OldiesSong

Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

In the spring of 1960, Loretta and Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn left their four young children in Washington state, loaded hundreds of 45 rpm records into the trunk of a 1955 Ford Fairlane, and set out toward Nashville to ask country radio DJs to play her debut song. Seven years earlier in Custer, Washington, Doolittle had spent 17 dollars at Sears, Roebuck & Co. on a Harmony guitar for Loretta’s twenty-first birthday after realizing she sang lullabies to their babies better than the singers on the radio. By February 1960, Canadian lumber businessman Norm Burley had heard her on a local Tacoma television show, founded the small label Zero Records, and backed her first session with producer Don Grashey at United Western Recorders in Hollywood, where she cut her self-written song, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.” Because Zero Records had no marketing budget, the couple stayed up late at their kitchen table addressing and packing more than 3,500 records and hurried promo photos for radio stations before hitting the road themselves. Having never left Betty Sue, Jack Benny, Clara Marie, and Ernest Ray before, Loretta cried almost every night in the passenger seat during their three-month drive from the West Coast across the South. To save gas money along an 80,000-mile push, they skipped motels and restaurants, sleeping curled up on the car seats in station parking lots and living on crackers, cheap bologna, and packaged cheese. Raised in Butcher Hollow, Loretta was so shy that Doolittle had to walk into the stations first to introduce her. She often stared down at her worn shoes while talking, until she sang unaccompanied and stunned the DJs in the room. When their old Ford finally rolled into Nashville, she was still wearing homemade clothes, and “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” was climbing toward Number 14 on the Billboard country chart without a major label behind it. The Wilburn Brothers soon took notice, leading to her Grand Ole Opry debut on October 15, 1960, a record seventeen-week run on the Opry stage, mentorship from Patsy Cline, and a contract with Decca Records.

Please scroll down for the video. It is at the end of the article!

When Loretta and Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn pulled into Nashville in their 1955 Ford Fairlane in the late spring of 1960, they parked outside the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium and went to sleep in the front seat so Loretta could see the building the moment she woke up.

They had spent the previous three months driving across the country from Custer, Washington, after leaving their four young children, Betty Sue, Jack Benny, Clara Marie, and Ernest Ray, with family in the Pacific Northwest.

Earlier that February, Canadian lumber executive Norm Burley had funded her debut recording session at United Western Recorders in Hollywood for his fledgling label, Zero Records. With no promotional department behind her self-written single, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl,” the couple hand-addressed more than 3,500 packages at their kitchen table and drove from town to town to hand records directly to country disc jockeys.

Along the route, they slept in radio station parking lots and lived on bologna, cheese, and crackers to save money for gas. Inside the stations, Doolittle introduced his shy twenty-eight-year-old wife while she looked down at her shoes before singing unaccompanied for the announcers.

By the time they arrived in Tennessee, those station visits had pushed “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” onto the Billboard country chart on its way to Number 14. In Nashville, they walked into the offices of Sure-Fire Music, the publishing company run by country duo Teddy and Doyle Wilburn.

The Wilburn Brothers signed Loretta to a publishing and management agreement, helped purchase her release from Zero Records, and brought her to legendary Decca Records producer Owen Bradley. Before the year ended, she had signed a recording contract with Decca, the same label home to her vocal idol, Kitty Wells.

On October 15, 1960, wearing a homemade dress, Loretta stepped onto the stage of the Ryman Auditorium for her Grand Ole Opry debut. While new guests were normally invited for a single appearance, audience response kept her booked on the Opry for seventeen consecutive weeks, a record for an unsigned or newly emerging female singer at the venue.

After that first Opry broadcast, she and Doolittle returned directly to Washington to bring their four children back to Tennessee, settling the family in a house near Nashville before the end of 1960.

Her arrival in Nashville also brought her into the orbit of Decca star Patsy Cline. During the spring of 1961, after Cline suffered terrible injuries in a head-on car crash in Nashville, Loretta sang Cline’s current hit, “I Fall to Pieces,” on the Ernest Tubb Record Shop’s *Midnight Jamboree* broadcast as a get-well tribute.

Hearing the radio performance from her hospital room, Cline sent her husband, Charlie Dick, to bring the young singer to the hospital. That bedside meeting began a close mentorship that lasted until Cline’s death in a March 1963 plane crash.

In those early Nashville years, Cline gave Loretta clothes, makeup, and stage outfits, taught her how to handle promoter negotiations, and insisted she stop staring at the floor when addressing an audience.

