The Greatest Oldies Music

Country

When Willie Nelson handed Columbia Records *Red Headed Stranger* in 1975, some executives thought he’d brought them a demo. They heard his voice, guitar and piano, with room between the notes where they expected more instruments. Willie considered the record finished. He’d spent years making records in Nashville with producers shaping the arrangements around him. Now he had a contract that gave him creative control, and he used it. He recorded the album inexpensively in Texas, leaving out the orchestral arrangements and extra polish that had surrounded much of his earlier work. Columbia’s Nashville executives wanted a fuller sound, but they had little room to insist. The album became a million seller and brought Willie the commercial breakthrough he’d been working toward. “Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain,” a song dating back to 1945, gave him his first No. 1 country single as a recording artist. Its spare arrangement was much of what made people stop and listen. That success gave weight to an argument Willie and Waylon Jennings had been making: singers should have a say in how their own records sounded. For artists pushing against Nashville’s production system, *Red Headed Stranger* offered something more useful than a debate. It sold. The spaces that worried the executives stayed on the record. Buyers heard Willie’s voice clearly, followed the story, and kept bringing the album home.

WILLIE NELSON DELIVERED AN ALBUM COLUMBIA THOUGHT SOUNDED LIKE A DEMO—THEN IT BECAME A CLASSIC

Willie Nelson handed Red Headed Stranger to Columbia Records in 1975, and some people at the label thought there was a problem.

It sounded unfinished.

There was Willie’s voice, his guitar, sparse piano and long stretches where almost nothing seemed to fill the room.

For a major-label country album, it sounded suspiciously like a demo.

That was exactly how Willie wanted it.

Nashville Had Spent Years Adding Things to His Music

Nelson had already lived through a long Nashville career in which producers often decided how his records should sound.Strings.

Backing vocals.

Polished arrangements.

The industry respected Willie as a songwriter, but his own recordings had struggled to capture the strange phrasing and loose rhythmic instincts that made him distinctive.

By the mid-1970s, he finally had something he had wanted for years:

control.

And he intended to use it.

He Recorded the Album Cheaply in Texas

Instead of building an expensive Nashville production, Willie made Red Headed Stranger with remarkable restraint.

The concept followed a fugitive preacher through murder, loneliness and redemption, but the music surrounding the story remained almost bare.

Columbia executives wanted more.

More production.

More polish.

Something that sounded like a finished commercial record.

Willie refused.

His contract gave him enough creative authority that the label had little choice but to release what he delivered.

Then the “Demo” Started Selling

Almost every fear surrounding the record turned out to be wrong.

Red Headed Stranger became a major commercial breakthrough and eventually sold more than a million copies.

Even more surprising was the song that became its biggest single.

“Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain” was an old Fred Rose composition dating back to 1945.

Willie recorded it with the same restraint as the rest of the album.

In 1975, it became his first No. 1 country single as a recording artist.

The song Columbia might easily have surrounded with more production succeeded partly because almost nothing stood between Willie and the listener.

The Album Changed More Than Willie’s Career

The success strengthened an argument already growing around Nashville.

Artists did not always need producers and labels to tell them what their records should become.

Sometimes the person singing the songs understood the sound better than the machinery surrounding him.

That idea became central to the outlaw-country movement associated with Nelson, Waylon Jennings and other artists demanding greater creative control.

Red Headed Stranger proved that independence could work commercially as well as artistically.

Everything Important Was Already There

Columbia heard empty space.

Willie heard room for the song to breathe.

The executives wondered where the rest of the record was.

Listeners discovered that nothing else was necessary.

That became the quiet triumph of Red Headed Stranger.

Willie Nelson had spent years being told how a country record should sound.

When he finally gained enough power to ignore that advice, he made one of his most important albums by removing almost everything Nashville thought a major album needed.

