The Greatest Oldies Music

FROM POURING CONCRETE ON OKLAHOMA OIL FIELDS TO CONQUERING COUNTRY MUSIC, TOBY KEITH BUILT A LEGEND ON UNYIELDING PERSEVERANCE.HE WAS STILL POURING CONCRETE ON OIL FIELDS WHEN NASHVILLE TOLD HIM HE WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH. YEARS LATER, THE SAME MAN WOULD BECOME ONE OF COUNTRY MUSIC’’S BIGGEST VOICES.Before Toby Keith filled arenas, he spent his days on Oklahoma oil fields. After graduating from high school, he worked alongside his father in the petroleum industry, hauling pipe and pouring concrete. At night, he played bars with a local band called Easy Money, chasing a music career that seemed far less certain than his day job.Then the oil industry collapsed in the early 1980s. Keith lost his steady paycheck and found himself doing whatever work he could while continuing to play every club that would have him. He even joined the Oklahoma City Drillers as a semi-professional defensive end, earning extra money while refusing to give up on music.For years, Nashville wasn’t interested. Record labels passed. Industry executives heard the big Oklahoma voice but didn’t believe it fit what country radio wanted. Keith kept driving from one bar to another, building an audience one night at a time instead of waiting for someone in Music Row to change his life.He finally recorded a demo of a song he had written himself. It was called “Should’ve Been a Cowboy.” Mercury Records signed him in 1993, and the song exploded almost immediately. It reached No. 1 on the Billboard country chart and became the most-played country song of the 1990s on country radio. His debut album sold more than a million copies, turning an Oklahoma oil-field worker into one of Nashville’s biggest new stars.Success never changed the way Keith saw himself. He kept writing songs about working people, small towns, soldiers, oil workers and ordinary Americans because they were the people he had known long before anyone knew his name. That background became the foundation of his career.When patriotic songs later made headlines, when sold-out arenas sang every word back to him, and when he became one of country music’s defining stars, Toby Keith wasn’t inventing a character.He was still singing from the life he had lived before Nashville ever believed in him.

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TOBY KEITH WAS STILL POURING CONCRETE ON OKLAHOMA OIL FIELDS WHEN NASHVILLE DECIDED HE WASN’T GOOD ENOUGH. YEARS LATER, THE SAME VOICE WOULD HELP DEFINE COUNTRY MUSIC. Before Toby Keith…

Country

FROM A SARDINE-CAN GUITAR IN THE MIGRANT FIELDS TO THE NATIONAL RECORDING REGISTRY, FREDDY FENDER CARRIED THE SOUL OF TWO CULTURES TO THE TOP OF THE CHARTS. HIS FIRST GUITAR WAS A SARDINE CAN, A LENGTH OF WIRE, AND SCRAPS OF WOOD. Before anyone knew the name Freddy Fender, he was Baldemar Huerta, born in San Benito, Texas, to a family that went wherever the harvest went. They picked beets in Michigan and cucumbers in Indiana, tomatoes and hay in Ohio, cotton in Arkansas, onions in New Mexico, then turned back toward Texas hoping the money would last until Christmas. He usually got home two months after school started. What stayed with him was the sound. He worked beside Black field hands who sang blues and gospel while they worked, and his family later wrote that it reached the core of him. Hank Williams and Ernest Tubb came off the truck radio, and boleros and rancheras came from home and from the stations across the river. He was assembling a voice years before he had any use for one. By 1974 he was still only a part-time musician when a producer asked him to sing over an instrumental track, and he put a full verse and chorus of it in Spanish. “The recording only took a few minutes,” he said later, figuring that was the end of it. “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” went No. 1 on the country chart in March 1975 and No. 1 on the pop chart that May. In 2025 the Library of Congress placed that recording in the National Recording Registry — kept for good, beet fields and cotton rows and all.

