.m. When he returned roughly an hour later, Keith was lying on the bed, fully dressed and unconscious. The medical examiner determined that he died from acute alcohol poisoning. Traveling back to Nashville, Lorrie read the card she had set aside. She later said its words left her feeling that Keith had been trying to tell her something—a feeling she was left to carry without the chance to ask him.

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In early May 1989, Keith Whitley drove his wife, Lorrie Morgan, to the Nashville airport and gave her a card before her flight. She decided to save it for the…

Country

For Vince Gill, the memory of singing with Dolly Parton came down to their final note together at the 1995 CMA Awards. Thirty-one years later, on the day she died, he shared that performance again. “We are all crushed here at our house,” he wrote. He called the closing note of their duet one of the most beautiful sounds he had ever heard. Their recording of “I Will Always Love You” began with Dolly’s album *Something Special*. That summer, she revisited three of her classics, including the farewell she had written for Porter Wagoner in 1973. It had already topped the country chart twice in her own voice, and Whitney Houston’s 1992 recording had brought it to listeners worldwide. For this version, Dolly invited Vince to join her. They performed it on the Grand Ole Opry on August 26, 1995, during a TNN broadcast. Radio programmers began playing the duet before Columbia officially issued it as a single. That unsolicited airplay carried it onto Billboard’s country chart at No. 53. On October 4, they sang it again at the CMA Awards. Vince, then 38, was hosting the broadcast at the Grand Ole Opry House. He stepped away from those duties to sing beside the woman who had written the song when he was sixteen. As the performance ended, their voices met on one sustained note. Decades later, that was the moment he singled out. Released as a single that November, the duet reached No. 15, received a Grammy nomination and won the 1996 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. But Vince’s remembrance centered on what he had heard standing beside her. Dolly died in Nashville on August 25, 2026, at 80, after a brief battle with cancer. Two days later, Vince appeared at the Midland Theatre in Kansas City. He told the audience how deeply his family was hurting, then began “I Will Always Love You.” This time, he sang it alone. Fan footage captured him struggling with his emotions throughout the performance. When he stepped back to compose himself, people in the audience carried the words. Musicians behind him wiped their eyes. He reached the closing note without Dolly’s voice beside his. After finishing, he moved away from the microphone, placed a hand over his chest and lowered his head.

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When the news came on August 25, 2026, that Dolly Parton had died in Nashville at 80, Vince Gill did not write a long tribute. He posted a piece of…

Country

Reba McEntire intended “Just Like Them Horses” to be a private recording for her father’s funeral. Producer Tony Brown heard it and believed it deserved a place on her next album. It was 2014, and Clark McEntire was still alive. The three-time world champion steer roper, who won his titles in 1957, 1958 and 1961, was 86 and had endured years of declining health. Following his 2011 stroke, one hospital stay lasted so long that the family planned his funeral three times before he recovered. While Reba was choosing material for a new album, songwriter Liz Hengber sent her the ballad on a CD. Reba said she knew immediately that she wanted it played at Daddy’s service. She requested only piano and her voice, keeping the arrangement simple for the family. Brown persuaded her to include it on the album. “Not long after we recorded it, Daddy passed away,” she later recalled. Clark died on October 23, 2014, at a nursing home in Coalgate, Oklahoma. Announcing his death, Reba remembered his instruction never to run a horse back to the barn. Her father, she wrote, had simply been taking his time going home. Six days later, the family played her recording at his funeral. “Just Like Them Horses” appeared on *Love Somebody* the following spring. For its black-and-white video, released in January 2016, Reba returned to the family land in Chockie, Oklahoma. Her mother, Jacqueline, appeared alongside her, driving a truck across the pasture to meet her daughter.

