Country music loves a tall tale, so these stories stick to what the record shows. They run from two fiddlers who walked into a New York record company in 1922, through the Bristol sessions and the Grand Ole Opry, to Nashville's studios and a Texas town Waylon Jennings sang about before he ever saw it. Along the way you will meet some of the people behind the hits whose names never made the label.
Every tile in a Country Music game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Stars
nine stories
1When his band left, he recorded alone
On the tile: Jimmie Rodgers1927
Jimmie Rodgers, a former railroad brakeman, came to Ralph Peer's recording sessions in Bristol in the summer of 1927 as part of a group. He split with his band just before the session and recorded solo: "The Soldier's Sweetheart" and "Sleep, Baby, Sleep." Peer heard something special and invited him to Victor's studio in Camden, New Jersey, that November. One song from that trip, "Blue Yodel (T for Texas)," made him a national star, and he came to be called the father of country music.
When the Carter Family recorded at Bristol in 1927, the trio was A. P. Carter, his wife, Sara, and Sara's cousin Maybelle, who was only 18. Maybelle played the melody on the guitar's bass strings while strumming rhythm on the treble strings, so one guitar did two jobs. Her technique, known as the Carter Scratch, helped move the guitar from the background to lead instrument. Decades later, as Mother Maybelle Carter, she played on the landmark 1972 album Will the Circle Be Unbroken with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.
Polio struck DeFord Bailey at age three and stunted his growth, but music came early. "My folks didn't give me no rattler, they gave me a harp," he explained, meaning a harmonica. By June 1926 he was a regular on Nashville's WSM Barn Dance, where George D. Hay dubbed him the Harmonica Wizard. For fifteen years he was one of the show's best-loved and highest-paid stars. His radio career ended in 1941 amid a licensing dispute, and he ran a shoeshine parlor. The Country Music Hall of Fame inducted him in 2005.
Minnie Pearl was a character. Her creator, Sarah Ophelia Colley, the youngest daughter of a prosperous lumber magnate, had hoped to become an actress. Working as a traveling theater director, she met an elderly woman in North Alabama whose funny country speech and manners inspired the character. Minnie made her Grand Ole Opry debut on November 30, 1940, and within a week more than 300 cards, telegrams and letters had arrived for her. She performed on the Opry for fifty years, famous for a straw hat with a $1.98 price tag.
5Why Hank Williams also recorded as Luke the Drifter
On the tile: Hank Williams1950
At the session that produced his 1950 hit "Long Gone Lonesome Blues," Hank Williams began recording narrations and talking blues, most with a strong moral. MGM Records released them under the name Luke the Drifter. The alias was not really a secret; MGM never seriously tried to hide who Luke was. The reason was business. Jukeboxes accounted for more than half of Hank's record sales, and moral recitations were unsuitable for the jukebox trade, so a separate name kept jukebox distributors from ordering them by mistake.
She was born Virginia Patterson Hensley in Winchester, Virginia. She took the name Patsy from her middle name, Patterson, possibly with a nod to the cowgirl singer Patsy Montana, and Cline from her first husband, Gerald Cline. Her first four singles flopped. Then, on January 21, 1957, she made her national TV debut on Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts, singing "Walkin' After Midnight," which reached No. 2 on the country chart and No. 12 on pop. In 1973 she became the first solo female artist elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame.
Many fans believe Johnny Cash served prison time. He did not. He spent only a few nights in jail, on minor charges. The myth followed him from the first time he sang "Folsom Prison Blues," whose notorious shooting line many took as a confession; he had borrowed the idea from Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel (T for Texas)." When he recorded live at Folsom Prison in 1968, Columbia's advertising and his own liner notes hinted at a darker past. In truth, he had spent a decade playing concerts in prisons.
8From the Negro leagues to Entertainer of the Year
On the tile: Charley Pride1966
At sixteen, Charley Pride left Mississippi to play baseball in the Negro American League, but singing proved his greater gift. In 1962 country stars Red Sovine and Red Foley heard him in Helena, Montana, and encouraged him to come to Nashville. RCA's Chet Atkins got approval to sign him, revealing Pride's race only after the deal was agreed, and RCA kept it from country disc jockeys until his third single, "Just Between You and Me," was climbing the charts. Pride became country's first Black superstar and the CMA's 1971 Entertainer of the Year.
Loretta Lynn's first guitar was a $17 Sears model from her husband, Mooney. In February 1960 Zero Records, a small label in Vancouver, British Columbia, signed her and sent her to Los Angeles to record four songs. The couple waited for the records to be pressed, mailed them to country radio stations, then drove toward Nashville, stopping at stations along the way to promote "I'm a Honky Tonk Girl." It reached No. 14 and earned her a first Grand Ole Opry appearance. In 1972 she became the first woman named CMA Entertainer of the Year.
