OldiesSong

Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

Before Carrie Underwood married NHL player Mike Fisher in July 2010, she sat down in 2009 with songwriters Kara DioGuardi, Marti Frederiksen, and Luke Laird to write a song for the woman who would have to let her go. Growing up in Checotah, Oklahoma, Carrie was the youngest of three daughters by several years. After her older sisters, Shanna and Stephanie, married and moved out, Carrie and her mother, Carole Underwood, spent years as close companions. Carole was a local elementary school teacher who sewed Carrie’s clothes and drove her to church singings and county fairs across Oklahoma. Preparing to build a marriage of her own, Carrie knew her wedding would leave the family home in Checotah quiet. The result was “Mama’s Song,” recorded for her third studio album, Play On. Rather than focusing only on romance, the ballad addressed a mother’s quiet worry when handing her daughter over to another man, reassuring Carole that Fisher would treat her well. When Carrie first played the finished recording for her mother before its release, the longtime schoolteacher broke down in tears. Released as a single on September 13, 2010, two months after the couple’s wedding, the track climbed to number two on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. For the music video directed by Shaun Silva around Nashville and Franklin, Tennessee, Carrie brought both Carole and Mike Fisher onto the set. It was the first time her mother and new husband appeared together in one of her videos. Standing beside the retired teacher from Checotah and the hockey player who had just married her youngest daughter, Carrie turned a chart hit into a family promise that thousands of brides have played for their own mothers on their wedding days ever since.

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

On February 5, 2009, right after finishing the stomping breakup single “Undo It” in a Los Angeles room, Carrie Underwood and three co-writers slowed their guitars down and wrote a song to help her mother let her go.

Nashville songwriter Luke Laird had flown out to California on short notice to join Underwood, pop hitmaker Kara DioGuardi, and rock producer Marti Frederiksen. Once the upbeat track was finished, Laird and Frederiksen began strumming a quiet acoustic progression, and Underwood started singing an opening line thanking her mother for teaching her how to live right before asking for permission to leave the nest.

At the time, the twenty-five-year-old singer was dating Ottawa Senators center Mike Fisher, though the couple had not yet announced an engagement. Nobody in the room asked if a wedding was coming, yet everyone understood where the idea came from as Carrie and DioGuardi began talking about their own mothers.

The conversation carried different weight for each writer in the room. DioGuardi was preparing for her own upcoming wedding without her mother, Carol, who had passed away in 1997, while Laird found himself hoping his girlfriend, Beth, would one day feel the same certainty about marrying him.

For Underwood, the ballad grew out of a quiet household in rural Checotah, Oklahoma. Born in March 1983 as the youngest of three daughters by a full decade, she was still a child when her older sisters, Shanna and Stephanie, grew up, became elementary school teachers themselves, and moved into homes of their own.

That age gap left Carrie and her mother, Carole Underwood, as daily companions on the family farm while Carrie’s father, Stephen, worked shifts at a paper mill. Carole taught elementary school in Checotah for twenty-five years, sewed performance outfits at home, and spent her weekends driving her youngest daughter to church singings and local talent shows across Oklahoma.

When a fourteen-year-old Carrie traveled to Nashville in 1996 for an early audition with Capitol Records that ultimately fell through, Carole was right beside her. Eight years later, in the summer of 2004, Carole drove her to St. Louis for the *American Idol* tryout that took the twenty-one-year-old farm girl away from Oklahoma for good.

Because Carole had spent years looking after her youngest child from a distance and worrying over her life on the road, Underwood used “Mama’s Song” to offer a direct promise. Rather than focusing only on romance, the song assured Carole that the man she had chosen would keep his word and take care of her daughter.

When Underwood first played the finished studio recording for her mother ahead of the November 2009 release of her third album, *Play On*, the retired schoolteacher broke down crying. Five months after the February 2009 writing session, Laird also played the track in the car for his future mother-in-law, watching her tear up over the exact same verses.