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In 2014, Reba McEntire heard a ballad called “Just Like Them Horses” and knew at once where it belonged. Not on the radio, and not on her next album. She…

Country

Johnny Horton had long told friends he believed a drunk driver would kill him. On November 4, 1960, between sets at Austin’s Skyline Club, he stayed in his dressing room rather than enter the bar. The venue carried an unsettling connection to his family. Hank Williams had given his final public performance there eight years earlier, shortly before dying in the back seat of a Cadillac. Horton later married Hank’s widow, Billie Jean. He had been reluctant to accept the Skyline booking. Needing the money, he took the job and missed the premiere of *North to Alaska*, the John Wayne film whose opening featured his voice. After the final set, Horton drove his Cadillac toward Shreveport. Duck season was opening that morning. Beside him, manager Tillman Franks dozed, while guitarist Tommy Tomlinson sat in the back, concerned about their speed. Around 1:30 a.m., on a railroad overpass near Milano, Texas, an oncoming pickup crossed into their path. Its driver, a nineteen-year-old college student who had been drinking, escaped with minor injuries. Horton died while being taken to the hospital. He was 35. Franks and Tomlinson survived. At 27, Billie Jean had lost a second husband in less than eight years. Both men had left the Skyline stage unaware they had just played their last show. “North to Alaska” continued climbing the charts after Horton’s death. The voice audiences heard introducing the film belonged to a singer who never lived to see its success.

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On the night of November 4, 1960, Johnny Horton stayed in the dressing room at the Skyline Club in Austin, Texas, between his sets. He would not walk out into…

Country

The day before Loretta Lynn died, she told her family she was ready for heaven. According to her daughter Peggy, she said Doo was coming to take her home. Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, her husband of 48 years, had died in 1996. Now Loretta was 90 and in declining health. Still, on Monday, October 3, 2022, she was animated and talking. Her family did not understand how close goodbye might be. In the early hours of October 4, Loretta died in her sleep at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee. Calls went out, and relatives hurried to the house. Before the public tributes began, her children were facing the loss of Momma. A year later, the family recalled how ordinary that Tuesday should have been. There were errands waiting, supper to plan, and things they expected to tell her. They remembered the months through what was missing: her voice, her birthday songs, her advice when a decision felt difficult. Fifty-two weeks had passed without another conversation. They also returned to something she had told them in her final days—that the angels were coming. At the time, they had brushed it aside. Peggy’s remembrance offered some comfort amid that regret. She believed her mother had known she was leaving, and that the thought had made her happy.

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In the first days of October 2022, Loretta Lynn told her family that the angels were coming for her. She was 90 years old, her health had been declining, and…

Country

Neil and Pegi Young spent years looking for ways their son Ben could communicate and learn. Born in 1978 with severe cerebral palsy, he could not speak and had extensive physical disabilities. Finding an educational program equipped to support him proved difficult. Neil already had some experience with cerebral palsy through his older son, Zeke, whose mother was actress Carrie Snodgress. Zeke’s disabilities were less severe. Raising Ben brought different demands, with therapies and communication devices becoming part of everyday family life. The challenge was finding a school that could recognize what children understood when speech and movement offered limited ways to show it. Unable to find the program they wanted, Neil and Pegi helped establish the Bridge School in 1986 for children with severe physical and communication impairments. Neil reached out to fellow musicians to help fund it. Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Don Henley and Nils Lofgren were among those who performed at the first benefit. The concerts became a tradition spanning thirty years, eventually welcoming artists including Bob Dylan, Paul McCartney, Pearl Jam and David Bowie. The students remained central to those evenings. Seated behind the performers, they could watch the musicians up close. Neil sometimes turned from the vast audience to play toward them, including Ben. His son’s needs had led the family into unfamiliar territory, then into work that reached well beyond their home. Each benefit helped sustain a school built around a practical conviction: children needed the tools and support to express what they knew, however they communicated.