The Carter Family's most famous song began as a parlor song, a quiet tune for Victorian drawing rooms. Its words are usually credited to Maud Irving and its music to Joseph Philbrick Webster, and it is believed to date from 1860, apparently titled "I'll Twine 'Mid the Ringlets." Passed along by ear, the words drifted. Where some versions begin "I'll twine 'mid the ringlets of my raven black hair," the Carters sang "Oh, I'll twine with my mingles and waving black hair." Their 1928 "Wildwood Flower" sold nearly 100,000 copies.
Roy Acuff and His Crazy Tennesseans recorded "Wabash Cannon Ball" in Chicago in 1936, and it became Acuff's trademark song. On that record, though, the solo vocal belongs to the band's harmonica player, Sam "Dynamite" Hatcher, while Acuff supplied the steam-whistle effects. The song grew out of older train songs such as "The Great Rock Island Route." Only later did the Wabash Railroad give the name to an actual train, running a Wabash Cannon Ball between Detroit and St. Louis. The train was named after the song, not the other way around.
A $50 tonsillectomy cost young Ernest Tubb his yodel, forcing him to drop most of the Jimmie Rodgers songs he loved and find his own style. Then a Dallas-Fort Worth jukebox operator told him his quiet records got plenty of afternoon plays, but louder night crowds drowned them out. The operator suggested he at least electrify his lead guitarist. For his April 1941 session in Dallas, Tubb used Fay "Smitty" Smith, who could not improvise and wrote out his parts note for note. "Walking the Floor Over You" became Tubb's signature song and biggest hit.
The song that made Hank Williams a superstar was not his, and it was not originally country. "Lovesick Blues" was written by the Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths Cliff Friend and Irving Mills and first published in 1922. Friend is best known today for "The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down," the Looney Tunes theme. Hank probably learned the song from records by Emmett Miller or Rex Griffin. His 1949 version went to No. 1 and stayed there sixteen weeks, and at his Grand Ole Opry debut that June the audience called him back for six encores.
In 1952 Kitty Wells, a thirty-two-year-old mother of three, was tired of the road and thinking about leaving full-time entertaining. When she was offered "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels," an answer to Hank Thompson's hit "The Wild Side of Life," her main concern was the $125 recording fee. Some radio executives resisted the record, but audiences could not get enough of it. It went to No. 1, sold more than 800,000 copies in its first release, and made Wells a star and an Opry member in her own right.
6Elvis sped up Bill Monroe's waltz, and so did Monroe
On the tile: Blue Moon1954
Bill Monroe wrote "Blue Moon of Kentucky" as a lonesome waltz and was singing it on the Grand Ole Opry by 1945. In July 1954 the young Elvis Presley and his sidemen, Scotty Moore and Bill Black, struggling to find a B-side for their first Sun single, turned it into a rollicking rockabilly number in 4/4 time. That September, Monroe recorded a new version that opens as a waltz and then shifts into a lively 4/4 beat. When the two met backstage at the Opry that October, Elvis apologized for taking liberties with the song.
In June 1961 Patsy Cline was badly hurt in a car accident and spent more than a month in the hospital. Her doctors expected a long recovery, but by August she was back in Owen Bradley's Nashville studio. On August 21 the band recorded "Crazy," a song by Willie Nelson. Cline decided her vocal was not up to her own standards and stopped. She returned a few days later and sang it in one take. Bradley had reshaped Nelson's demo so that it sat in the strongest, most beautiful part of her voice.
George Jones did not want to record "He Stopped Loving Her Today." He found the Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman ballad far too depressing and worried that people would think he was feeling sorry for himself. In the studio, producer Billy Sherrill had to talk him out of singing it to the tune of Kris Kristofferson's "Help Me Make It Through the Night." Released in 1980, it became only the seventh solo No. 1 of Jones's long career, and Jones later credited that three-minute song with saving his forty-year career.
In 1946 Pee Wee King and Redd Stewart were driving to Nashville for a Grand Ole Opry appearance when they heard Bill Monroe's "Kentucky Waltz" on the radio and decided to try a "Tennessee Waltz" of their own. They wrote it on that drive. King's band released it in 1948, but Patti Page's pop recording became a colossal hit, and in May 1951 Billboard called it "possibly the biggest song in the history of the modern pop song business." In 1965 it became Tennessee's fourth official state song.
