The Greatest Oldies Music

Country

Marty Robbins wrote “Two Little Boys” for Jean Shepard after Hawkshaw Hawkins died. Then he placed her sons’ names in the songwriting credit, giving them the financial benefit of a song about the father they had lost. Hawkshaw died on March 5, 1963, in the plane crash that also killed Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas. Jean was 29, eight months pregnant, and caring for their fifteen-month-old son, Don Robin, whose name partly honored Marty. Before leaving that morning, Hawk had looked into Don’s crib and said he wanted another child just like him. Their second son, Harold Franklin Hawkins II, arrived 34 days after the crash. For months, Jean stayed away from performing. Her parents moved in to help, she sold Hawk’s quarter horses, and she considered leaving music altogether. Opry president Jack DeWitt encouraged her to return. Later in 1963, Marty approached her outside a Nashville publishing office. He wanted to write about her loss. Jean told him he couldn’t possibly know how she felt. He wrote the song anyway. After hearing it, she conceded that he had done a “pretty damn good job.” On January 27, 1964, Jean recorded “Two Little Boys” alongside “Second Fiddle (To an Old Guitar).” Capitol paired them on a single. “Second Fiddle” reached No. 5, giving her a chart comeback after five years without one. On the other side was Marty’s gift: a song that acknowledged what Jean was raising her sons without, and writing credits that helped provide for them.

In January 1964, ten months after Hawkshaw Hawkins died in the plane crash that also took Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas and pilot Randy Hughes, his widow Jean Shepard went into a Nashville studio and recorded a song about the two little boys he left behind. Marty Robbins wrote it. When the single came out, the writer’s credit did not carry his name. It read “Don & Harold Hawkins,” the names of her sons.

That record was the start of Jean Shepard’s way back. To understand what it cost her to make it, you have to go back to the spring of 1963.

The morning Hawk left

Jean Shepard and Hawkshaw Hawkins had joined the Grand Ole Opry the same year, 1955. They married on November 26, 1960, onstage at a show in Wichita, Kansas, with Capitol producer Ken Nelson giving the bride away. A year later came their first son, Don Robin, named for two friends: Don Gibson and Marty Robbins.

By March 1963 the family lived on a three-acre place in Goodlettsville, Tennessee, with a horse stable. Jean was 29 and eight months pregnant. Hawk was flying to Kansas City for a benefit show for the family of disc jockey “Cactus” Jack Call, who had been killed in a car accident.

Fifty years later, Jean told The Tennessean what she remembered of that morning. Before he left, Hawk leaned over the baby’s crib and said he wanted another one just like that.

The night of March 5, 1963

Hawk called her from Kansas City to say he was flying home with Randy Hughes, and called again from Dyersburg, Tennessee, where the plane stopped to refuel. That evening, Jean felt dizzy and a sharp pain, and went to bed. She later connected the feeling with the time the plane went down near Camden.

Around 11 p.m., a phone call woke her with the news that the plane was missing. Her doctor sedated her. A highway patrol officer was posted at the house, and friends, Minnie Pearl among them, sat by her bed through the night. The wreckage was found at dawn.

On April 8, 1963, Jean gave birth to a second son. She named him Harold Franklin Hawkins II, after his father.

Walking away from the stage

The Country  Music Hall of Fame puts it simply: overwhelmed, Shepard put her career on hold for several months. Her parents moved in to run the household and help with the newborn and the toddler. She sold Hawk’s quarter horses.

She also thought hard about leaving music altogether. It was Opry president Jack DeWitt who persuaded her to keep going. She returned to the Opry stage several months after the crash and went back into the recording studio in August 1963.

She had not had a hit in years. Coming back meant starting over as a widow with two babies.

“You don’t know how I feel”

Later in 1963, Jean was walking into the Cedarwood Publishing office in Nashville when she ran into Marty Robbins. He had been a close friend to both her and Hawk. He told her he wanted to write a song about what she had lost. She answered him flatly, as she recalled in her 2014 autobiography, Down Through the Years:

You can’t write a song for me because you don’t know how I feel.