At Decca’s Quonset Hut studio on Music Row, producer Owen Bradley paired her mountain vocal phrasing with the Nashville A-Team session musicians, including pianist Floyd Cramer and steel guitarist Hal Rugg. In 1962, her single “Success” gave her a Number 6 country hit and prompted the Grand Ole Opry to induct her as an official member on September 25, 1962.

Later in the decade, after partnering with the Wilburn Brothers on their syndicated television show, Lynn began recording the bold, autobiographical compositions that defined her career at Decca, starting with “You Ain’t Woman Enough (To Take My Man)” in 1966 and her first Number 1 single, “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ on Your Mind),” in early 1967.

By October 1972, twelve years after she and Doolittle had slept in their 1955 Ford outside the Ryman Auditorium while peddling records out of the trunk, Loretta stood on the Nashville stage as the first woman ever named Entertainer of the Year by the Country Music Association.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9eHp7JJgq8

Related Post

Before Alan Jackson ever held a platinum record in Nashville, he spent his early twenties driving a forklift at a Kmart warehouse in Georgia to pay the bills. After graduating from Newnan High School in 1977 and briefly attending a local college, Jackson went straight to work with his hands. He sold shoes, helped build wooden cabinets, and turned wrenches as a mechanic. That comfort around engines came directly from his father, a longtime Ford mechanic known as Daddy Gene, who stood beside Alan in the driveway to rebuild his first car, a worn 1955 Chevrolet Impala. Life required even steadier paychecks in December 1979 when the 21-year-old married his high school sweetheart, Denise. To support his young bride, Jackson clocked long shifts moving freight inside the Kmart distribution center in Newnan. Music happened only after the work was done, when he sat down with an old guitar in the evenings or played small local spots on weekends with grease and calluses still on his fingers. Even when he finally moved to Nashville in 1985 at age 27, the daily grind continued. Jackson took an entry-level job sorting letters and packages in the mailroom at The Nashville Network just to keep the lights on while he chased a recording contract. Those warehouse shifts and garage floors gave him an understanding of working people that no songwriting room could ever teach. Even after becoming a millionaire, he treated stagehands, truck drivers, and road crews with the quiet respect of a man who had once carried the heavy loads himself. How a chance encounter outside that Nashville mailroom period finally got his demo tape into the hands of Glen Campbell remains the turning point that changed his life forever.

Alan Jackson earned millions in Nashville and offered to buy his parents any mansion they wanted, yet his mother chose to stay in the former 12-by-12-foot toolshed where she raised him. Before his songs topped the country charts in the 1990s, Jackson grew up in Newnan, Georgia, with his parents and four sisters: Carol, Cathy, Connie, and Diane. Their home had been built around his grandfather’s old wooden shed, leaving so little room that the family’s only son slept on a twin bed in the hallway so his sisters could have the bedrooms. His father, Joseph Eugene “Daddy Gene” Jackson, worked as a mechanic at a local Ford dealership, while Ruth Musick Jackson stayed home to care for the five children. Money was tight, though neighbors knew “Mama Ruth” for keeping every corner of that crowded house spotless and having hot Southern meals on the table when her husband walked through the door. When fame finally arrived, Alan tried several times to move his parents into a larger, modern home. Ruth turned him down every time, allowing her millionaire son to make only modest repairs and practical updates so she could get around more easily as she aged. After Daddy Gene died at age 72 in 2000, she stayed inside those same walls in Newnan for another 17 years. To her, leaving the small house meant walking away from the rooms that held her husband’s memory and her children’s childhood. Ruth passed away peacefully in her sleep on January 7, 2017, at age 86, inside the exact home she had refused to trade for luxury. How those tight hallway years in Georgia later shaped the specific songs Alan wrote for his parents remains one of the most personal chapters of his career.

