OldiesSong

Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

In 2019, when John Anderson walked into Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville after an eighteen-month medical crisis, the singer behind “Swingin'” and “Seminole Wind” was not sure he still had a voice left to record with. Between 2017 and 2018, a severe and mysterious illness had drained his physical strength and directly affected both his hearing and his vocal cords. For a year and a half, a man whose unmistakable country voice had carried a forty-year career could not clearly hear music or control his own throat. He canceled his tour dates and retreated completely to his farm in Smithville, Tennessee, taking slow walks through the woods and around the lake in DeKalb County while quietly accepting that his singing days might be over. As his health slowly began to recover, longtime Nashville engineer David “Fergie” Ferguson, known for his work with Johnny Cash, teamed up with The Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach to reach out. Knowing Anderson’s pride, they did not mention making a commercial record, inviting him instead just to sit down and write a few songs together. After several days of relaxed writing produced roughly ten new songs, the time came to step up to the vocal microphone. Anderson stopped, looked directly at Auerbach and Ferguson, and admitted that he had not been able to sing for over a year and did not know if his voice was still there. Ferguson looked back and told him simply that they believed he could do it. Anderson stepped into the booth, and Auerbach left every weathered breath and fragile note untouched for the ten-song album “Years,” released on April 10, 2020, turning the sixty-five-year-old singer’s hardest silence into the defining comeback of his career.

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

When John Anderson drove sixty miles west from his farm in Smithville, Tennessee, to Dan Auerbach’s Easy Eye Sound studio in Nashville in 2019, he had not sung into a studio microphone in four years.

Between 2017 and 2018, a severe eighteen-month medical crisis had drained his physical strength, made it difficult for him to swallow, and directly affected both his inner ear and his vocal cords. For the singer whose unmistakable baritone had carried “Wild and Blue,” “Swingin’,” and “Seminole Wind” across four decades of country radio, the illness meant he could no longer clearly hear musical pitch or trust his own throat.

After canceling his touring calendar, Anderson retreated to the DeKalb County acreage near Center Hill Lake where he had lived with his family for over thirty years. While he took slow daily walks through the timber and along the water to rebuild his stamina, his friend David “Fergie” Ferguson, the longtime Nashville engineer known for his work on Johnny Cash’s *American Recordings* series, reached out with an informal invitation.

Ferguson had recently partnered with The Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach at Easy Eye Sound, where the two were pairing veteran Nashville session players with country and roots songwriters. Knowing Anderson was still recovering and guarded about his voice, they did not pitch an album contract, asking instead if he would come into town for a single afternoon just to write a song together.

On that first afternoon at Easy Eye Sound, Anderson and Auerbach sat down with hit songwriter Paul Overstreet and wrote “I’m Still Hangin’ On,” an honest reflection on surviving hard seasons. What started as a one-day trial quickly grew into a series of relaxed songwriting appointments that produced between fifteen and twenty new songs.

A week after the opening session, Anderson, Auerbach, and Ferguson joined songwriter Pat McLaughlin to write “Years,” a reflection on time passing that became the anchor of the project. Across the remaining writing days, Anderson and Auerbach brought in longtime friends from every corner of his career, including Joe Allen, who had co-written Anderson’s 1970s early singles, along with Larry Cordle, keyboardist Bobby Wood, and young Alabama singer Dee White.

Anderson and Auerbach also wrote two tracks completely on their own, including “Celebrate,” a song born directly out of the morning Anderson realized his health was finally turning a corner.

“I had been very, very sick for at least 18 months,” Anderson told *Wide Open Country* in April 2020. “‘Celebrate’ was part of my exclamation of just getting well again and a renewed appreciation of waking up feeling good every day.”

Once the team narrowed the stack of new compositions down to ten songs, Auerbach and Ferguson assembled the Easy Eye Sound house band in the tracking room. The studio lineup featured Memphis Boys drummer Gene Chrisman and pianist Bobby Wood alongside bassist Dave Roe, guitarist Billy Sanford, steel guitarist Russ Pahl, harmonica veteran Charlie McCoy, fiddler Stuart Duncan, and mandolinist Ronnie McCoury.

When the arrangements were ready for lead vocals, Anderson stopped before stepping up to the microphone and looked at his two producers. He told them plainly that he had barely sung in over a year and was not sure his voice was still there.