Fisher proposed to Underwood in December 2009, and the two were married in Georgia on July 10, 2010. Two months later, on September 13, 2010, Arista Nashville sent “Mama’s Song” to country radio as the fourth single from *Play On*.

To film the music video in Nashville and Franklin, Tennessee, director Shaun Silva brought both Carole Underwood and Mike Fisher onto the set alongside actual photographs from the couple’s wedding. Before the cameras rolled on a scene where mother and daughter looked through a family photo album together, Silva secretly had Carrie write a private note inside the book so Carole would open it during the take and cry real tears on screen.

That November, Carole sat in the Bridgestone Arena audience for the 44th Annual CMA Awards and wept through the entire live performance as her daughter sang the ballad on national television.

By January 2011, “Mama’s Song” had reached number two on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart, earned a Grammy nomination, and gone on to sell more than a million copies. More than four years after that afternoon session in Los Angeles, Underwood even released the raw February 5, 2009 worktape on her *Greatest Hits: Decade #1* album, preserving the first acoustic recording of the day a twenty-five-year-old daughter practiced telling her mother from Checotah that she was going to be alright.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaSy8yy-mr8

Related Post

For the first seven months of their marriage, Carrie Underwood and NHL center Mike Fisher lived more than a thousand miles apart across two countries. After their wedding in Georgia on July 10, 2010, Fisher returned to Canada to play for the Ottawa Senators, the team he had served since he was nineteen. Underwood stayed rooted in Nashville for her recording sessions, songwriting, and tour schedule. Their early married life ran on late-night phone calls, texts after games and concerts, and exhausting cross-border flights for one or two days together before another airport goodbye. That distance ended on February 10, 2011, through an unexpected act of kindness from the Ottawa front office. Facing a mid-season rebuild, Senators general manager Bryan Murray had to start trading veteran players for future draft picks. Having watched Fisher give eleven years to the franchise and local children’s charities, Murray told reporters that if he had to let him go, he wanted to send him somewhere he could play hockey and still go home to his new wife at night. Fisher held a no-trade clause in his contract that allowed him to block a move. When he learned the deal would send him to the Nashville Predators in exchange for two draft picks, he waived the clause at age thirty, leaving the only NHL city he had ever known to live under the same roof as Underwood. When Fisher called to tell her the news that day, Underwood broke down in tears. An Ottawa radio station briefly banned her songs in frustration over losing a hometown favorite, while thousands of Canadian fans sent messages thanking Fisher for a decade of loyalty. Days later, when Fisher skated onto the ice at Bridgestone Arena in Predators gold and blue, the Nashville crowd gave him a standing ovation, welcoming him home to the city where he and Underwood would finally wake up in the same house and raise their children.

When Carrie Underwood announced her Blown Away Tour in May 2012, she quietly attached one dollar of every North American ticket to the American Red Cross before a single storm hit the headlines. Raised on a farm in Checotah, Oklahoma, she grew up knowing what severe weather could do to a small town. The tour itself was named after a hit song centered on a tornado, and its arena production used wind and storm visuals night after night. Long before the trucks rolled out, she made sure the real money behind those shows would go to families facing actual disasters. That decision took on urgent weight in late October 2012 when Hurricane Sandy tore through the East Coast, knocking out power and leaving thousands of families in New York and New Jersey facing early winter cold without heat or shelter. On November 2, 2012, Underwood went to a New York studio to perform on NBC’s Hurricane Sandy: Coming Together telethon, helping raise national relief funds while her tour continued collecting dollar by dollar across the country. By the time the North American run wrapped in May 2013, more than one million fans had filled over one hundred sold-out arenas. Those single dollars added up to a $1,000,000 check for the Red Cross Disaster Responder Program, paying for warm meals, blankets, and emergency shelter. Days later, on May 20, 2013, an EF5 tornado devastated Moore, Oklahoma. Rather than stopping at the Red Cross pledge she had just fulfilled, Underwood took another $1,000,000 directly from her Blown Away Tour proceeds and sent it home to help her fellow Oklahomans rebuild. Two million dollars from one tour went straight back into broken neighborhoods, turning a year of arena lights into roofs, warm beds, and recovery for people she would never meet.

