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Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

On the night of November 11, 2020, 86-year-old Charley Pride walked onto the stage at Nashville’s Music City Center to receive the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award at the 54th CMA Awards and sing one last time. Because of the global pandemic, there was no general audience in the hall that evening, only a small room of fellow artists seated at spaced round tables in formal evening wear. Pride stood beside younger Black country singer Jimmie Allen to perform “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’,” the 1971 number-one hit that had helped make Pride the CMA Entertainer of the Year in 1972. Though his steps had slowed with age, the moment the introduction played, his warm, clear baritone filled the room and brought the stars at the tables to their feet. Pride had traveled a long road to that Nashville stage. Born into a sharecropping family of eleven children picking cotton in Sledge, Mississippi, he spent his youth pitching in the Negro Leagues and shoveling coal into smelting furnaces before breaking through the racial barriers of 1960s country music. Over the decades, he became the genre’s first Black superstar, earning 29 number-one country singles and becoming RCA Records’ best-selling artist since Elvis Presley. As Allen bowed his head with reddened eyes beside him on stage, the moment connected the man who had opened the door with the new generation walking through it. When Pride stepped to the microphone to accept his trophy, his breath was occasionally short, and he did not mention the hardships of his early years. Instead, he thanked his fans and called out the name of his wife, Rozene, who had walked beside him through 64 years of marriage. Exactly one month and one day later, on December 12, 2020, Pride passed away at a hospital in Dallas, Texas, at age 86 from complications of COVID-19. While his close friend Willie Nelson and the Nashville community mourned his loss, his final public memory remained intact: a sharecropper’s son singing his signature song under the stage lights, thanking his wife of six decades, and waving goodbye to a standing room of his peers.

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On the night of November 11, 2020, 86-year-old Charley Pride walked onto the stage at Nashville’s Music City Center to receive the Willie Nelson Lifetime Achievement Award at the 54th CMA Awards and sing his signature song one last time.

Because of the pandemic, there was no general crowd in the hall, only a small gathering of fellow country artists seated at spaced round tables. Standing beside 35-year-old Black country singer Jimmie Allen, Pride sang “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin’,” the 1971 single that had propelled him to CMA Entertainer of the Year in 1972. When the song ended and the room rose to its feet, Pride stepped to the microphone, thanked his lifelong fans, and called out the name of his wife, Rozene, after 64 years of marriage.

When Pride first recorded “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'” at RCA Studio B in Nashville with producer Jack Clement in 1971, the song had come not from a story about marriage, but from a songwriter’s nursery. Mississippi native Ben Peters, who wrote dozens of songs for Pride, had recently welcomed a baby daughter named Angela. One morning as Peters headed out the door for work, his wife reminded him to kiss the baby goodbye, giving him the opening hook that he turned into a song about a husband’s devotion.

Pride later recalled that he could not wait to get into the studio the moment Clement played him the demo. At the time, one prominent radio chain owner had warned Pride directly that as long as he kept traditional steel guitars on his records, his stations would refuse to play them on pop radio.

Released on October 23, 1971, as the lead single from the album *Charley Pride Sings Heart Songs*, the track kept its country steel guitar and crossed over anyway. It spent five weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard country chart, climbed to No. 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 as Pride’s first and only Top 40 pop hit, sold more than a million copies, and earned Peters the 1973 Grammy Award for Best Country Song.

Finding his place in those early years had required allies willing to stand beside him in segregated halls. Born to sharecroppers in Sledge, Mississippi, Pride had pitched for the Memphis Red Sox in the Negro American League and shoveled coal into smelting furnaces in East Helena, Montana, before RCA Victor signed him in the mid-1960s.

When Dallas club owner Dewey Groom initially balked at letting a Black singer perform at the Longhorn Ballroom on a 1960s Texas package tour, Willie Nelson and his drummer Paul English escorted Pride through the stage door themselves. Before Pride sang a note of “The Snakes Crawl at Night” in front of the uneasy Texas crowd, Nelson walked up to the microphone and kissed Pride squarely on the lips to leave no doubt where he stood.

More than five decades later, in 2018, Pride boarded Nelson’s tour bus for a filmed interview, leaned over, and kissed Nelson right back, laughing that he had been waiting years to return the favor. Two years after that reunion on the bus, Pride was handed the CMA trophy bearing Willie Nelson’s name.

Exactly one month and one day after the Nashville broadcast, on December 12, 2020, Pride died at a hospital in Dallas at age 86 from complications of COVID-19. Across Texas and Tennessee, Nelson and the generation of artists who had watched Pride open the doors of country music shared their grief for a friend who had carried the genre across racial lines.