Ferguson looked back at his friend and told him simply that they believed he could do it. Anderson stepped into the vocal booth, and Auerbach and Ferguson recorded his takes live without polishing away the weathered breaths or the fragile edges in his phrasing, later adding harmony guest appearances from Blake Shelton on “Tuesday I’ll Be Gone,” Tyler Childers on “Wild and Free,” and Molly Tuttle on “Slow Down”.

Released on April 10, 2020, as his twenty-second studio album, *Years* became the defining critical comeback of the sixty-five-year-old singer’s late career. Two years later, Auerbach and Ferguson released the tribute album *Something Borrowed, Something New*, featuring John Prine, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, Sturgill Simpson, and Sierra Ferrell, before Anderson himself was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in October 2024.

Before passing away at age seventy-one on October 21, 2026, Anderson made his final public appearance in Nashville on October 18 at the Country Music Hall of Fame Medallion Ceremony, sitting in the rotunda to welcome into the Hall the same songwriter who had sat across from him on his very first day back inside Easy Eye Sound, Paul Overstreet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FARZGM8Wk0

Related Post

When her marriage to Buck Owens ended in 1953, a twenty-three-year-old Bonnie Owens was left in the oil and farming town of Bakersfield, California, with two toddlers to feed and no steady way to pay the rent. She had once won talent contests in Arizona with her yodeling voice, yet with young Buddy Alan, born in 1948, and Mike, born in 1950, waiting at home, singing had to come second to groceries. Bonnie put on a waitress uniform and went to work serving cocktails and clearing ashtrays in smoky Bakersfield honky-tonks. Night after night, she carried trays of beer across crowded dance floors while watching other singers take the microphone on stage. Even during those lean years when Buck was still struggling to build his own career, she never spoke poorly of him to the boys and kept their father part of their lives. Club owners and local musicians who respected her work ethic and decency eventually began inviting her to step up to the bandstand between shifts. Those late-night sets caught the attention of producer Fuzzy Owen and landed her a regular spot on KERO-TV’s local country show, “Cousin Herb Henson’s Trading Post.” Signing with Fuzzy Owen’s Tally Records in the early 1960s, she poured her years as a single mother into recordings like “Dear John” and “Why Don’t Daddy Live Here Anymore.” By 1965, the former cocktail waitress made history as the very first winner of the Academy of Country Music’s Female Vocalist of the Year award. The connections she built from the floor up in those Bakersfield clubs not only allowed her oldest son, Buddy Alan, to later share stages with both of his parents, but also put her in position to guide a young ex-convict named Merle Haggard toward country music stardom.

In 1956, when seventeen-year-old Temple “Mickey” Medley married Harold Jenkins in Hernando, Mississippi, he was not yet Conway Twitty, just a broke twenty-two-year-old Army veteran with a failed first marriage, a young son to support, and no recording contract to his name. Three years earlier, in 1953, nineteen-year-old Harold had married Ellen Matthews after an unplanned pregnancy, welcoming his first son, Michael, late that year just as the U.S. Army sent him to serve in Japan. By the time he returned home in 1955, that loveless marriage was ending. He walked away from an offer to play professional baseball after hearing Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train,” betting his future on rockabilly music even though he had no money and child support to pay. In the American South of the mid-1950s, marrying a divorced barroom singer with a child from a previous marriage carried heavy social stigma for a teenage girl. At the time, Sam Phillips at Sun Records in Memphis had repeatedly passed on releasing Harold’s recordings, and road money was so scarce that his band sometimes went hungry on tour dates in Canada. Still, Mickey never complained when he sent portions of his meager paychecks back to Ellen to support young Michael. Her quiet steadiness gave Harold the footing he had lacked since his teens. In 1957, he took the stage name Conway Twitty, and by 1958, “It’s Only Make Believe” turned him into an international million-selling star. Even as Mickey went on to raise their three children together, Joni, Kathy, and Jimmy, she always respected her husband’s bond with his oldest boy, allowing Michael to grow up close to his siblings and later work alongside his father in the band.