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The Uncompromising Rocker and the Silent Son Who Rewrote His Voice When a Relentless Star Met an Insoluble Reality By 1978, Neil Young sat at the absolute summit of the…

Country

Linda Ronstadt could fill an arena in the 1970s and still feel lonely on the road. Selling millions of records brought opportunities, but the constant travel made it difficult to sustain the ordinary closeness she wanted. Touring and recording repeatedly interrupted her relationships. She dated prominent men, including Jerry Brown and George Lucas, but never married. Eventually, she decided marriage wasn’t for her. Years later, she chose motherhood on her own terms, adopting Mary Clementine and Carlos. She raised them with considerable distance from the publicity that had shaped her working life. At home, traditional Mexican music connected the children to her family’s heritage. Ronstadt recalled that Mary was about six before she realized her mother also sang in English. For a singer whose English-language hits had been everywhere on American radio, it was a revealing detail. Her children were discovering her through the songs she loved at home, rather than the celebrity other people knew. In 1997, Ronstadt moved the family from Tucson to San Francisco, influenced partly by schools and the environment she wanted for her son. Decisions about where to live now followed her children’s needs. Later, she spoke warmly about Sunday brunch with them and the pleasure of having family nearby. After years of moving between cities for work, she had built a life around people she could see without leaving home for another tour.

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LINDA RONSTADT BUILT THE QUIET FAMILY LIFE FAME NEVER GAVE HER At the height of the 1970s, Linda Ronstadt could walk onto a stage and hear thousands of people scream…

Country

Travis Tritt didn’t write “Here’s a Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)” expecting a hit. He wrote it after coming home from work to discover that his second wife had left, taking most of the furniture with her. Country stardom was still years away. He was holding down a regular job while pursuing music, and now he was sitting in a nearly empty house with divorce papers in front of him. Then she called. His wife said she might have made a mistake and asked whether they should give the marriage another chance. Tritt listened while looking through the paperwork. The conversation left him with an answer—and a song title. He later recalled writing “Here’s a Quarter” in about fifteen minutes. At first, it was simply his way of dealing with the divorce. He had little reason to imagine that strangers would eventually sing those words back to him. Years later, with a record deal secured, he pulled out the song during an acoustic performance at Billy Bob’s Texas. The audience’s immediate response persuaded him it deserved a wider hearing. Released in 1991, it became one of the signature hits of his early career. A song written alone after a marriage fell apart had found an audience that understood every word—and a sharp, memorable way to say they were done listening.

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TRAVIS TRITT TURNED DIVORCE PAPERS AND ONE PHONE CALL INTO “HERE’S A QUARTER” Travis Tritt came home from work one afternoon and found the house nearly empty. His second wife…

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You Missed

Country

A cot waited in a rehearsal hall at RCA Victor’s New York studio while Jimmie Rodgers made his final recordings. Between songs, he lay down to recover enough strength for another take. It was May 1933. Rodgers was 35 and had battled tuberculosis since 1924. As his health deteriorated, his earnings had dwindled. Victor was paying $250 per recorded side, and he wanted to provide for his wife, Carrie, and their daughter, Anita. The sessions started on May 17. Within days, standing to sing became impossible. He worked from an easy chair, supported by pillows that brought him close enough to the microphone, then returned to the cot. On May 24, two musicians accompanied him through three songs. After they left, Rodgers recorded one more with only his guitar: “Years Ago.” He had completed twelve songs in eight days. The following night at the Taft Hotel, severe coughing gave way to hemorrhaging in his lungs. The hotel doctor could not be located. Rodgers fell into a coma and died on May 26, roughly 36 hours after his last recording. Before music made him famous, he had worked as a railroad brakeman. A Southern Railway train carried his body home to Meridian, Mississippi, in a baggage car. According to accounts of the journey, the engineer kept sounding the whistle along the way.