In 1983, sixty-nine-year-old Ernest Tubb walked into a recording studio while battling advanced emphysema to sing beside Hank Williams Jr. and Waylon Jennings on “Leave Them Boys Alone,” three decades after he sang at the 1953 funeral of Hank Jr.’s father. Written by Dean Dillon, Gary Stewart, and Tanya Tucker for Hank Jr.’s album Strong Stuff, the collaboration brought together three distinct generations of country music during the slick Urban Cowboy era of the early 1980s. Tubb had pioneered traditional honky-tonk, Jennings had led the 1970s outlaw movement, and Hank Jr. was carrying the family name into a louder brand of country rock. For the younger men, inviting the frail Texas Troubadour into the studio was an act of deep respect. In the late 1940s, Tubb had been Hank Williams Sr.’s early musical hero and close friend, personally lobbying WSM executives to bring the younger singer into the Grand Ole Opry cast in 1949. Having lost his father when he was only three years old, Hank Jr. stood at the microphone beside a living witness to his father’s life, while Tubb heard the voice of his late friend echoed in the son. Though chronic lung disease had left Tubb short of breath and roughened his famous baritone, he delivered his lines with the calm authority of an elder stepping in to defend two rowdy younger singers from their Nashville critics. The single climbed to Number 6 on the Billboard country chart in the fall of 1983. It stood as one of the final recordings of Tubb’s career before he passed away in Nashville on September 6, 1984, at age seventy, leaving behind a studio farewell where he stood up one last time for the son of the friend he had laid to rest thirty-one years earlier.

On April 1, 1932, twenty-four-year-old radio singer Gene Autry and twenty-two-year-old education student Ina Mae Spivey were married so quietly in St. Louis, Missouri, that their friends at Chicago’s WLS radio station and the Frisco Railroad laughed it off as an April Fools’ Day prank. Even the bride’s uncle, railroad dispatcher and songwriter Jimmy Long, who had introduced the couple and sung duets with Autry, was caught off guard by how quickly the wedding happened. America was deep in the Great Depression, and Autry had only recently stepped away from his telegraph key on the railroad to try his luck singing on the airwaves. Spivey had been studying at a teachers college in Springfield, Missouri, with a steady career ahead of her, yet she chose to bet her future on a struggling singer with a guitar. There was no lavish reception or honeymoon. Right after signing the marriage certificate, the newlyweds climbed back into an old car and drove toward Chicago so Autry could make his broadcast slot on the National Barn Dance. As Autry rose into Hollywood’s Singing Cowboy and recorded classics like “Back in the Saddle Again” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Spivey managed their finances and kept him grounded far from the spending habits and short-lived marriages of the movie capital. Though they never had children, the two remained inseparable partners at home and in business, building a media, music, and film empire worth hundreds of millions of dollars while celebrating their anniversary every April Fools’ Day. Their forty-eight-year marriage lasted until Spivey passed away at age seventy on May 19, 1980. For the rest of his ninety-one years, Autry looked back on the 1932 wedding his friends had mistaken for an April Fools’ joke as the truest decision of his life.