On January 13, 1948, in Mesa, Arizona, two broke eighteen-year-old musicians named Alvis Edgar “Buck” Owens and Bonnie Campbell got married, four months before the birth of their first son, Alan Edgar Owens, later known to country music fans as Buddy Alan. They had met at a local show while Buck was playing guitar and mandolin in the house band at radio station KTYL and Bonnie was already winning local talent contests with her clear yodeling voice. When their baby arrived on May 22, 1948, followed by a second son, Mike, in 1950, the small paychecks from radio work could not feed a young family. Under the Arizona desert heat, eighteen-year-old Buck hauled produce in trucks, picked cotton, and worked as a mechanic by day, then carried his guitar into smoky honky-tonks at night. Bonnie stepped away from the microphone to wait tables and raise the two boys in cramped rented homes, joining Buck on local barroom stages whenever she could arrange care for the children. Searching for steadier work, the young couple loaded their belongings into a car in 1951 and moved west to the oil and farming town of Bakersfield, California. There, Buck’s relentless drive kept him in Bakersfield clubs and Los Angeles recording studios late into the night, while the strain of early parenthood and constant poverty wore down their marriage. They divorced in 1953 when both were still in their early twenties, parting without bitterness. Buck went on to build the Bakersfield Sound empire, while Bonnie returned to singing, became a pioneering country artist in her own right, and married Merle Haggard in 1965. Through every decade that followed, the two Bakersfield families remained linked by mutual respect and by the son born into their hardest year in Mesa, as Buddy Alan grew up to record chart hits and share the stage with both his mother and his father.

In 1984, just two years after Conway Twitty opened his multi-million-dollar Twitty City estate in Hendersonville, Tennessee, to bring his entire family together, his wife Temple “Mickey” Medley filed for divorce for the second and final time. Their marriage had lasted nearly three decades, stretching back to 1956 when he was still an unknown young singer named Harold Jenkins and moving through dozens of number-one country hits. Even after their quiet 1970 divorce and secret remarriage later that same year, the pace of his career never slowed. For roughly thirty years, Conway lived on a tour bus with the Twitty Birds for 200 to nearly 300 days a year, turning ordinary family dinners and anniversaries at home into rare occasions. When he opened Twitty City in 1982, the complex was meant to be a permanent home where his wife and children could live side by side. Instead, the property also operated as a public tourist attraction that drew hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. While Conway remained out on the highway performing for millions of fans, Mickey found herself living inside a crowded public showcase, stripped of basic privacy and still waiting for a husband who belonged primarily to the stage. By 1984, after fourteen years of trying to hold their second marriage together, their three children, Joni, Kathy, and Jimmy, were fully grown. With her duties as a mother complete, Mickey chose to step away from a lifetime of waiting for a tour bus to pull into the driveway. She never spoke against him in the press, and Conway made sure she was generously provided for before his later marriage to Dee Henry in 1987. Even after Conway passed away in 1993, his children and longtime insiders remembered Mickey as the woman who gave up three decades of quiet home life so the world could have Conway Twitty.

In 1970, at the exact moment “Hello Darlin'” turned Conway Twitty into a multi-week number-one country music superstar, he and his wife Temple “Mickey” Medley finalized their divorce. They had been married since 1956, back when he was still Harold Jenkins and they exchanged vows in Hernando, Mississippi, long before the country hits, when he was still chasing an uncertain living in rockabilly. As his transition to country music took off, his schedule with the Twitty Birds stretched toward 300 road dates a year. While he played to packed venues and crowds of devoted female fans, Mickey stayed behind in Oklahoma and later Tennessee to raise their three children, Joni, Kathy, and Jimmy, bearing the quiet weight of his constant absence. The separation lasted less than a year. Unable to stay apart, Conway and Mickey remarried in a private ceremony in November 1970. They kept both the divorce and the second wedding so quiet that many people in the Nashville music industry and fans across the country never realized they had parted ways at all. Fellow Nashville songwriters and peers often noted that the guilt of nearly losing the woman who stood by him in his leanest years gave his 1970s country ballads their choked, aching honesty. He spent the next fourteen years trying to bridge the distance between the road and home, eventually opening the Twitty City complex in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in 1982 so his wife and children could live and gather together on the same grounds. Though they divorced for good in 1984 after nearly three decades together, their children and fans always remembered Mickey as the woman who carried the heaviest share of the quiet years so Harold Jenkins could become Conway Twitty.