For Allen, who had grown up in Delaware and first learned what Pride looked like when his father showed him an album cover, the loss hit like a family death. Speaking two days after Pride’s passing, Allen remembered how the older singer had shared quiet stories with him about the racism he endured in the 1960s while also asking eagerly about rising young Black country artists like Kane Brown, Mickey Guyton, and Breland.

Calling Pride his hero and mentor, Allen said losing him felt like Superman had died, adding that his prayers stayed with Rozene after more than six decades together before he picked up his guitar to record a solo acoustic rendition of “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin'” in Pride’s memory.

Three months later, in March 2021, the Texas Rangers—the baseball franchise where Pride had spent decades as a regular at spring training and a part-owner—renamed their facility in Surprise, Arizona, Charley Pride Field, placing his name permanently on the diamond a sharecropper’s son from Sledge had once dreamed of reaching.

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On March 15, 2015, twelve years after Brad Paisley and Kimberly Williams tricked their guests with a secret wedding, Paisley turned the tables and planned a surprise vow renewal from start to finish for his wife. To keep Williams from suspecting anything while making sure she still felt like a bride, Paisley quietly reached out to her best friend ahead of time and asked her to pick out a new white wedding dress that matched Williams’s exact measurements and style. Between his touring schedule, he arranged every detail himself at home, inviting only their closest friends and their two young sons, eight-year-old Huck and five-year-old Jasper. Instead of a stiff, formal ceremony, Paisley put together a celebration that mixed traditional vows with campy, offbeat humor. Standing before their boys and friends, the couple read new vows written specifically for the twelve-year mark, pairing deep commitments with playful jokes about the everyday habits they had picked up after more than a decade under the same roof. The timing carried quiet weight for their household. March 2015 came during one of the hardest seasons of Williams’s life, as her mother’s dementia continued to worsen and Williams prepared to share that family journey in her memoir Where the Light Gets In. Knowing how much heaviness his wife had been carrying, Paisley built the entire day around laughter to give her a warm place to breathe. Twelve years earlier, they had stood at the altar as two young newlyweds keeping a secret from the room. This time, with their two sons watching, Paisley used a borrowed secret and a new white dress to tell his wife he would choose her all over again.

In 2002, before they even walked down the aisle, Brad Paisley and Kimberly Williams started sitting down together with a marriage counselor to learn how to communicate before any crisis arrived. Instead of waiting for conflict to threaten their home, the couple kept those regular counseling sessions going across more than two decades of marriage. While many in the entertainment world hid therapy out of fear of divorce rumors, Paisley and Williams spoke openly about their choice. Williams compared going to counseling while happy to maintaining a car or exercising while healthy, rather than waiting until the engine started smoking on the side of the road to look for a mechanic. Their marriage brought together two different worlds and personalities. Paisley grew up in West Virginia and lived the road life of a traditional country singer with a quiet, introverted nature, while Williams came from New York to work as a driven, perfectionist actress in Hollywood. In their early years, the counselor’s office became the place where two famous artists learned to set aside their egos and listen across those invisible distances. That foundation carried them through their hardest family season when Williams’s mother, Linda, battled frontotemporal dementia for years. As her mother gradually lost her memory and cognitive abilities, Williams struggled through deep emotional grief, and Paisley used the empathy they had practiced for years to steady their home so his wife could write and advocate for dementia patients. In 2015, they marked twelve years of marriage with a humorous, intimate vow renewal surrounded by family and friends. At their farm in Franklin, Tennessee, where they raised their sons Huck and Jasper, all music awards and film credits stayed outside the wooden gate so the two of them could simply come home as husband and wife.

In August 2002, Brad Paisley took actress Kimberly Williams for an early morning walk along the Venice Beach Pier in California and dropped to one knee right in front of the public restrooms. Their story had started eleven years earlier in a movie theater, when a young Paisley went to see the 1991 film Father of the Bride with his girlfriend at the time. That girlfriend later left him for his best friend, while Paisley never forgot the actress who played the bride on screen. When he needed a leading lady for his music video in 2001, he reached out and asked Williams to take the part. After filming wrapped, they went for their first walk together on the Venice Beach Pier. Over the next year, they built a relationship across the distance between Nashville and Los Angeles through hours of nightly phone calls between tour stops and film sets. Through those quiet conversations, Williams came to know the warm, grounded humor of the man behind the white cowboy hat. When Paisley brought her back to the same pier a year later with a ring in his pocket, he worried she would guess his plan if he led her all the way out to the scenic end over the ocean. Wanting to catch her completely off guard, he stopped abruptly in the least glamorous spot on the boardwalk and proposed beside the restroom sign. Williams burst out laughing in surprise and said yes, and the two celebrated afterward over a quiet breakfast at a small beachside cafe with no cameras or crowds around them. They married in March 2003 at Stauffer Chapel at Pepperdine University in Malibu and went on to raise two sons across more than two decades together. The marriage that began with a movie screen bride found its lasting footing in a clumsy morning question beside a boardwalk restroom.