In the late 1920s, while working the night shift as a telegraph operator for the Frisco Railroad in Oklahoma, a young Gene Autry began spending his evenings practicing guitar in the home of an older railroad dispatcher named Jimmy Long, where he met Long’s niece, Ina Mae Spivey. Long before America knew him as the Singing Cowboy, Autry was a broke railroad worker trying to find a foothold on local radio stations like KVOO in Tulsa and later WLS in Chicago. In the living rooms and kitchens of the Long family homes in Tulsa and Springfield, Autry and Jimmy Long worked through harmonies and wrote songs together, including their classic recording “That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine.” While the two men practiced, Spivey, a quiet education student, sat listening and became the first steady believer in the young telegrapher’s voice. On April 1, 1932, in the middle of the Great Depression, Autry and Spivey were married in St. Louis, Missouri. With very little money to their names, the new bride set aside a settled life to ride beside him in an old car along dusty Midwestern roads from one small-town fair date to the next. When an offer came from Hollywood in 1934 to try musical Western films, Autry hesitated over his lack of acting experience, and it was Spivey who urged him to leave Chicago and take the chance. As he rose into one of the biggest box-office draws of the late 1930s, she stayed out of the Hollywood spotlight, reviewing his scripts and new songs first and later conceiving the original story idea for his 1948 film The Strawberry Roan. During World War II, while Autry served as a transport pilot in the United States Army Air Forces flying over the Hump in the Himalayas, she managed their business affairs at home, helping guide the investments in broadcasting, real estate, and the California Angels baseball team that made him a fortune. When Ina Mae passed away on May 19, 1980, at age seventy, the media mogul and baseball owner lost the partner who had shared his life for forty-eight years, dating back to the evenings when she sat in her uncle’s living room listening to a night-shift railroad man play his guitar.

On November 7, 2022, multi-instrumentalist and harmony vocalist Jeff Cook passed away at age seventy-three at his home in Destin, Florida, with his wife of forty-six years, Lisa Williams Cook, by his side, ending a decade-long fight with Parkinson’s disease. Born and raised around the cotton fields of Lookout Mountain near Fort Payne, Alabama, Cook teamed up with his cousins Randy Owen and Teddy Gentry in 1969 to form Young Country, later known as Wildcountry before becoming Alabama in 1977. During the lean years of the 1970s, the three cousins hauled their own sound equipment into bars along Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, playing for tips and sharing loaves of bread long before they sold more than eighty million records worldwide. While Owen sang lead and Gentry anchored the bass, Cook shaped the group’s blend of country and Southern rock with his fast, effortless command of both the electric guitar and the fiddle. Doctors diagnosed Cook with Parkinson’s disease in 2012, an illness that gradually took away the steadiness of the hands he had used to play strings for fifty years. Unwilling to let fans worry or look at him with pity, he kept the diagnosis private for five years, enduring the worsening tremors and loss of balance backstage so he could keep walking out for Alabama’s anniversary tours. When his health finally forced him to step back from regular touring in April 2017, Owen and Gentry refused to replace him. Instead, they kept his microphone and instrument stand set up on stage so their cousin could join them whenever he felt strong enough. During his final major appearances with the group, including at the Country Music Hall of Fame, Owen and Gentry gently steadied Cook as they walked him out to standing ovations. In the tribute shows that followed November 2022, Owen stood at the center microphone and looked toward the open space on the right side of the stage where his cousin had stood with a fiddle and a quiet smile under his cowboy hat for more than fifty years.

In February 1958, Merle Haggard walked through the gates of California’s San Quentin State Prison as inmate number 65723 and spent his twenty-first birthday behind bars, knowing his mother had done everything in her power to keep him out. Haggard’s downward spiral began in 1946 when he was nine years old and his father, James Francis Haggard, died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage. Having migrated from Oklahoma to California during the Great Depression, the family lived in a converted refrigerator boxcar in Oildale that his father had turned into a home. After her husband’s passing, Flossie Mae Haggard took a job as a bookkeeper in Bakersfield to support her three children on her own while holding tightly to her church faith. Grief-stricken and untethered without the father he idolized, young Merle began hopping freight trains at fourteen, skipping school, and committing petty crimes. He was sent to juvenile detention centers seven times and repeatedly ran away, yet Flossie Mae never turned her back on him, showing up at police stations and courtrooms after sleepless nights to plead for her son. In late 1957, a drunken twenty-year-old Haggard tried to pry open the door of a Bakersfield tavern at eleven o’clock at night while the business was still open. Coupled with his long juvenile record and local jailbreaks, the botched burglary landed him in San Quentin. Inside those stone walls, watching a fellow inmate walk to the gas chamber and seeing Johnny Cash perform at the prison in 1958 finally forced him to reckon with the heartbreak he had caused the woman waiting at home. Ten years later, after turning his life around as a leading voice of the Bakersfield Sound, Haggard wrote and recorded “Mama Tried.” Released in July 1968, the song spent four weeks at Number 1 on the Billboard country chart. At a time when neighbors often blamed parents for a delinquent child, Haggard stood before millions of listeners to clear his mother’s name and take full blame for his own choices. Flossie Mae lived to see California Governor Ronald Reagan grant her son a full pardon in 1972, sitting proudly in the front row at his concerts until her passing in 1985 as the mother whose boy finally told the whole country she had done nothing wrong.