In April 2015, Randy Travis walked into AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, for the 50th Academy of Country Music Awards. It marked his first public appearance at a major music event since the massive stroke that nearly took his life in 2013, coming just one month after he and Mary Davis had quietly married in March. For nearly two years, Travis had lived shielded behind hospital corridors and therapy rooms, learning to navigate life after losing much of his speech and mobility. Sitting in the audience on that Texas evening, he was no longer an isolated patient fighting for survival, but a beloved icon returning home to the community he had shaped for decades. From the stage, singer Lee Brice paused to recognize the country legend sitting in the crowd. As the stadium focused on him, Mary gently helped Randy rise to his feet, steadying his body under the gaze of more than 70,000 fans and millions watching at home. The entire venue rose in an immediate, roaring standing ovation. Fellow artists and lifelong listeners applauded without pause as Travis smiled, placed a hand over his heart, and bowed his head in quiet gratitude. Beside him stood Mary, holding him steady, sharing in the warmth of a world that had waited patiently for his return.

In July 2013, acute viral cardiomyopathy triggered severe congestive heart failure in Randy Travis, sending his body into circulatory collapse and beginning an agonizing six-month stay in the hospital. As complications mounted and systemic failure deepened, clinical conferences turned bleak. Medical teams presented the grim realities of his prognosis, advising Mary Davis that letting go might be the most humane choice to spare him further suffering. Mary stood alone in that cold intensive care corridor and refused to sign the papers to stop active intervention. Stepping forward as his sole protector, she shouldered the full legal and moral weight of the decision, choosing the instinct of faith and devotion over cold clinical finality. Her unyielding stand shifted the entire course of his treatment. By refusing to give up, Mary created the critical window doctors needed to continue heart and lung support and perform essential surgical interventions. She remained anchored at his bedside through the long months in the ICU, holding his thin hand through high fevers, listening to the rhythm of monitors, and speaking quietly to a man who lay motionless beneath medical lines. The country music icon who once commanded packed arenas had been left completely helpless, his entire life resting on the endurance of the woman beside him. By refusing to let go when medical reason urged surrender, Mary kept Randy Travis tethered to this life, leaving behind a lasting testament to a devotion that stood firm when everything else had given way.

In July 2013, country music legend Randy Travis was rushed to a Texas hospital with viral cardiomyopathy, a severe infection that quickly led to a massive, life-threatening stroke. Complications forced doctors to relieve pressure on his brain, and he soon fell into a deep coma. Seeing the devastating damage, the medical team gave him only a one percent chance of survival and approached Mary Davis with the painful option of withdrawing life support. Standing beside his bed in intensive care, Mary refused to let him go. In the quiet of that room, she leaned in close, looked at Randy, and spoke to him. A faint squeeze of her hand and a single tear rolling down his face gave her all the answer she needed. She told the doctors to keep fighting. What followed was a brutal, grueling road to recovery. The stroke took away nearly all of Travis’s ability to speak and walk, requiring brain surgeries, months in hospital rooms, and years of relentless physical therapy. Mary remained anchored at his side through every agonizing step, acting as his voice, his protector, and his steady hands before the two officially married in 2015. The man whose deep baritone once defined an entire generation of country music now depended entirely on her patience and devotion. The full weight of that one percent choice became undeniable in 2016, during his induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Supported by Mary, Travis stood before the quiet room, raised his microphone, and sang the first verse of “Amazing Grace”—his first public song in years, carried by the woman who refused to give up on him.

When Alan Jackson stepped onto the stage to accept the Lifetime Achievement Award at the ACM Awards, the spotlight reflected off more than three decades of classic country history. Yet the tall, quiet man from Newnan, Georgia did not spend his moments at the microphone recounting radio hits, tour records, or industry milestones. Instead, he looked directly toward the audience and gave the night to his wife, Denise. Their journey had begun long before Nashville ever knew his name. Back in high school, Denise had believed in his quiet ambition when there was no guarantee of success, even working as a flight attendant to help keep their household running while casually handing his demo tape to Glen Campbell at an airport. They had weathered the heavy strain of early stardom and a painful separation in the late 1990s, choosing patience, faith, and hard work to rebuild their marriage. When Denise faced cancer in 2010, the country star stepped away from the road to sit by her side, putting family ahead of music. Now, with Jackson publicly managing Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease—a genetic neuropathy that has gradually affected his balance and movement—every step up to a podium carries quiet effort. Watching from the floor, Denise looked back at the man she had loved since their teenage years, understanding the full weight behind his steady voice. Standing tall before millions of viewers, Jackson made sure everyone knew that behind every song, every tour, and every award, there had only ever been one constant foundation holding him steady.