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Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

In 1930, seven-year-old Hank Williams watched his father enter a Louisiana veterans hospital for eight years, leaving the frail Alabama boy to help keep the family afloat by shining shoes and selling peanuts along the railroad tracks. Elonzo “Lon” Williams had suffered severe head injuries after falling from a military truck in France during World War I. When facial paralysis and a brain aneurysm finally forced him into the Veterans Hospital in Alexandria, his wife, Lillie, had to support their children alone through the Great Depression. In Georgiana, Alabama, Lillie ran a small boarding house while working night shifts at a strawberry cannery and a local hospital. Born with undiagnosed spina bifida occulta that left him thin and in constant back pain, young Hank went to work alongside his older sister, Irene. The two tended a backyard garden, roasted and bagged peanuts in paper sacks, peddled newspapers, and carried a heavy shoeshine box down to the train depot whenever passenger cars pulled in. When Hank turned eight, Lillie used her scarce savings and the loose coins from his street work to buy him a secondhand guitar. Between shifts at the depot, the boy followed Black street musician Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne around town, learning the blues chords and rhythms that shaped his voice. By the time Elonzo was discharged in 1938, Hank was fifteen and already singing on local radio in Montgomery. Those eight hard years without a father, spent working the Georgiana train platforms beside his sister and mother, gave his music the lonesome weight and working-class honesty that millions of listeners later recognized as their own.

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At age fourteen, Hank Williams stepped onto the stage of the Empire Theater in downtown Montgomery, Alabama, and won fifteen dollars for an original song called “WPA Blues”.

Seven years before that night in late 1937, the boy known around south Alabama as Hiram had watched his father enter the Veterans Hospital in Alexandria, Louisiana, leaving a single mother and two children to survive the Great Depression near the Louisville and Nashville Railroad tracks in Georgiana.

Elonzo “Lon” Williams, a locomotive engineer for a lumber company, had suffered severe head injuries after falling from a military truck in France during World War I. In 1930, when facial paralysis and a brain aneurysm took away his ability to work, his wife, Lillie, took over as the sole provider.

Lillie moved the children into a boarding house on Rose Street in Georgiana, taking in lodgers while working night shifts at a strawberry cannery and a local hospital. Born with undiagnosed spina bifida occulta that left him frail and in steady back pain, seven-year-old Hank went to work alongside his older sister, Irene.

After helping tend a backyard vegetable garden, the siblings roasted peanuts in Lillie’s kitchen and packed them into small paper sacks. Whenever passenger trains pulled into the Georgiana depot, Hank walked the platform carrying a shoeshine box, sacks of boiled or roasted peanuts, and copies of the *Saturday Evening Post*.

When Hank turned eight, Lillie put $3.50 of her savings together with the coins from his street work to buy him a secondhand acoustic guitar. Between train schedules in Georgiana, the boy began trailing Rufus “Tee-Tot” Payne, a Black street musician born in Lowndes County in 1884 who played blues and popular standards for spare change.

In exchange for small coins or food wrapped up from Lillie’s boarding house kitchen, Payne showed the thin white kid how to keep a steady thumb rhythm, move cleanly between basic chords, and carry a vocal melody that held the attention of people passing on the sidewalk.

A house fire in Georgiana cost the family nearly all of their possessions in late 1934, prompting Lillie to move the children fifteen miles north to the larger county seat of Greenville in 1935. Payne traveled that same stretch of Butler County, and Hank continued taking lessons from his mentor on sidewalks and courthouse steps before Lillie relocated the family again in July 1937 to Montgomery.

Outside the studios of radio station WSFA on Perry Street in Montgomery, the teenager sat on the sidewalk with his guitar, singing for passing producers and office workers until the station invited him inside for an on-air guest spot.

Months later, in December 1937, the fourteen-year-old entered the amateur talent contest at Montgomery’s Empire Theater and took first prize with “WPA Blues,” a song he wrote about the federal work relief program. Listeners flooded WSFA with mail asking to hear more from the boy they called “The Singing Kid,” convincing station managers to give him his own fifteen-minute broadcast twice a week for fifteen dollars a week.

When Elonzo Williams was briefly discharged from the Louisiana hospital in 1938 and visited Montgomery, he arrived to find a household his wife had held together for eight years and a fifteen-year-old son already earning a steady living on local radio.

With Lillie acting as his business manager and booking driver, Hank formed the Drifting Cowboys that same year, taking the rhythmic timing he learned from Rufus Payne on the streets of Georgiana and Greenville into schoolhouses, dance halls, and honky-tonks across central Alabama.

