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Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

In 1993, after Nashville labels and country radio had written him off, 61-year-old Johnny Cash rebuilt his career in a Los Angeles living room with a hip-hop and heavy metal producer. Dropped by Columbia Records in 1986 after 28 years and struggling through a quiet run at Mercury Records, Cash spent the early 1990s playing dinner theaters and county fairs while country stations favored younger singers. Backstage after a show at California’s Rhythm Cafe, Def Jam co-founder Rick Rubin, known for working with Run-D.M.C., the Beastie Boys, and Slayer, approached him about making a record. Cash doubted that any label still knew what to do with an aging singer whose recent Nashville tracks had been buried under glossy arrangements. With encouragement from his wife, June Carter Cash, he accepted Rubin’s invitation to skip the big studios altogether. Sitting in Rubin’s Los Angeles living room and later at Cash’s cabin in Hendersonville, Tennessee, he recorded with only a single microphone and his Martin acoustic guitar. Across weeks of quiet sessions, he pulled hundreds of gospel hymns, prison ballads, cowboy songs, and new originals from memory, including old folk songs his mother once sang in the Arkansas cotton fields. To introduce the music, Rubin booked him at Johnny Depp’s Viper Room on the Sunset Strip in December 1993, followed by the Glastonbury Festival in 1994, where young rock and punk crowds stood transfixed by a 62-year-old man in black holding an acoustic guitar. Released on April 26, 1994, American Recordings earned Cash the 1995 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album and launched a six-album series. Over the final decade of his life, especially after June died in 2003, those daily recording sessions with Rubin kept him singing until the end.

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When 61-year-old Johnny Cash walked into Rick Rubin’s Los Angeles home in May 1993, he brought a Martin acoustic guitar and serious doubts that any record label still knew what to do with him.

Only a few years earlier, the Nashville industry he helped build had quietly moved on. Columbia Records dropped Cash in 1986 after twenty-eight years on its roster, and a subsequent four-album deal with Mercury Records produced little radio play while country stations chased a younger generation of hat acts. By the early 1990s, a member of both the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was spending much of his calendar playing Branson theaters, state fairs, and half-full dinner clubs.

Rubin, the thirty-year-old co-founder of Def Jam Recordings who had built his name producing Run-D.M.C., the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, and thrash metal band Slayer, saw something Nashville was ignoring. After catching Cash’s show at the Rhythm Cafe in Santa Ana, California, earlier in 1993, Rubin went backstage to propose an album on his American Recordings label. Cash was skeptical, having spent the 1980s watching producers bury his baritone under heavy drums and polished studio arrangements, until his wife, June Carter Cash, urged him to hear the younger man out.

Instead of booking a commercial studio with session players on the clock, Rubin invited Cash into the living room of his home on Loma Vista Drive in Beverly Hills. There were no backing tracks, no Nashville strings, and no strict schedules. Cash simply sat in a chair in front of a single microphone and started playing the songs he had carried around for decades.

Over weeks of informal sessions that moved between Rubin’s California living room and Cash’s log cabin in Hendersonville, Tennessee, the two men recorded more than a hundred songs. Cash pulled from every corner of his memory, running through nineteenth-century cowboy ballads, prison songs, gospel hymns his mother Carrie had sung in the cotton fields of Dyess, Arkansas, and new compositions he wrote on the spot. Rubin also began slipping him tapes of contemporary rock and alternative songwriters, putting tracks by Glenn Danzig, Leonard Cohen, Nick Lowe, and Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell directly alongside traditional folk numbers.

To test the stripped-down material in front of an audience, Rubin booked Cash at the Viper Room, the Sunset Strip nightclub co-owned by actor Johnny Depp, on December 2, 1993. Stepping onto a cramped stage normally reserved for Los Angeles punk and grunge bands, Cash stood alone in his black coat and held a room of twenty-something rock fans and Hollywood regulars completely still. By June 1994, he was playing the main stage at England’s Glastonbury Festival before tens of thousands of young festivalgoers.

Released on April 26, 1994, the eleven-track album American Recordings featured ten songs recorded solely with Cash’s voice and guitar, plus two live cuts taped that night at the Viper Room. The record won the 1995 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Folk Album and opened a ten-year partnership that stretched across six studio albums and the multi-disc Unearthed box set.

Two years later, Rubin surrounded Cash with Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers for the 1996 follow-up, Unchained, which won the Grammy for Best Country Album. When Petty’s label objected to standard promotional ads, Rubin and Cash took out a full-page advertisement in Billboard showing a young Cash flipping his middle finger to the Nashville establishment and thanking country radio for its non-support.

By 1997, Cash’s health began to fail due to autonomic neuropathy associated with diabetes, alongside recurring bouts of pneumonia that repeatedly put him in the hospital. Even as his vision dimmed and his vocal cords weakened, Rubin kept sending guitars and demo tapes to Hendersonville, recording third and fourth installments built around songs by U2, Tom Waits, Depeche Mode, Nick Cave, and Nine Inch Nails.

When Cash hesitated to cover Trent Reznor’s “Hurt” for 2002’s American IV: The Man Comes Around, Rubin pressed him to listen again until the seventy-year-old singer turned the industrial rock track into a stark meditation on mortality.

After June Carter Cash died on May 15, 2003,following heart valve surgery, a grieving Cash told Rubin at her funeral that he needed to work every single day or he would not survive. Confined to a wheelchair in his final months, he recorded roughly sixty songs before his death on September 12, 2003, at age seventy-one, spending his last afternoon in the studio on August 21 cutting one final gospel hymn with the producer who had given him back his unadorned voice.