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Freddy Fender’s First Guitar and the Long Road to a Classic Before the name Freddy Fender became part of American music history, he was Baldemar Huerta, a boy from San…

Country

STAYING OUT OF THE HOLLYWOOD SPOTLIGHT TO BUILD BRIDGES AT HOME, COY “DENVER” PARTON’S QUIET LIFE WILL NOW LIVE ON THROUGH THE GIFTS OF CHILDREN’S BOOKS. HE WAS THE THIRD OF TWELVE PARTON CHILDREN, AND HE IS THE FIFTH OF THEM TO BE BURIED. Coy “Denver” Parton died on Thursday, July 23, at 82, in Sevierville, Tennessee, in the county where he was born in August of 1943. Dolly came next, about two and a half years behind him. She left for Nashville, and Stella and Randy eventually followed her onto stages. Denver never did. He ran a crane and spent years building bridges across East Tennessee. He kept a homestead. He hunted. Taste of Country once called him perhaps the most private of all the Partons, noted there was almost nothing on the record about him at all, and guessed that was how he preferred it. He had already buried his wife, Carolyn. The family had already buried Larry, Floyd, Randy, and David, and in March of last year Dolly buried her husband of nearly sixty years. Denver’s service was held privately. No cause of death was given. Then came the one public request. Instead of flowers, the family asked that people give to Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, the program that has mailed free books to small children since 1995, when it began right there in Sevier County. A man almost nothing was ever written about will now be remembered by strangers putting books into the hands of children in the county where he was born.

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Denver Parton’s Quiet Life, and the Family Memory He Leaves Behind When Coy “Denver” Parton died on Thursday, July 23, in Sevierville, Tennessee, the news carried a rare stillness with…

Country

AFTER BEING REJECTED FOR SOUNDING TOO COUNTRY ON A TELEVISION SINGING COMPETITION, MORGAN WALLEN RETURNED YEARS LATER TO FILL AMERICA’S LARGEST STADIUM. HE MADE THE TOP 20 ON A TELEVISION SINGING SHOW, THEN SANG A COUNTRY SONG AND GOT SENT HOME. That was 2014. Morgan Wallen was a Southern Baptist pastor’s son from east Tennessee who had only ever sung in church, and he auditioned for The Voice with a Howie Day cover. He landed on Usher’s team, got stolen away by Adam Levine, and was cut in the playoffs before the live rounds began. Years later he gave his own account of why. “They wanted me to sing pop music,” he said, describing himself as a fish out of water who had never even been on an airplane before the show. Twelve years on, he walked into a building that had gone almost a century without hosting a concert at all. Michigan Stadium opened in 1927 and stayed a football field until Zach Bryan played there last September. On July 24 and 25, Wallen played the second and third shows in its history, an estimated 75,000 people a night, in the largest stadium in the United States. The kid they dressed up in pop clothes was finally too country to fit anywhere smaller.

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From Reality Show Elimination to Stadium Headliner: Morgan Wallen’s Long, Country Road In 2014, Morgan Wallen was still the son of a Southern Baptist pastor from East Tennessee, a young…

Oldies Musics

In June 1977, just weeks before the world lost Elvis Presley, CBS cameras captured something they were never meant to. The network had planned a television special celebrating the greatest entertainer of his generation. Instead, they unknowingly recorded the final chapter of an extraordinary life. Looking back today, those performances feel less like a concert and more like history unfolding in real time.

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In June 1977, just weeks before the world lost Elvis Presley, CBS cameras captured something they were never meant to. The network had planned a television special celebrating the greatest…

Oldies Musics

One of the most persistent questions about Elvis Presley’s death is also one of the most misunderstood. Did he really die on the toilet? The short answer is yes. On the morning of August 16, 1977, Elvis was found unconscious on the bathroom floor at Graceland after collapsing while using the toilet. What is often repeated as a joke was, in reality, the tragic final moment of a man whose health had been declining for years.

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One of the most persistent questions about Elvis Presley’s death is also one of the most misunderstood. Did he really die on the toilet? The short answer is yes. On…

Oldies Musics

Few people in modern history became famous as quickly as Elvis Presley. In just a matter of months during 1956, he went from a promising young singer from Mississippi to the biggest name in entertainment. His records topped the charts, television appearances attracted enormous audiences, and wherever he went, crowds gathered simply to catch a glimpse of him.