On January 19, 1946, Dr. Robert F. Thomas traveled a rough mountain road through the winter cold to a one-room cabin in Locust Ridge, Tennessee, and delivered a baby girl for a single sack of home-ground cornmeal. That baby was Dolly Parton, the fourth of twelve children born to Avie Lee and Robert Lee Parton in Sevier County. The remote cabin had no electricity and no running water, and in January the children slept crowded together on straw mattresses as cold wind came through the wooden walls. Her father worked as a sharecropper and had no cash in the house, so he gave the doctor the only thing the family could spare from their own table. For decades, Dr. Thomas served the isolated families of the Smoky Mountains as both a missionary minister and a country physician. He walked, rode horseback, and drove a jeep across creeks and steep ridges at all hours, delivering thousands of babies and treating the sick regardless of whether a family could pay. In those mountain hollows, his fee was often chickens, garden vegetables, cured meat, or simply a word of thanks, and he never turned away a midnight call. Parton stayed close to the doctor who brought her into the world until he passed away in 1980 at age 90. Three years later, after becoming one of country music’s biggest stars, she established the Robert F. Thomas Foundation and began hosting annual benefit concerts in her hometown of Sevierville to upgrade medical care and equipment for Sevier County families. Speaking to her hometown neighbors from the stage, Parton said building up the local hospital was her way of paying back her father’s sack of cornmeal with interest. That effort grew into the LeConte Medical Center, which opened in 2010 with the Dolly Parton Birthing Unit named in honor of her parents, along with cancer care and rehabilitation services for tens of thousands of mountain residents. The debt that began in a freezing one-room cabin was answered generations later with warm hospital rooms where East Tennessee mothers could bring their children safely into the world.

At 88 years old, recovering from a 2017 stroke and a broken hip the following year, Loretta Lynn rolled her wheelchair into the rustic rooms of Cash Cabin Studio in Hendersonville, Tennessee, to record the 50th solo studio album of her six-decade career. Her daughter, Patsy Lynn Russell, drove her to the sessions, cared for her between songs, and co-produced the project alongside John Carter Cash, the only son of Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash. Working inside the wooden cabin Johnny had built in 1979 for quiet reflection, Loretta told the crew she could still feel her two departed friends standing nearby among the family keepsakes. Before the tape rolled, Patsy and John Carter watched Loretta sit frail and quiet in her chair, sometimes pausing just to catch her breath. Then the opening guitar notes sounded and the red recording light turned on. Her back straightened, her eyes lit up, and she delivered full, steady vocals in one or two takes without studio piecing. Released in March 2021, Still Woman Enough brought Reba McEntire, Carrie Underwood, Margo Price, and Tanya Tucker into those sessions to honor the women of country music. Loretta treated the collaborations like warm living-room conversations, urging the younger singers to guard their pride and keep their own identity. For one of the album’s thirteen tracks, she recorded an acoustic recitation and vocal return to her 1970 signature song, Coal Miner’s Daughter, fifty years after its original release. Hearing her weathered 88-year-old voice revisit her Kentucky childhood brought the control room crew to tears. The wheelchair stayed right beside the microphone, while the Kentucky coal miner’s daughter proved that as long as she could still sing, age and illness had not won.

After a severe stroke in May 2017 and a broken hip eight months later ended Loretta Lynn’s touring life at age 85, her youngest daughter Peggy stepped away from her own singing career to move to the family ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, and care for her mother full-time. Born as a twin alongside her sister Patsy in 1964 during her mother’s early rise to fame, Peggy had spent years performing in the family duo The Lynns. More than half a century later, their roles reversed inside the ranch house. Having already survived the loss of her husband Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, three of her six children—Jack Benny in 1984, and Betty Sue and Cissy in 2013—and later her grandson Jeffrey in 2022, the aging country singer faced her final five years confined largely to a wheelchair and bed. Peggy stayed beside her day and night. She brushed her mother’s hair, fed her spoonfuls of soup, and sat by the bed during sleepless nights of physical pain to hold her hands, read the Bible, and softly sing old country songs until she fell asleep. Knowing her mother’s lifelong pride, Peggy also carefully styled her hair, makeup, and clothes whenever friends like Reba McEntire, Tanya Tucker, or Kid Rock visited, or when they filmed brief videos for fans. With steady support from Peggy and Patsy, Lynn even completed her final albums, Wouldn’t It Be Great in 2018 and Still Woman Enough in 2021. On October 4, 2022, 90-year-old Loretta Lynn passed away peacefully in her sleep at her Hurricane Mills home, fulfilling her wish never to pass away in a hospital room while Peggy held her hand until the very end. The family laid her to rest in the ranch cemetery right beside her husband and the three children who had gone before her, just steps from the home where her daughter had kept her safe.