State Street in Bristol is the border between Tennessee and Virginia, so the twin cities share a main street. Since 1915 a big electric sign has spanned the state line there, and since 1921 it has read "Bristol ... A Good Place to Live." In the summer of 1927 Victor's Ralph Peer set up a temporary studio at 408 State Street, on the Tennessee side, and discovered Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. In 1998 the U.S. Congress designated Bristol, Tennessee-Virginia, the Birthplace of Country Music.
Thomas Ryman was a wealthy, hard-partying Nashville riverboat captain until a Georgia revivalist, the Reverend Sam Jones, converted him with one spirited sermon. Ryman began dreaming of a grand tabernacle, and with donations from the community the Union Gospel Tabernacle opened in 1892. After his death in 1904 people began calling it Ryman Auditorium. Its manager Lula Naff, a former secretary, booked Harry Houdini, Charlie Chaplin and Katharine Hepburn, and in 1943 she brought in the Grand Ole Opry, which stayed until 1974. Today the old tabernacle is called the Mother Church of Country Music.
When the Grand Ole Opry moved from Ryman Auditorium to its new Opry House in 1974, it brought part of the old stage along. On January 9, 1974, an eight-foot square was cut from the Ryman stage and carved into a six-foot circle of white oak and maple. Roy Acuff oversaw its installation, told workers to move it just a hair to the right, then became the first to step inside. When a flood swamped the Opry House in 2010, the circle buckled but proved sturdier than the modern stage, and was refurbished and reinstalled.
Tulsa's Cain's Ballroom was built in 1924 as a garage, then became a dime-a-dance joint and a dancing academy. On New Year's night 1935, Bob Wills made his debut there, and from 1935 to 1942 it was the home of Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Their weekly dances, a midnight radio show and a daily noon-hour program spread western swing, a blend of country with jazz, blues, boogie, big-band swing, rhumba and mariachi. The ballroom still has its historic spring-loaded maple dance floor, laid in a log cabin pattern of concentric squares.
According to Chet Atkins, RCA's chief audio engineer, Bill Miltenburg, drew the plans for Nashville's RCA Studio B on a dinner napkin. A local businessman, Dan Maddox, put up the building for about $40,000, and it opened in November 1957. It turned out hits for the Everly Brothers, Roy Orbison, Dolly Parton and Charley Pride, and Elvis Presley recorded more than 200 songs there, including "Are You Lonesome Tonight." RCA closed the studio in 1977. Today the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum leases it for $1 a year for tours and classes.
Dust Bowl refugees ended their trip west in the farm fields and oil industry around Bakersfield, California, and they brought their music. Buck Owens arrived in 1951 and spent seven years at the Blackboard club, where the house band played anything that got people dancing: country, R&B, rockabilly, even rhumbas, polkas and sambas. He cut a 1956 rockabilly single as Corky Jones to protect his country credibility. Unlike most stars of the polished Nashville Sound era, Owens recorded with his own road band. His 1963 No. 1, "Act Naturally," was later covered by the Beatles.
The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville hides music in its architecture. The windows on its front suggest black piano keys, and a giant sweeping arch ends in the angle of a 1950s Cadillac fin. Four disc-shaped tiers on the rotunda roof stand for the 78, the vinyl LP, the 45 and the compact disc, and vertical stone bars around the rotunda portray the notes of the Carter Family's "Will the Circle Be Unbroken." A tower echoes the diamond-shaped WSM radio tower, and from overhead the front wall forms a bass clef.
In 1971 the humorist Hondo Crouch and two partners bought Luckenbach, Texas, a tiny spot south of Fredericksburg. The post office and school promptly closed, so Crouch, whose business card read "Imagineer," invented reasons to visit, including a No Talent Contest he said he could not enter because he had talent. He even put the mailbox on a twenty-foot pole for airmail. In 1977 Waylon Jennings had a hit with "Luckenbach, Texas," written by Chips Moman and Bobby Emmons. Jennings had never been there when he sang it; his only visit came in 1997.
9The print shop that told towns the Opry was coming
On the tile: Hatch Posters1879
In 1879 the brothers Charles R. and Herbert H. Hatch opened a small print shop in Nashville. Their first poster, a six-by-nine-inch handbill for a lecture by Henry Ward Beecher, already had the look of a Hatch poster: nineteenth-century type and letterpress printing. In the 1940s the shop made posters for Grand Ole Opry stars touring outside Nashville. "All you needed was a Hatch poster to let folks know the Opry was coming to town," Minnie Pearl once said. The shop still prints its posters by letterpress, one at a time.