Payne died in a Montgomery charity hospital in March 1939, a decade before his student reached the Grand Ole Opry, yet in later interviews Williams still credited the old street singer from Georgiana as the only music teacher he ever had.

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

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In 1935, a young Tennessee carpenter named Johnnie Wright heard sixteen-year-old Ellen Muriel Deason singing over an old Nashville radio and spent the next two years convincing the shy teenager to marry him. Wright had traveled from rural Mt. Juliet to visit his sister Louise in Nashville when he caught Muriel and her sisters harmonizing on local station WSIX. Taken by her voice before he ever saw her face, he asked his sister to arrange an introduction. Muriel was quiet and guarded around the stranger at first. Over the next two years, Wright kept driving into Nashville after his shifts as a cabinetmaker, bringing his guitar over to play music with the Deason family until his steady presence finally won her trust. They married on October 30, 1937, when Muriel was eighteen and Wright was twenty-three. Soon after the wedding, he encouraged his reluctant bride to sing onstage alongside him and his brother-in-law, Jack Anglin, and gave her the stage name “Kitty Wells” from an old folk song his father used to play. With Wright backing her career at every step, she recorded “It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels” in 1952, becoming the first female solo singer to top the Billboard country charts. Even when her fame eclipsed his own duo, Johnnie & Jack, Wright gladly stepped back to manage their road shows and keep her at the center of the stage. The marriage that began beside a sister’s radio in 1935 lasted seventy-four years until Wright passed away in September 2011 at age ninety-seven, followed by his wife ten months later in July 2012.

In June 1961, Patsy Cline lay in a Tennessee hospital bed after a car crash and asked her husband to find the young Kentucky singer she had just heard dedicating a song to her on late-night radio. Days earlier, on June 14, while “I Fall to Pieces” was climbing the charts, Cline had been thrown through a windshield in a head-on collision in Madison, Tennessee. Recovering at Madison General Hospital with a fractured skull, a dislocated hip, and heavy stitches across her forehead, she tuned in to WSM’s Midnight Jamboree from the Ernest Tubb Record Shop. Over the airwaves, newcomer Loretta Lynn sang “I Walk Alone” as a prayer for Cline’s recovery. At Cline’s urging, her husband, Charlie Dick, tracked down Loretta and her husband, Doolittle “Mooney” Lynn, and brought them to the hospital that same night. When the shy newcomer hesitated at the door, Cline welcomed her like family, calling her “hoss” and beginning a sisterhood that lasted the rest of Cline’s life. After leaving the hospital, Cline saw how little the Lynns had in their small rented Nashville house. Having grown up poor in Virginia herself, Cline gave Loretta stage dresses from her own closet, bought her personal clothes and undergarments, and even brought over new curtains to hang in Loretta’s windows. At a time when Nashville’s established female singers guarded the few spots open to women, Cline took Loretta by the hand and walked her directly into their gatherings, making it clear that the coal miner’s daughter was under her protection. Between tours, the two sat at the kitchen table over coffee, talking through marriage, motherhood, and the business skills women needed in a male-run industry. Their friendship lasted less than two years before Cline died in a March 1963 plane crash. For the next six decades until her own passing in 2022, Loretta Lynn kept her friend’s name alive on stages across America, never forgetting the star who reached out from a hospital bed and hung curtains in her home.

In 1989, fifty-five-year-old Vern Gosdin walked into a Nashville studio while his third marriage was falling apart and recorded an entire album about returning to an empty house. Working with producer Bob Montgomery for Columbia Records, Gosdin did not take time off the road to recover from the divorce. Instead, he stood behind the microphone and poured the breakup directly into a ten-song concept album titled “Alone,” released in July 1989. Every track centered on the quiet aftermath of a failed marriage. While Gosdin sang in his weathered baritone, Montgomery and the seasoned Nashville session players often sat in silence behind the control room glass after a single take, leaving the natural catch in his breath untouched on the final master. At a time when upbeat young acts dominated late-1980s country radio, Gosdin’s stripped-down record climbed to number 11 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart. It produced two major hits, with “That Just About Does It” reaching number 4 and “Right in the Wrong Direction” hitting the top 10. The sessions cemented the nickname “The Voice” among his peers, earning high praise from fellow country icons George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Years before his passing in 2009, critics already placed the 1989 release alongside Frank Sinatra’s “In the Wee Small Hours” and Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.” At fifty-five, during the loneliest season of his private life, Gosdin gave listeners who were walking through their own divorces a voice that understood the silence waiting at home.

