The Greatest Oldies Music

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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.

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, and by that May he could barely stand. He went to New York anyway, to record one more time for RCA Victor. Over eight days he cut twelve songs, resting on a cot between takes. The last one was called “Years Ago.” About 36 hours after he finished it, he was gone.

Why He Went Back to New York

Rodgers had been a railroad brakeman before he became a star, and he never lost the habit of hard work. But by 1933 the work was also about money. The Depression had cut into record sales, his heavy spending had cost him his home in Kerrville, Texas, and his income had fallen as his health failed. In 1932 he had signed a new deal with Victor that paid $250 for every side he recorded.

He wanted to leave something for his wife, Carrie, and their daughter, Anita. The May sessions would bring in about $3,000 in cash. Rodgers talked his producer, Ralph Peer, into setting them up, even though Peer was not in the studio when they took place.

He arrived in New York by ship on May 14, 1933, with a private nurse, Cora Bedell. He checked into the Taft Hotel and spent a few days resting. A driver named Castro was assigned to take him wherever he needed to go.

A Cot Between Takes

The sessions began on May 17 at Victor’s studio on East 24th Street, with engineer Fred Maisch running the room. On that first day Rodgers recorded four songs, including “Blue Yodel No. 12” and “The Cowhand’s Last Ride.”

After that, his strength went quickly. Peer’s assistant, Bob Gilmore, tried to get the remaining work postponed. Rodgers kept going. By May 20 he was singing from an easy chair, propped up with pillows so he could reach the microphone. A cot was set up in a rehearsal hall so he could lie down between takes and gather enough breath for the next one. Most of those last songs feature only Rodgers and his own guitar.

“Years Ago”

On May 24, Victor brought in two session musicians to help him, steel guitarist John Cali and guitarist Tony Colicchio. Together they recorded “Old Love Letters,” “Mississippi Delta Blues” and “Somewhere Down Below the Dixon Line.”

Then the musicians were sent home. Rodgers recorded the final song of the session alone with his guitar. It was “Years Ago,” and it would be the last thing he ever put on record. Counting all four days, he had cut twelve songs since May 17.

The Night at the Taft Hotel

The next day, May 25, Rodgers went out to Coney Island with his driver. Coming back, he walked the last few blocks to the Taft Hotel and needed help getting up to his room. Once inside, he had a severe coughing spell.

Around midnight the coughing came back, and his lungs began to hemorrhage. Hotel staff could not find the house doctor. Castro was out on an errand and did not get back in time to take him to a hospital. Rodgers slipped into a coma and died on May 26, 1933. He was 35 years old.

The Train Home to Meridian

The railroad brought him home. His pearl-gray casket was placed on a raised platform covered with lilies inside a converted baggage car, and the Southern Railway carried him south to Meridian, Mississippi. The trip was run by men he had once worked alongside. Accounts of the journey say the engineer blew the whistle the whole way, and hundreds of people were waiting when the train came into Meridian.

On May 29, his body lay in state at the Scottish Rite Cathedral in Meridian. He was buried at Oak Grove Cemetery. Two years later, Carrie published a book about their life together, My Husband, Jimmie Rodgers.

What He Left Behind

The songs from that final week were released after his death. In 1961, when the  Country Music Hall of Fame named its very first members, Jimmie Rodgers was one of the three, alongside Hank Williams and Fred Rose. The Hall later put his importance in one line:

Created and defined the role of the singing star in country music.

Ernest Tubb, Hank Snow and many others who came after him named Rodgers as the singer who showed them the way. Carrie later gave Tubb one of Jimmie’s guitars.

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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.

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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.