The banjo's story begins in West Africa, where gourd-bodied folk lutes such as the Senegambian akonting have long been played. Enslaved Africans in the Americas built new versions from those traditions, and for its first hundred years here, the musician Rhiannon Giddens has pointed out, the banjo was a Black instrument, played for plantation dances. Black musicians learned European fiddle tunes, and pairing fiddle with banjo was their innovation. "You don't have country music without fiddle and banjo," Giddens said. "And you don't have fiddle and banjo music without black people."
The steel guitar, heard on countless country records, was invented by a Hawaiian teenager, Joseph Kekuku. A popular origin myth says he slid a railroad spike along his guitar strings and liked the sound; the exact details are lost to history. As a student at the Kamehameha School for Boys around 1889, he raised a guitar's strings off the fretboard and played them with a smooth metal bar. Hawaiian music became a craze, and in 1916 records featuring the instrument outsold every other genre in the United States. Jimmie Rodgers recorded with Hawaiian steel guitarists.
3The cowboy fiddler who walked into Victor unannounced
On the tile: Eck Robertson1922
In June 1922 the Texas fiddler Eck Robertson went to a Confederate veterans' reunion in Richmond, Virginia. It was perhaps there that he met, or met again, 76-year-old Henry Gilliland. The pair headed to New York to ask Victor to record them, though no record company had shown the slightest interest in old-time fiddle music. They showed up unannounced at Victor's Manhattan office, dressed head to toe as cowboys. By Robertson's account, he had not played half of "Sallie Gooden" when an impressed official stopped him and told them to come back in the morning for a test record.
Fiddlin' John Carson was a showman who once brought his hound, Old Trail, to a fiddle contest; the dog was trained to howl along with his fiddling. On June 14, 1923, Ralph Peer of OKeh Records reluctantly let him record two songs in a makeshift Atlanta studio: "The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane" and "The Old Hen Cackled and the Rooster's Going to Crow." Peer famously called the result "pluperfect awful." Record buyers disagreed. The first 500 copies sold out within days, sparking national interest in Southern rural music.
In 1924 guitarist Joe Hopkins went for a haircut in Galax, Virginia, met a fiddle-playing barber named Tony Alderman, and a band was born. In January 1925 the group recorded for OKeh in New York. When producer Ralph Peer asked their name, bandleader Al Hopkins had none ready. "We're nothing but a bunch of hillbillies from North Carolina and Virginia. Call us anything," he said. Peer had his secretary list them as The Hill Billies. Heading home, they had qualms. "Hillbilly was not only a funny word; it was a fighting word," Alderman said. The name stuck anyway, and soon spread from the band to the music.
In late July 1927, Victor producer Ralph Peer began recording in a temporary studio in Bristol, on the Tennessee-Virginia line. First up was Ernest Stoneman, a seasoned recording artist, with family and friends. Then a front-page story in the Bristol News Bulletin reported that Stoneman had earned about $3,600 in royalties from his records, an inspiring sum at the time. It "worked like dynamite," Peer recalled. Groups of singers who had never visited Bristol, he said, arrived by bus, horse and buggy, train, or on foot. The sessions came to be called the big bang of country music.
Nashville's WSM, named for its owner's insurance slogan, We Shield Millions, launched its Barn Dance on November 28, 1925, with a 77-year-old fiddler, Uncle Jimmy Thompson. The show got its lasting name in December 1927. It followed an NBC classical music broadcast hosted by the conductor Walter Damrosch, and announcer George D. Hay quipped on the air that listeners had been hearing music taken largely from grand opera, but from now on they would hear the Grand Ole Opry. The name stuck, and the show is still on the air almost a century later.
Lesley Riddle, a Black guitarist who had lost his right leg in a cement factory accident, met A. P. Carter in Kingsport, Tennessee, in the late 1920s. The two became friends and went song hunting in remote hollows of the southern Appalachians. Carter wrote down the words while Riddle memorized the melodies, and back home they reworked the songs for the studio. The Carters learned gospel, blues and railroad tunes from him, and Maybelle adapted much of his picking into her style. In 1942 he moved to Rochester, New York, and lost touch with music until Mike Seeger found and recorded him in the mid-1960s.
Hee Haw, the country music and comedy show hosted by Roy Clark and Buck Owens, premiered on CBS on June 15, 1969, as a summer replacement and joined the regular lineup that December. By 1971 it ranked among the 20 most-watched shows on television, but new CBS management felt the network had too many rural settings. It canceled Hee Haw along with The Beverly Hillbillies, Mayberry R.F.D. and Green Acres. Hee Haw simply moved into syndication, where local stations were hungry for original programs, and kept going for two more decades. Its last original episode aired on May 30, 1992.