One day before she passed away at age 90, Loretta Lynn looked from her bed in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, and told her daughter Peggy Jean that her late husband Doolittle had come to take her home. She had lived without Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn for twenty-six years after losing him in August 1996. Through more than a quarter century of widowhood, she never remarried and chose to stay on the sprawling Tennessee ranch the two of them had bought and built together starting in 1966. That property held the physical traces of their life. Doolittle had managed the grounds, cared for the horses, and built a museum there honoring her career. Even as she endured the earlier losses of two of their children, Jack Benny in 1984 and Betty Sue in 2013, she kept his memory and belongings intact around the ranch. Her final years brought steep physical setbacks, including a stroke in 2017 and a broken hip in 2018. By late September and early October 2022, her twin daughter Peggy Jean stayed close to her bedside as her strength faded. Although Loretta was already lying in her own house at Hurricane Mills when she spoke to Peggy on October 3, her words made it clear to her family that home meant being back with the man she had married at fifteen. The next morning, October 4, 2022, she passed away peacefully in her sleep. In keeping with her wishes, she was laid to rest in the family cemetery right on the Hurricane Mills ranch, beside Doolittle and near the graves of Jack Benny and Betty Sue.

In August 1996, Loretta Lynn sat beside a hospital bed, held her husband Doolittle’s hand, and sang him a song she had spent years trying to avoid on stage. She had married Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn on January 10, 1948, when she was fifteen. For nearly half a century, he caused her deep private pain through heavy drinking and infidelity, while also building the foundation of her career. In 1953, he bought her a 17-dollar Harmony guitar, urged her to write songs, and later drove her from station to station across the South to promote her 1960 debut single, “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl.” Her marriage gave country music some of its most honest songs, including one written from the ache of wishing her husband would show her tenderness while completely sober instead of only after drinking. For years, when audiences requested that song, she hesitated to perform it because it cut too close to the loneliness inside her own home. In the 1990s, severe diabetes complications cost Doolittle both legs, and congestive heart failure left him weak. Loretta stepped back from touring and narrowed her career for years, staying at their ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, to care for him herself until her sixties. By his final days in August 1996, after long medical treatment, Doolittle was completely clear of alcohol. Sitting beside him at age 69, Loretta sang that painful old song one more time, turning a plea from their hardest years into a quiet goodbye before he passed away on August 22. She barely recorded for several years afterward, yet whenever people judged him by his worst mistakes, she reminded them that without that 17-dollar guitar and his early belief, the world would never have known her name.

At 15, before he was old enough to hold a driver’s license, Alan Jackson spent his savings from odd jobs on a rusted 1955 Ford Thunderbird. In a working-class home in Newnan, Georgia, that beat-up two-seater became a project for Alan and his father, Joseph Eugene “Daddy Gene” Jackson. A career mechanic at the Ford assembly plant in Hapeville, Gene came home after long shifts in worn work clothes, his hands permanently stained with grease, and turned their small yard into a garage. A quiet Southern man of few words, Gene spoke through wrenches and patience. Night after night, father and son lay side by side beneath the frame, scraping rust, fitting junkyard parts, and rebuilding the engine until the day Alan turned the key and Gene stood by the porch smiling as the car roared to life. When Daddy Gene died in 2000 at age 72, those memories stayed with Alan, who had gone on to teach his own three daughters, Mattie, Ali, and Dani, how to steer along quiet back roads. Two years later, he poured those afternoons with his father into his 2002 number-one single, “Drive (For Daddy Gene).” Even after building a millionaire’s garage filled with rare classics in Nashville, Jackson never parted with the turquoise-and-white 1955 Thunderbird, eventually placing it on display at the Country Music Hall of Fame. Every weld beneath that frame still carries his father’s hands, and how those backyard lessons in Newnan shaped the songwriting behind his 2002 tribute remains one of the richest chapters of his life.

Growing up in the San Felipe Courts federal housing project in Houston during the 1940s and 1950s, Kenny Rogers received a single piece of advice from his mother that guided him for the next six decades. As the fourth of eight children, Rogers did not initially realize his family was poor because everyone in the cramped complex lived the same way. His father worked as a carpenter and struggled with heavy drinking that drained the household finances, leaving his mother, Lucille Lois Rogers, to hold the family together on her small wages as a nursing assistant. The reality of their circumstances only hit Rogers as a teenager when he walked outside the project and saw Houston’s wealthy neighborhoods. Noticing her son’s growing resentment and desire to escape, Lucille took his hand and told him, “Son, be happy where you are, but never be satisfied to stay there. Because if you can’t be happy where you are, you’ll never be happy anywhere.” Those two sentences solved the boy’s quiet shame without turning poverty into bitterness. Following the second half of his mother’s counsel, Rogers stayed at Jefferson Davis High School and became the first person in his extended family to earn a diploma. From there, he moved through early jazz groups and The First Edition before building a legendary solo career in country music, photography, and business. Through early years as an unknown backup singer and later financial ups and downs, his mother’s first rule kept him steady. While promoting his memoir, Luck or Something Like It, in 2012 on The Diane Rehm Show and with AARP, the 74-year-old singer still recited Lucille’s words verbatim. Twenty-one years after her passing in 1991, and eight years before his own in 2020, the superstar with dozens of million-selling records still spoke of that afternoon in the Houston housing project as the greatest inheritance he ever received.