Robbins wrote it anyway. “Two Little Boys” is sung in the voice of a widow who sees her late husband in their sons and believes he would be proud of how they are growing. When Jean heard it, she told him he had done a very good job, in somewhat saltier words.

Then she noticed the credit. Robbins had left his own name off and listed her boys as the writers, so the royalties would go to them. She later wrote that she thought it was the most wonderful thing he could have done.

One session, two songs

On January 27, 1964, Jean recorded at Columbia’s studio in Nashville with producer Marvin Hughes. Three songs were cut that day. One was “Two Little Boys.” Another was a lighthearted Betty Amos number about a wife who comes second to her husband’s guitar, “Second Fiddle (To an Old Guitar).”

Capitol released the two together in April 1964, with “Second Fiddle” on the A-side and Robbins’s song on the back. “Second Fiddle” reached No. 5 on the Billboard  country chart, her first chart record since 1959, and earned a Grammy nomination. It opened a run of hits that carried her through the rest of the decade.

“Two Little Boys” was never a hit on its own and was not put on an album until a German box set collected it in 1995. Jean sang it on The Wilburn Brothers Show soon after the release. Watching that clip decades later, she said you could almost read her face. She was not herself. She was simply sad.

What the record carried

Jean Shepard stayed on the Opry for 60 consecutive years, the first woman to reach that mark, and retired from the stage on November 21, 2015, her 82nd birthday. Her son Harold, the baby born five weeks after the crash, was the one who told the world when she died in September 2016.

Through all those years she bristled at how the 1963 crash was remembered almost entirely through Patsy Cline. She never hated Patsy, she said. She resented the way the story was told, as if no one else had been on that plane.

One record from 1964 holds both halves of what she went through. The front side, a bouncy song about playing second fiddle, put her back on the radio. The back side, written by a friend who refused to sign it, went quietly to the two boys Hawk never got to raise.

Related Post

There’s a grin behind Toby Keith’s “How Do You Like Me Now?!” that makes its wounded pride even more entertaining. Co-written with Chuck Cannon and released in November 1999, it spent five weeks atop Billboard’s country chart and became the biggest country hit of 2000. I’ve always enjoyed the satisfaction in its story: the small-town boy dismissed in high school finally gets his chance to be heard. Toby gives him plenty of swagger, but you can still hear how much the rejection stung. That lingering hurt makes the boast work. He’s successful now—and he wants someone who doubted him to notice.

Toby Keith had a gift for telling a ridiculous barroom story as though it had happened to someone you knew. In “The Size I Wear,” co-written with Rivers Rutherford for his 2012 album *Hope on the Rocks*, two friends settle in for beers before a group of secretaries gives the evening a new direction. What I enjoy most is the mischief in his delivery. He lets the situation get out of hand without sounding remotely surprised. A few drinks, a little misplaced confidence, and suddenly there’s a story somebody will have to explain the next morning. Toby knew exactly how to land that kind of joke.

Marty Robbins’s tribute to his wife reached record stores on January 23, 1970. Four days later, he underwent triple bypass surgery at Nashville’s St. Thomas Hospital. He had gone in expecting a checkup and permission to race that spring. Although he had suffered a heart attack while touring Ohio the previous August, he told reporters he had felt well since. The tests revealed two blocked arteries and a third that was 75 percent obstructed. “I came and took them and found out nothing was all right,” he said. The January 27 operation was the first triple bypass performed at St. Thomas, at a time when the procedure was still uncommon. One doctor described Marty as having entered surgery hanging by a thread. Meanwhile, listeners were discovering “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife,” written for Marizona. They had met at an ice cream parlor in Glendale, Arizona. She wanted to marry a singing cowboy; he was singing in Phoenix clubs and struggling to make a living. They married on September 27, 1948, the day after his twenty-third birthday. Marizona was eighteen. By the spring of 1970, the song had reached No. 1. “My wife is everything I said in the song,” Marty explained. “It’s a true song.” Recovery brought him back to racing that fall. His appetite for it survived the surgery: at Charlotte in 1974, he drove into a wall at roughly 160 miles an hour to avoid Richard Childress’s stalled car. He needed 37 stitches in his face. On December 8, 1982, another heart attack and emergency surgery ended differently. Marty died at St. Thomas at 57, with Marizona and their children at the hospital. They had been married for 34 years. The young singer she had met in Arizona had become a country star, and among the records he left behind was his own account of what she had meant to him.

