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Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

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.

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In the spring of 1989, fifty-four-year-old Vern Gosdin walked into Tree Studios in Nashville and recorded the final number-one country single of his life alongside his own son, turning the collapse of his third marriage into an album that lasted only thirty-three minutes.

Working once again with veteran producer Bob Montgomery for Columbia Records, Gosdin had already spent the late 1980s reviving pure honky-tonk balladry on his gold-certified 1988 album *Chiseled in Stone*. When his marriage fell apart soon after, he did not step away from the microphone to wait out the grief in private.

Instead, Gosdin and Montgomery booked sessions at Tree Studios in Nashville and The Bennett House in nearby Franklin, Tennessee, to cut a ten-song concept album titled *Alone*. Montgomery, a former Texas songwriting partner of Buddy Holly who had produced Gosdin’s resurgence at Columbia, built the project around sparse, traditional arrangements that left the singer’s baritone completely exposed.

Rather than pulling songs from outside publishing catalogs, Gosdin co-wrote nine of the ten tracks on the record. He sat down with his closest songwriting partners, including Hank Cochran, Buddy Cannon, Max D. Barnes, and Mack Vickery, as well as his son, Steve Gosdin, documenting the breakdown of a household while it was still happening.

With Steve and Cannon, Gosdin co-wrote the album’s lead single, “I’m Still Crazy,” a two-minute-and-forty-six-second ballad about a man unable to accept that a relationship has ended. Released in May 1989 ahead of the full album, the song climbed the Billboard country chart and reached number one on September 2, 1989, giving Gosdin the final chart-topping hit of his career less than a month after his fifty-fifth birthday.

Inside the studio for the rest of the sessions, Montgomery gathered a tight crew of Nashville session veterans: steel guitarist Jim Vest, electric guitarists Billy Sanford and Mike Severs, acoustic guitarist Tim Mensy, keyboardist Ron Oates, drummer Jerry Kroon, and bassists Bob Wray and Tom Robb.

The musicians played with restrained dynamics so they never crowded Gosdin’s phrasing. Across tracks like “Do Me a Favor,” “Tanqueray,” and “I’m Only Going Crazy,” where Gosdin addressed the division of a house, a car, and shared plans after a split, Montgomery kept the natural catch in the singer’s breath intact on the final master.

The only track on the album that Gosdin did not have a hand in writing was the four-minute-and-forty-second title cut, “Alone,” penned solely by his frequent collaborator Max D. Barnes, with whom he had written the CMA Song of the Year nominee “Chiseled in Stone”. Placed near the end of the record, Barnes’ composition served as the anchor for the nine personal co-writes surrounding it.

When Columbia Records released *Alone* in the summer of 1989, country radio was increasingly turning toward a wave of young newcomers led by Clint Black, Garth Brooks, and Travis Tritt. Even in that shifting market, a fifty-five-year-old traditionalist singing ten consecutive songs about divorce and an empty home pushed the album to number 11 on the Billboard Top Country Albums chart.

Two more singles from those sessions became major radio hits over the next several months. “That Just About Does It,” written by Gosdin and Barnes, debuted at the end of September 1989 and climbed to number four, followed in February 1990 by the Cochran, Vickery, and Gosdin composition “Right in the Wrong Direction,” which reached number ten.

Born in Woodland, Alabama, in August 1934, Gosdin had spent decades singing bluegrass with his brother Rex in the Gosdin Brothers and harmonizing with Emmylou Harris before reaching solo stardom in his forties. By the time the 1989 sessions concluded, peers across Nashville referred to him simply as “The Voice,” and Tammy Wynette publicly called him the only other singer who could hold a candle to George Jones.

Years before Gosdin died in Nashville on April 28, 2009, at age seventy-four, music critics already ranked *Alone* beside single-theme heartbreak records such as Frank Sinatra’s *In the Wee Small Hours* and Bob Dylan’s *Blood on the Tracks*. By walking into Tree Studios with Bob Montgomery, his trusted co-writers, and his son Steve while his marriage was ending, Gosdin turned the quietest rooms of his private life into thirty-three minutes of country music that never needed a second take.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly6PHGAOCnI

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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.

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.

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.

In June 2020, after ninety days of falling in love through a phone screen, Reba McEntire stood by her Tennessee window waiting for Rex Linn to arrive. Right after her mother, Jacqueline, passed away on March 14, 2020, national lockdowns had kept the 65-year-old singer at her family ranch in rural Atoka, Oklahoma, while the 63-year-old actor remained in Los Angeles. Though they had known each other socially since 1991 and reconnected over dinner in January, their romance had grown entirely through daily 5:00 a.m. video calls they named Coffee Camp. Once interstate travel restrictions eased in early June, McEntire returned to her estate in Lebanon, Tennessee, and Linn headed east from California. Both had spent decades working in front of large audiences, yet waiting for his car to pull into the driveway left them with racing hearts and sweaty palms like teenagers before a first date. Through three months on a screen, they had already learned each other’s past heartaches, family stories, and unvarnished morning faces before ever holding hands. When Linn stepped out of the car and opened his arms, McEntire held onto the real shoulder that had steadied her through a spring of grief. Because restaurants were still closed or limited that June, their first days as a couple stayed quiet. They walked beneath the trees around the property, cooked meals in her kitchen, and drank their morning coffee side by side on the wooden porch without a phone screen between them. From that June afternoon in Tennessee, the two never let distance separate them again, soon moving in together to share the rest of their lives. Three months of voices across a screen had kept her going, and one long embrace in the driveway turned that promise into home.

In the fall of 1991, Rex Linn had a small supporting role on the Western movie set where Reba McEntire was starring alongside Kenny Rogers. On the set of NBC’s The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw, McEntire played female lead Burgundy Jones opposite Rogers as Brady Hawkes, while Linn appeared in a minor part as Henry. At 36, McEntire was a country superstar, two years into her marriage to manager Narvel Blackstock, raising her young son Shelby, and working through grief only months after a March 1991 plane crash killed eight members of her road band. Linn, then 34, was an Oklahoma native still trying to earn a foothold in Hollywood. Between scenes, the star in vintage Western wardrobe and the tall supporting actor bonded over their shared Oklahoma upbringing. Trading stories and dry hometown humor gave McEntire a familiar piece of home during one of the hardest years of her life. Once filming wrapped, they went back to very different worlds. Over the next 29 years, while McEntire expanded her career and later ended her 26-year marriage to Blackstock in 2015, Linn remained a polite friend from afar, checking in occasionally without ever crossing the line. An invitation to dinner in early 2020 finally brought them back to the same table when both were single. By March 2020, the same month Kenny Rogers passed away, daily phone calls during quarantine had turned nearly three decades of friendship into a lasting romance. More than three decades after sharing that Western set, the supporting actor who once stood in the background of her frame walks beside her today as her fiance.