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Johnny Cash needed a lyric sheet to get through the song. The performance became the biggest pop hit of his career. Shel Silverstein, the cartoonist and author of *The Giving Tree*, had played it at a Nashville guitar pull, where songwriters took turns sharing songs. June Carter Cash heard it and urged Johnny to give it a try. He did, at San Quentin State Prison on February 24, 1969. Cash had barely studied the words, so he kept them in front of him onstage. The band had no sheet to follow. Carl Perkins and the other musicians worked out the backing while Johnny sang. The prisoners loved it. Cash later said even he was surprised by the response. That live recording reached No. 1 on the country chart and No. 2 on the pop chart. For three weeks, the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” kept it from the top. Cash won a Grammy for the performance, and Silverstein won one for writing it. If you’ve ever sung along in the car, you probably know what happened to the boy in the story. What’s the song?

In Jerry Reed’s final months, emphysema left him without enough breath to play guitar. He could still laugh, though. Sometimes he laughed so hard he had to make himself stop and get serious long enough to breathe again. Being unable to play was his one regret about the instrument. His “claw” picking had once left even the musicians working on Elvis Presley’s sessions struggling to figure out what he was doing. Family and friends came to spend time with him. Brenda Lee, who’d taken one of his songs into the Top 10 in 1960, visited. So did Bobby Bare, who had shared hundreds of quiet hours with Jerry out fishing. They kept telling stories and making each other laugh. Jerry had also used some of his remaining strength to make a final album to raise money for wounded veterans. During a visit that August, he told Bare something he’d been thinking about: every dream he’d ever had had come true. He died on September 1, 2008, at 71. A few years earlier, Jerry had put it this way: “I’m a cotton mill boy, and I got to go to Hollywood.”

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Country

When Sevierville, Tennessee, put up a bronze statue of Dolly Parton in 1987, her father had a joke ready. Fans might see an idol, he told her, but the pigeons saw an outhouse. Dolly was delighted to have a statue outside the county courthouse in her hometown. She proudly told her father, Robert Lee Parton, about the honor. His teasing was familiar; fame had never stopped him from keeping his daughter’s feet on the ground. But there was something he didn’t tell her. Late at night, he would put a big drum of soapy water and a broom in his pickup, drive to the courthouse and wash the pigeon droppings off the bronze. Dolly knew nothing about those trips while he was alive. After his death, one of her brothers told her what their father had been doing. Years later, she recalled the story on *Jimmy Kimmel Live!* and said she’d cried her eyes out. He’d let her hear the joke. He’d kept the cleaning trips to himself.

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Johnny Cash needed a lyric sheet to get through the song. The performance became the biggest pop hit of his career. Shel Silverstein, the cartoonist and author of *The Giving Tree*, had played it at a Nashville guitar pull, where songwriters took turns sharing songs. June Carter Cash heard it and urged Johnny to give it a try. He did, at San Quentin State Prison on February 24, 1969. Cash had barely studied the words, so he kept them in front of him onstage. The band had no sheet to follow. Carl Perkins and the other musicians worked out the backing while Johnny sang. The prisoners loved it. Cash later said even he was surprised by the response. That live recording reached No. 1 on the country chart and No. 2 on the pop chart. For three weeks, the Rolling Stones’ “Honky Tonk Women” kept it from the top. Cash won a Grammy for the performance, and Silverstein won one for writing it. If you’ve ever sung along in the car, you probably know what happened to the boy in the story. What’s the song?

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In 1989, Charley Pride was hospitalized in a Dallas psychiatric ward. Fans knew the voice behind “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’.” Few knew about the illness he had been living with for years. His first serious episode came in 1968, after performing for American troops in Germany. He couldn’t sleep and became paranoid and confused. He was hospitalized, but resisted when doctors told him he would need lifelong medication. He continued performing. In 1971, he won CMA Entertainer of the Year. At RCA, only Elvis sold more records. Another episode in 1982 led him to take lithium. He later stopped because he believed it had caused a skin rash. In 1989, he was hospitalized again. Rozene, his wife, encouraged him to tell the story. In his 1994 autobiography, Pride described the hospital stays and his behavior during episodes, including throwing televisions. Speaking publicly didn’t settle every private doubt. Three years later, he acknowledged that part of him still wanted to deny the illness. “But I’m on lithium,” he said.