At 71, Loretta Lynn arrived at a Memphis studio carrying a stack of loose-leaf notebook paper filled with songs she had written in silence after losing her husband of 48 years. For nearly two decades before that session, Lynn had largely stepped away from mainstream recording to care for Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn until his passing in 1996. Mainstream country radio had moved toward younger voices, leaving little room for a veteran singer in her seventies. The return began in 2001 when 28-year-old garage rock frontman Jack White dedicated a White Stripes album to her. When he visited her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, she cooked him fried Spam sandwiches and bean soup in her own kitchen. After performing together in New York in 2003, White offered to produce her next record. Inside Easley-McCain Recording in Memphis, White read through the handwritten notebook pages Lynn had brought with her and convinced her to record only her own writing. He assembled a young rock backing band called The DoWhaters and forbade rehearsals. The musicians simply listened to Lynn strum her acoustic guitar and followed her raw timing on classic eight-track tape, finishing all 13 songs in 12 days without Nashville studio polish. Named after her childhood nickname in the Kentucky coal camps, Van Lear Rose came out in April 2004 and reached number 24 on the Billboard 200, the highest chart placement of her career. At the 47th Grammy Awards in 2005, the 72-year-old coal miner’s daughter wore an evening gown and walked onto the stage on White’s arm to accept two trophies, including Best Country Album and Best Country Collaboration with Vocals for “Portland Oregon.” The handwritten pages from her quiet years of grief had become the biggest commercial triumph of her life.

Inside the Nashville grocery store Brad Paisley opened with his wife Kimberly, families fill carts with fresh meat and produce before getting a receipt for zero dollars. The idea started over Thanksgiving when Brad and Kimberly Williams-Paisley took their sons, Huck and Jasper, to volunteer at Unity Shoppe in Santa Barbara, California. They wanted the boys to see life beyond their comfortable home in Franklin, Tennessee. Watching families in the aisles, the couple realized children there never felt the shame of a handout line because their parents were simply grocery shopping like anyone else. Brad brought the model to Nashville through Belmont University, where he graduated in 1995. The school donated land beside its campus on 12th Avenue South, country music friends quietly helped fund the building, and Belmont students in law, healthcare, and music stepped in to assist visiting families. Instead of handing out prepacked boxes, The Store lets households referred by social agencies choose dairy, vegetables, and staples that fit their own kitchens and culture. At the checkout counter, volunteers greet shoppers like neighbors and pack their bags carefully. The doors opened on March 12, 2020, days after a tornado hit Middle Tennessee and right as the COVID-19 pandemic shut down the country. Pivoting overnight to weekly home deliveries for seniors and newly jobless families, the team provided over 1.3 million meals in under a year. Each Christmas, the aisles also become a free toy shop where parents select new gifts to put under the tree themselves. After years of operating past capacity on 12th Avenue South, Brad and Kimberly advanced plans for a second location at the TriStar Centennial hospital campus so patients and families strained by medical bills can still bring food home with their pride intact.

When a sixties folk group sued Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, and Kris Kristofferson over the name The Highwaymen in 1990, they settled it on stage. Although Jimmy Webb’s song Highwayman hit number one in 1985 and won a Grammy, Columbia Records never printed a band name on their first two albums, Highwayman and Highwayman 2. The covers simply listed four surnames: Nelson, Jennings, Cash, Kristofferson. A legal conflict arose in 1990 when tour promoters began officially billing the quartet as The Highwaymen. Formed at Wesleyan University in 1958, the original folk group The Highwaymen had topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 1961 with Michael and scored another hit with Cotton Fields. Protecting a name they had legally owned for three decades, the folk musicians filed suit. The country stars had the label backing to outspend the older group in court. Having fought Nashville executives for years to protect their own creative rights, they refused to bully fellow musicians. Cash and Kristofferson admired the early sixties folk movement, and Waylon Jennings proposed handling the matter face to face. The quartet invited all five members of the original folk group, including Dave Fisher and Steve Butts, to open their 1990 show and share the stage at The Roxy in Los Angeles. Instead of meeting across a courtroom table, the nine men met backstage with guitars and handshakes before standing shoulder to shoulder under the lights as nine Highwaymen. Touched by the gesture, the folk group dropped the lawsuit and gave the country stars full permission to tour and record under the name. When the quartet released their final studio album, The Road Goes On Forever, in 1995, The Highwaymen appeared officially on the cover with the blessing of the men who carried it first.