You Missed

Country

There’s a grin behind Toby Keith’s “How Do You Like Me Now?!” that makes its wounded pride even more entertaining. Co-written with Chuck Cannon and released in November 1999, it spent five weeks atop Billboard’s country chart and became the biggest country hit of 2000. I’ve always enjoyed the satisfaction in its story: the small-town boy dismissed in high school finally gets his chance to be heard. Toby gives him plenty of swagger, but you can still hear how much the rejection stung. That lingering hurt makes the boast work. He’s successful now—and he wants someone who doubted him to notice.

Country

Toby Keith had a gift for telling a ridiculous barroom story as though it had happened to someone you knew. In “The Size I Wear,” co-written with Rivers Rutherford for his 2012 album *Hope on the Rocks*, two friends settle in for beers before a group of secretaries gives the evening a new direction. What I enjoy most is the mischief in his delivery. He lets the situation get out of hand without sounding remotely surprised. A few drinks, a little misplaced confidence, and suddenly there’s a story somebody will have to explain the next morning. Toby knew exactly how to land that kind of joke.

Country

Marty Robbins’s tribute to his wife reached record stores on January 23, 1970. Four days later, he underwent triple bypass surgery at Nashville’s St. Thomas Hospital. He had gone in expecting a checkup and permission to race that spring. Although he had suffered a heart attack while touring Ohio the previous August, he told reporters he had felt well since. The tests revealed two blocked arteries and a third that was 75 percent obstructed. “I came and took them and found out nothing was all right,” he said. The January 27 operation was the first triple bypass performed at St. Thomas, at a time when the procedure was still uncommon. One doctor described Marty as having entered surgery hanging by a thread. Meanwhile, listeners were discovering “My Woman, My Woman, My Wife,” written for Marizona. They had met at an ice cream parlor in Glendale, Arizona. She wanted to marry a singing cowboy; he was singing in Phoenix clubs and struggling to make a living. They married on September 27, 1948, the day after his twenty-third birthday. Marizona was eighteen. By the spring of 1970, the song had reached No. 1. “My wife is everything I said in the song,” Marty explained. “It’s a true song.” Recovery brought him back to racing that fall. His appetite for it survived the surgery: at Charlotte in 1974, he drove into a wall at roughly 160 miles an hour to avoid Richard Childress’s stalled car. He needed 37 stitches in his face. On December 8, 1982, another heart attack and emergency surgery ended differently. Marty died at St. Thomas at 57, with Marizona and their children at the hospital. They had been married for 34 years. The young singer she had met in Arizona had become a country star, and among the records he left behind was his own account of what she had meant to him.

Country

Waylon Jennings had plenty of songs that could rouse a crowd. When he named his favorite recording on an Austin stage nearly a decade later, he chose the tender “Dreaming My Dreams with You.” He recorded it in 1975, during the years that established his outlaw reputation. Fans knew the black hat, the leather-covered Telecaster, and a voice with enough grit to make defiance sound effortless. Here, that voice carried resignation. Waylon sang slowly, letting the hurt emerge without pushing it. The man in the song understood that love might end while the longing remained. There was little anger in his delivery. He left room for affection, regret, and the possibility that someone could leave his life without ever leaving his dreams. The single reached No. 10 on the country chart. Its place in Waylon’s own affections was clearer when he introduced it years later: “I guess this is my favorite song I ever recorded.” For a singer so closely associated with independence, it was a revealing choice—a performance in which he allowed himself to sound completely unable to let go.