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Few people in modern history became famous as quickly as Elvis Presley. In just a matter of months during 1956, he went from a promising young singer from Mississippi to…

Country

FACING CRITICS AND FORWARD OPERATING BASES, TOBY KEITH GAVE TWENTY YEARS OF HIS LIFE TO THE TROOPS WHO CALLED HIM FAMILY. The critics called him a warmonger. The soldiers called him family. Only one of them ever met him. Toby Keith didn’t have to go. He was already a superstar — private jets, sold-out arenas, number one hits. Instead, he got on military transport planes. Flew into Iraq. Afghanistan. Kuwait. Places where the stage was a flatbed truck and the audience carried rifles. Not once. Not for a photo op. 11 USO tours. Over 285 shows. Nearly 256,000 troops. More than any artist of his generation. He did it for his father — H.K. Covel, an Army veteran who lost his right eye in service, who raised his kids to respect the flag. When his dad died in 2001, six months before 9/11, Toby wrote “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue” in 20 minutes. Critics tore him apart for it. Radio hosts called him angry. Hollywood called him worse. He never apologized. He just kept flying back. Soldiers remember him eating in the mess halls, not backstage. Playing acoustic sets on forward operating bases too dangerous for full crews. Coming back year after year, even when the cameras stopped following. Then came the diagnosis. Stomach cancer. He fought it quietly for two years — and still stood on stage in 2023, thin and unbroken, singing “Don’t Let the Old Man In.” He passed in February 2024. The Country Music Hall of Fame called his name that same year. He never wore the uniform. But ask any soldier who was there. Some people salute with their hand. Toby Keith saluted with 20 years of his life.

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Toby Keith Never Wore the Uniform—But for Two Decades, He Carried a Piece of Home to Those Who Did “THE CRITICS CALLED HIM A WARMONGER. THE SOLDIERS CALLED HIM FAMILY.…

Country

FROM GROWING UP ON ANNE MURRAY’S RECORDS IN ALBERTA TO SHARING THE STAGE DECADES LATER, K.D. LANG’S LIFELONG ADMIRATION CAME FULL CIRCLE. K.D. lang took her Hall of Fame award from Anne Murray in 2013 and told her, “I still have a crush on you.” It happened at the Juno Awards in Regina, April 21, 2013, on national television. The woman handing lang the honour was one of the idols she’d grown up on out in Consort, Alberta. Murray said of her that night, “I loved her sense of fun, her spunk, her gumption, and she could sing.” Six years earlier they had already sung together. For Duets: Friends & Legends, Murray re-recorded seventeen of her own songs with her favourite female singers, and the one she cut with lang was “A Love Song.” Emmylou Harris, Shania Twain, Olivia Newton-John and Celine Dion were all on that record. Reviewers still singled out how cleanly lang’s voice sat against Murray’s. Eighteen years after that album, on October 27, 2025, the Grand Ole Opry House filled up for a tribute night called The Music of My Life. Murray was 80, retired from the stage since 2008, and she stayed down in the audience with more than a dozen of her family. One after another the singers took her hits. Then k.d. lang walked out and sang “A Love Song” — the one the two of them had recorded together — back to the woman who had been her idol since Alberta.

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k.d. lang, Anne Murray, and a Full-Circle Moment That Still Resonates On April 21, 2013, at the Juno Awards in Regina, k.d. lang stood on a national stage and received…

Country

GROWING UP SIDE BY SIDE AS YOUNG MOTHER AND DAUGHTER, LORETTA LYNN AND BETTY SUE FORGED A BOND THAT SURVIVED POVERTY, FAME, AND AN UNBEARABLE LOSS. LORETTA LYNN BECAME A MOTHER AT 16. DECADES LATER, SHE ADMITTED SHE AND HER DAUGHTER HAD ALMOST RAISED EACH OTHER. Betty Sue was Loretta’s first child. She arrived before Loretta had finished growing up herself. While most girls her age were thinking about school dances and the future, Loretta was keeping house, working in the garden and caring for a baby. Three more children followed quickly. Betty Sue became the feisty little “boss” of her younger siblings, while her young mother tried to build a home from almost nothing. Looking back, Loretta said, “In many ways it felt like we raised each other.” As the years passed, their bond changed. Betty Sue became a songwriter, helped her mother with the ranch and worked beside her in entertainment. But more than that, she became the person Loretta called every day. Not simply a daughter. A best friend. When Betty Sue died in 2013, Loretta had already survived poverty, a difficult marriage, the death of her son Jack and six decades in the music business. None of it prepared her for losing her firstborn. “Part of my heart died when she left us,” Loretta later wrote. Loretta became a mother at 16. But when Betty Sue died, she learned that no matter how old a child becomes, a mother never stops seeing the baby who first gave her that name.

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Loretta Lynn and Betty Sue Lynn: A Mother-Daughter Bond That Grew Up Together When Loretta Lynn became a mother at 16, her life changed before she had even finished becoming…

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