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

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On September 1, 1970, Barry Gibb turned 24 at St Paul’s Church in Knightsbridge, London, by marrying the Scottish woman he had met backstage nearly three years earlier. They first crossed paths on December 21, 1967, during the filming of a Top of the Pops Christmas special at the BBC studios in London. Barry was 21 and the Bee Gees were breaking through across Britain, while 18-year-old Linda Gray, a former Miss Edinburgh, was working at the studio as an assistant and co-host. Surrounded by screaming fans, the young singer still found himself nervous in the corridor, looking for any excuse to speak with her and get her contact details before taping ended. After his brief first marriage to Maureen Bates ended and nearly three years of relentless touring passed, Barry married Linda on his 24th birthday, turning every September 1 into a double celebration. Linda quietly stepped back from her own modeling and television prospects in London to build a home life away from the industry. Before disco revived the band in 1975, the couple lived through the lean early 1970s when the Bee Gees played small clubs in northern England. They eventually raised five children, Stephen, Ashley, Travis, Michael, and Alexandra, welcomed seven grandchildren, and kept homes in Miami and the English countryside where Barry’s brothers and parents regularly gathered. As the decades took Andy in 1988, Maurice in 2003, and Robin in 2012, Barry retreated into his house and stopped picking up his guitar. It was Linda who urged the last surviving Gibb brother to sing again and take the stage to honor them. When Barry received his knighthood at Buckingham Palace in 2018, he arrived the same way he had walked out of that London church in 1970, holding the hand of the woman from the BBC hallway over 55 years ago.

In early 1969, when Robin Gibb walked out of the Bee Gees, Barry and Maurice called the one person in the family who had never chased a spotlight, their older sister Lesley. Born in Manchester in January 1945, Lesley Barbara Gibb was the firstborn child and the only sister to Barry, twins Robin and Maurice, and young Andy. During the family’s years in Redcliffe, Australia in the late 1950s, she helped her parents care for the boys long before the world knew their names. When tension around the album Odessa fractured the group, Barry and Maurice still had British television commitments and engagements at London’s Talk of the Town. With almost no professional rehearsal, Lesley stepped between her brothers alongside drummer Colin Petersen. She sang on BBC television so they would not have to cancel their shows while the British press watched for signs of collapse. Her voice blended naturally with theirs, and she even recorded a few demos, yet she walked away as soon as her brothers were steady again. Having married Keith Evans in 1966, she chose a quiet life in rural New South Wales over touring, raising seven children in Wallacia and breeding Jack Russell Terriers. When the Bee Gees reached global wealth in the late 1970s, the brothers quietly bought her family a spacious Australian property, and Lesley turned down tabloid offers so her home could remain a private refuge for them. Over the decades, she and Barry watched the rest of their family pass away, losing Andy in 1988, their father Hugh in 1992, Maurice in 2003, Robin in 2012, and their mother Barbara in 2016. When Barry brought his Mythology Tour to Australia in 2013 to honor their late brothers, the silver-haired sister who once saved the band backstage was still there, one of the last two left from a house that started with five siblings.

When Conway Twitty signed his will on July 18, 1984, he made sure the first $50,000 of his estate would go directly to his mother, Velma Dunaway. Long before the world knew him as a country superstar with 55 number-one hits, he was Harold Lloyd Jenkins, growing up in lean times in Friars Point, Mississippi, and Helena, Arkansas. His mother raised him through those hard early years and stayed close as his music carried him to national fame. When he opened his nine-acre Twitty City complex in Hendersonville, Tennessee, in 1982, he built a home right on the property for Velma alongside houses for his children so he could look after her every day. Two years later, while married to his second wife, Mickey Temple Jenkins, he put that same duty into legal writing, later adding two codicils to adjust his estate. That preparation was tested sooner than anyone expected. On June 4, 1993, after performing at the Jim Stafford Theatre in Branson, Missouri, the 59-year-old singer fell ill on his tour bus. He died the next morning at Cox South Hospital in Springfield from an abdominal aortic aneurysm. Because the 1984 will had not been fully updated following his 1987 marriage to his third wife, Delores “Dee” Henry, an eight-year legal dispute erupted between his widow and his four adult children, Michael, Kathy, Joni, and Jimmy. While courts and auctions eventually divided Twitty City and his music rights through 2001, the $50,000 instruction for his mother stood clear and untouched. Velma Dunaway lived nearly nine years after losing her son, passing away in March 2002 at age 88, still cared for by a promise he had locked in paper nearly a decade before his final road trip.

Years of arena tours and chart-topping records gave Carrie Underwood the means to live in any gated neighborhood in Tennessee, yet she never felt at home behind subdivision walls. After a fall outside her previous house in late 2017, Underwood and her husband, Mike Fisher, decided to leave suburban life behind and finish building their forever home on roughly four hundred acres of rural land outside Nashville. Moving out to the country brought Underwood back to the rhythms of her childhood in Checotah, Oklahoma, where she grew up on her parents’ cattle farm. Away from the cameras and award shows, she planted a large vegetable garden and orchard, spending hours in the kitchen canning tomatoes, pickling vegetables, and storing jars of homemade jam for the winter. Outside, she and Fisher stocked the pastures and barns with cattle, horses, and a flock of chickens. For Underwood, the move was mostly about how she wanted to raise their two sons, Isaiah and Jacob. Instead of growing up surrounded by music industry luxury, the boys spend their days barefoot in the dirt, gathering eggs from the coop, and helping with daily chores around the property. When the tour buses park and the stage lights go dark, the voice known to millions of country fans returns to four hundred acres of Tennessee pasture, trading red carpets for garden soil and a quiet farmhouse kitchen.

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.

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.