Country

Randy Owen sometimes stopped his tour bus at truck stops to call radio DJs from pay phones. Alabama had already made him a country star. These calls were about persuading stations to help children at St. Jude. He knew what it meant to grow up with little. On his family’s sharecropper farm near Fort Payne, Alabama, he picked cotton and corn to help put food on the table. At school, other children mocked his scarred hands and the cotton dust on his clothes. Years later, after millions of record sales, Owen met St. Jude founder Danny Thomas in Atlanta. Thomas asked him to bring the country music community into the hospital’s fundraising work. When illness prevented Thomas from speaking at Nashville’s Country Radio Seminar, Owen took his place and proposed a nationwide radio effort. Winning support required persistence. He later described himself as “begging, pleading” with DJs. Some stations remained unconvinced. The first Country Cares radiothon aired on November 19, 1989: twelve hours, 45 artists and more than 800 stations. It raised approximately $1 million. By its 35th year in 2024, the initiative had brought in more than $1 billion. Owen has said helping St. Jude may be his most important work beyond being a husband and father. That enormous total began with individual requests, including calls made beside the highway between shows. Owen kept asking stations to participate. Across the country, their listeners kept answering.

Country

Lorrie Morgan saved the card Keith Whitley gave her at the Nashville airport for her flight home. When she finally opened it, her husband was dead. It was early May 1989. Lorrie was heading to Alaska to promote her first RCA album, while Keith was enjoying the strongest run of his career. Just weeks earlier, “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” had become his third consecutive No. 1. At home, success had brought little reassurance. Keith had struggled with alcohol for years. A period of sobriety beginning in 1987 lasted about six months. Lorrie later described the fear surrounding his drinking as living with a ticking time bomb. In her 1997 memoir, she recalled tying her leg to his while they slept so she would know if he got up to drink. During her trip, he began drinking again that weekend. On Tuesday morning, May 9, his brother-in-law, Lane Palmer, visited the house in Goodlettsville. They drank coffee and discussed golf and lunch. Palmer left around 8:30 a.m. When he returned roughly an hour later, Keith was lying on the bed, fully dressed and unconscious. The medical examiner determined that he died from acute alcohol poisoning. Traveling back to Nashville, Lorrie read the card she had set aside. She later said its words left her feeling that Keith had been trying to tell her something—a feeling she was left to carry without the chance to ask him.

Country

For Vince Gill, the memory of singing with Dolly Parton came down to their final note together at the 1995 CMA Awards. Thirty-one years later, on the day she died, he shared that performance again. “We are all crushed here at our house,” he wrote. He called the closing note of their duet one of the most beautiful sounds he had ever heard. Their recording of “I Will Always Love You” began with Dolly’s album *Something Special*. That summer, she revisited three of her classics, including the farewell she had written for Porter Wagoner in 1973. It had already topped the country chart twice in her own voice, and Whitney Houston’s 1992 recording had brought it to listeners worldwide. For this version, Dolly invited Vince to join her. They performed it on the Grand Ole Opry on August 26, 1995, during a TNN broadcast. Radio programmers began playing the duet before Columbia officially issued it as a single. That unsolicited airplay carried it onto Billboard’s country chart at No. 53. On October 4, they sang it again at the CMA Awards. Vince, then 38, was hosting the broadcast at the Grand Ole Opry House. He stepped away from those duties to sing beside the woman who had written the song when he was sixteen. As the performance ended, their voices met on one sustained note. Decades later, that was the moment he singled out. Released as a single that November, the duet reached No. 15, received a Grammy nomination and won the 1996 CMA award for Vocal Event of the Year. But Vince’s remembrance centered on what he had heard standing beside her. Dolly died in Nashville on August 25, 2026, at 80, after a brief battle with cancer. Two days later, Vince appeared at the Midland Theatre in Kansas City. He told the audience how deeply his family was hurting, then began “I Will Always Love You.” This time, he sang it alone. Fan footage captured him struggling with his emotions throughout the performance. When he stepped back to compose himself, people in the audience carried the words. Musicians behind him wiped their eyes. He reached the closing note without Dolly’s voice beside his. After finishing, he moved away from the microphone, placed a hand over his chest and lowered his head.