Long before Alan Jackson sold millions of country records, he slept on a small bed in a hallway in Newnan, Georgia, listening to his mother sing gospel hymns over an ironing board. Born on October 17, 1958, to Ford mechanic Joseph Eugene “Daddy Gene” Jackson and Ruth Musick “Mama Ruth” Jackson, Alan grew up as the only boy among four sisters. The family of seven lived inside a modest home built around the frame of his grandfather’s old tool shed. Money went toward groceries and bills rather than record players or stacks of vinyl. Instead of pop or country radio, Alan’s earliest music came from their local Baptist church and his mother’s kitchen. A shy boy, he first sang in public pressed between his sisters on wooden church pews, learning timing and phrasing from worn Southern hymnals. He did not truly discover country music until young adulthood, when a friend introduced him to Gene Watson, John Anderson, and Hank Williams Jr. while Alan was working warehouse jobs and driving a forklift. Decades later, after becoming one of Nashville’s biggest stars, he returned to those roots for Mama Ruth. Answering her longtime wish, he quietly went into the Ryman Auditorium and recorded 15 childhood hymns solely as her private Christmas gift in 2005. He pressed just a few CDs with a cover photo of an old church and brought them home to Georgia, moving his mother to tears. Released publicly in 2006 as Precious Memories, that simple gift for Mama Ruth reached number one and sold nearly two million copies. How those unadorned sessions inside the empty Ryman came together, and how the old tool-shed home in Newnan shaped the quiet humility he kept throughout his decades in Nashville, remains a deeper chapter of his story.

On August 26, 1985, country and Tejano star Freddy Fender walked into a treatment facility after his wife, Evangelina “Vangie” Huerta, staged an intervention that stopped his years of drinking and drug use. Born Baldemar Huerta, Fender had reached the top of the country and pop charts in the mid-1970s, only to see relentless touring and substance dependence drain his savings, his health, and the voice that made him famous. Vangie had married him in their youth, divorced him, and later remarried him. Rather than walking away when his addiction worsened in the mid-1980s, she gathered the family and insisted he enter treatment. Fender never described what followed as an overnight victory. In a 2002 interview, after nearly 17 straight years without alcohol or drugs, he explained that his physical recovery had been slow and that it took a long time for his body and mind to regain their strength after he stopped using. Instead of presenting himself as a self-made hero, he credited his survival to Vangie and to the decision to accept help when he could no longer save himself. That daily sobriety opened a second chapter in his career, leading to a role in Robert Redford’s 1988 film The Milagro Beanfield War and the formation of the Grammy-winning Texas Tornados in 1989. Although past damage and diabetes later brought severe kidney and liver disease before his death in 2006, the choice he made with Vangie on August 26, 1985, allowed him to live his final two decades clean and present for his family.

When Freddy Fender went into surgery for a kidney transplant in San Antonio on January 24, 2002, the donor lying in the next operating room was his 21-year-old daughter, Marla Huerta. Born Baldemar Huerta, the 64-year-old country and Tejano star had spent months dealing with severe kidney failure caused by diabetes. He sat through hours of dialysis every week just to stay alive, while still keeping as many tour dates as his body would allow. At first, his family looked for other options so his youngest daughter, then a college student, would not have to face the risks of surgery. Marla settled the matter herself when she went to her mother, Vangie Huerta, and asked why nobody had tested her yet to be the donor. In an interview before the procedure at St. Luke’s Baptist Hospital, Fender spoke openly about the weight a father feels when accepting part of a young daughter’s body while she is in the prime of her life. The operation succeeded without acute rejection, and the two recovered near each other in the San Antonio hospital, holding hands between their beds. The transplant did not cure his other underlying conditions, as he still faced hepatitis C, a liver transplant in 2004, and the lung cancer that ended his life in 2006. Marla’s question to her mother gave her father nearly five more years of life, enough time to return to the stage, win a 2002 Grammy with Los Super Seven, and record his final Mexican heritage album, La Música de Baldemar Huerta.