In 1982, severe complications from Crohn’s disease forced founding tenor Lew DeWitt to leave the Statler Brothers after twenty-seven years, though he refused to let surgery be his final note in country music. Along with Don Reid, Harold Reid, and Phil Balsley, DeWitt had helped build the quartet from its 1955 beginnings as the Four Star Quartet in Staunton, Virginia. Playing guitar and singing high tenor, he wrote their 1965 breakthrough hit “Flowers on the Wall,” a song that took the group from local Virginia stages to international fame alongside Johnny Cash. Behind the group’s onstage humor during the 1970s, DeWitt quietly endured exhausting intestinal pain that often left him collapsed backstage after shows. When his body could no longer handle the road in 1982, he underwent major surgery to remove much of his intestine and personally recommended young Virginia singer Jimmy Fortune to take his place. Stepping away after nearly three decades left DeWitt fighting both physical weight loss and the grief of losing his life’s work. His former bandmates stayed close, visiting him regularly and continuing to support him as a permanent brother in the group. By 1985, DeWitt returned to the studio and the stage as a solo artist, releasing the album “On My Own.” Though his health only allowed limited travel and shorter appearances, he walked back under the lights with a frail frame, a warm smile, and the clear tenor fans remembered. DeWitt passed away from heart and kidney complications on August 15, 1990, at his home in Waynesboro, Virginia, just miles from where the quartet had started. He was fifty-two. For the next twelve years until the Statler Brothers retired in 2002, the Reid brothers, Balsley, and Fortune paused every concert to honor the man who gave the group its first great song and its harmony.

In early 1982, twenty-seven-year-old Jimmy Fortune walked onto a major stage with the Statler Brothers, stepping into the spot left by founding tenor Lew DeWitt while thousands of skeptical fans waited to hear if the quartet’s harmony had survived. DeWitt had spent years battling Crohn’s disease, and by 1982 his failing health forced him off the road for surgery after nearly two decades with the group. Before stepping away, DeWitt heard a young unknown singer performing nightly for small crowds at Bryce Resort in Basye, Virginia. Convinced the twenty-seven-year-old could carry the part, DeWitt personally recommended Fortune to bandmates Don Reid, Harold Reid, and Phil Balsley. Only weeks after singing in a Virginia ski lounge, Fortune stood under the lights facing an audience that had grown up on DeWitt’s voice. Rather than imitating the man he was replacing, Fortune leaned into his own clear, high tenor while the Reid brothers and Balsley stood close beside him. When he hit his first soaring notes, the hesitation in the hall broke into a standing ovation. That night in 1982 secured the group’s future. Over the next twenty years, Fortune wrote several of the Statler Brothers’ biggest number-one hits, including “Elizabeth,” “My Only Love,” and “Too Much on My Heart,” carrying the harmony DeWitt had entrusted to him until the group retired in 2002.

On June 15, 1979, Johnny Cash parked a restored cherry-red 1958 Ariel Cyclone 650 motorcycle outside Waylon Jennings’ home in Nashville, returning a piece of the friend Waylon had mourned for twenty years. The bike had originally belonged to Buddy Holly, who bought it at a Dallas dealership in May 1958 alongside bandmates Joe B. Mauldin and Jerry Allison. Back in Lubbock, Texas, Holly had given a young Waylon Jennings his start, producing his debut single and hiring him to play bass on the 1959 Winter Dance Party tour. On February 3, 1959, Jennings gave up his seat on a chartered Beechcraft Bonanza so a flu-stricken J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson could avoid the freezing tour bus. Before parting ways in Clear Lake, Iowa, Holly joked that he hoped the bus froze up, and Jennings shot back that he hoped the plane crashed. When the plane went down minutes after takeoff, taking the lives of the 22-year-old Holly, Richardson, and Ritchie Valens, that passing joke haunted Jennings for the next two decades. By the late 1970s, Jennings was country music’s toughest outlaw, yet those closest to him knew the weight he still carried from 1959. Working with Lubbock singer Joe Ely and members of the Crickets, Cash quietly tracked down Holly’s old motorcycle in Texas, where it had passed from Holly’s father through several owners, and had it restored for Jennings’ 42nd birthday. When Jennings walked outside and recognized his late friend’s cherry-red machine, the hardened country star broke down in tears. He kept that 1958 Ariel Cyclone for the rest of his life. After Jennings passed away in 2002, his wife Jessi Colter and son Shooter preserved the motorcycle in the family, holding on to the gift that finally brought peace to a twenty-year wound.