After walking away from a second-lap pileup at Charlotte Motor Speedway on October 6, 1974, twenty-nine-year-old driver Richard Childress told reporters he would have been killed if Marty Robbins had not driven his Number 42 Dodge Charger straight into a concrete wall at 160 miles per hour. During the opening laps of the National 500, Childress’s car had spun to a halt across the track with the driver’s side exposed. Looking at the tire marks left on the asphalt, a senior NASCAR official confirmed that Robbins could have held his line to lessen the impact on himself, yet chose to jerk the wheel into the concrete barrier and absorb the full force of the crash to avoid hitting Childress’s cockpit. Emergency crews took Robbins to the hospital with two broken ribs, a bruised chest, an injured tailbone, and facial cuts requiring thirty-two stitches. For a major Nashville television and Grand Ole Opry star whose face was part of his livelihood, the scars drew not a single complaint from Robbins, who simply smiled in relief upon learning that the younger driver was unharmed. In the rugged 1970s NASCAR garage, where full-time drivers and mechanics often viewed outside celebrities with skepticism, that split-second decision erased any remaining line between a part-time singing racer and the veterans of the sport. Men like Richard Petty, Cale Yarborough, and Bobby Allison had already admired his honesty at Talladega in 1972, when Robbins admitted to knocking the restrictor plate out of his carburetor for extra speed and turned down the Rookie of the Race award. Spared in that 1974 wreck, the struggling independent Childress went on to build Richard Childress Racing and win six NASCAR Cup championships with Dale Earnhardt. After Robbins passed away at age fifty-seven in December 1982 following heart surgery, NASCAR honored the man who took the wall for a fellow driver by renaming its annual Nashville Fairgrounds race the Marty Robbins 420 in early 1983.

On October 6, 1974, during the second lap of the National 500 at Charlotte Motor Speedway in North Carolina, country music star Marty Robbins steered his purple-and-gold Number 42 Dodge Charger straight into a concrete wall at 160 miles per hour to avoid hitting fellow driver Richard Childress. Moments earlier, a multi-car pileup had left the twenty-nine-year-old Childress sitting motionless across the asphalt with his driver’s side door exposed through the smoke. In 1970s stock car racing, a direct T-bone impact into the cockpit at that speed was nearly certain to be fatal. For the forty-nine-year-old Robbins, NASCAR was never a publicity stunt. He paid for his own cars out of pocket without sponsors and often drove through the night from the track to Nashville in time to sing the closing spot at the Grand Ole Opry. He was also racing with a scarred heart, having survived a severe heart attack in 1969 and undergone one of America’s earliest coronary bypass surgeries in 1970. With less than a second to react as his nose aimed directly at Childress’s door, Robbins jerked the wheel hard and drove his car into the concrete barrier to kill his momentum. Emergency crews pulled the unconscious singer from the crushed Dodge and took him to the hospital with two broken ribs, a cracked tailbone, heavy chest trauma, and head and facial lacerations requiring thirty-two stitches. When he woke up, the first thing he asked was whether the other drivers in the wreck were safe. Childress walked away unharmed and went on to build one of the most successful team ownership careers in NASCAR history alongside Dale Earnhardt. In 1983, a year after Robbins passed away at age fifty-seven following his third heart attack, Childress earned his first victory as a car owner with driver Ricky Rudd at Riverside and dedicated the win to the singer who took the wall for him at Charlotte.