Rex Linn spent sixty-four years convinced he was meant to live alone, right up until a series of morning FaceTime calls with Reba McEntire in 2020 changed his mind. Born in Spearman, Texas, on November 13, 1956, and raised in Oklahoma City, Linn worked in banks and oil fields before moving to Los Angeles at thirty-two to act. As he built a career in Cliffhanger, CSI: Miami, and Better Call Saul, he also ended a past engagement after realizing he feared marriage and did not want to hurt someone by making a promise he could not keep. For decades afterward, he settled into a San Fernando Valley house with his dogs, his backyard smoker, and Texas Longhorns football. He met Reba in 1991 on the set of The Gambler Returns while she was married to Narvel Blackstock, and for twenty-nine years they remained nothing more than friendly Oklahoma acquaintances who occasionally said hello backstage. That distance held until January 2020, when they reunited on Young Sheldon and shared a dinner in Los Angeles. Two months later, Reba’s mother died during the pandemic lockdown, and Linn called her in Oklahoma to check on an old friend. Talking to her through an iPad screen broke through the walls he had guarded for decades. A man who once prized drinking his morning coffee in total solitude started setting an alarm every day so he would not miss their virtual Coffee Camp. After five months of daily calls, the lifelong bachelor began flying back and forth between California and Nashville before moving in to share his life with her. Now nearly seventy, the man who walked red carpets alone for thirty years rearranges his schedule just to hold Reba’s hand and open her car door.

A bout of bronchitis kept Reba McEntire in a San Diego hotel room on March 15, 1991, sparing her life hours before her band’s plane went down. Following a private performance for IBM executives, a doctor advised Reba not to fly overnight in a small jet with an unpressurized cabin. She stayed behind near Brown Field Municipal Airport with her husband and manager, Narvel Blackstock, while two chartered planes took off ahead for Fort Wayne, Indiana. At 1:45 a.m. on March 16, the first aircraft clipped the side of Otay Mountain in thick fog. All ten people aboard died in the crash, including seven members of Reba’s band, tour manager Jim Hammon, and both pilots. When the pilot of the second plane called the hotel past 2:00 a.m. with the news, Narvel went alone with family friend Roger Woolsey to identify their friends so his wife would not have to face the scene. He returned before dawn, knelt by the bed, and held Reba’s hands to tell her no one had survived. Only nine days later, encouraged by Vince Gill and the victims’ families, she walked onto the stage at the 63rd Academy Awards in a plain black velvet dress to sing her nominated song from Postcards from the Edge. For months afterward, she still turned toward her right on stage out of habit, looking for backing vocalist Paula Kaye Evans before remembering she was gone. That autumn, she poured the grief into her album For My Broken Heart, which sold over four million copies, while she and Narvel covered funeral costs and supported the eight families left behind. Though their twenty-six-year marriage ended in 2015, that night in San Diego bound them together for over two decades, and Reba still honors every name each March 16.

Reba McEntire and Rex Linn first met on a movie set in 1991, though it took nearly thirty years and a quiet grieving season in Oklahoma for their real story to begin. They were cast alongside Kenny Rogers in The Gambler Returns, stayed friendly across the decades, and crossed paths again in early 2020 while filming Young Sheldon. One dinner in Los Angeles followed right before the pandemic shut the country down. That March, Reba lost her mother, Jacqueline, to cancer just five years after the end of her twenty-six-year marriage. Isolated on her Oklahoma ranch during the heaviest days of grief, she started getting calls from Rex, a fellow Oklahoma native who understood her roots without needing them explained. From March to June, while he stayed in California and she remained in Oklahoma, they held what they called Coffee Camp over FaceTime every morning. Those early calls pulled her out of the silence of an empty house and built a deep companionship before they ever held hands in person. When they finally met face-to-face that June at a tavern in Manhattan, Montana, the server offered tater tots and Reba raised her hand with childlike excitement. Rex started calling her Tots on the spot, and she soon answered back with Sugar Tot. After forty years of carrying a music empire and staying strong through life’s hardest losses, she no longer had to be the resilient superstar in the room. Since making their relationship public in October 2020, they have shared a podcast, acted together on Big Sky and Happy’s Place, and walked red carpets with their hands locked tight. At an age when many stop looking, Reba found someone who simply lets her be Tots.