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Greatest Hits Oldies But Goodies Ever

In 1970, twelve-year-old Marty Stuart got Connie Smith’s autograph at a fair in Choctaw, Mississippi, went home to tell his mother Hilda he was going to marry her, and fifty-one years later stood onstage while she placed the Country Music Hall of Fame medallion around his neck. The two married on July 8, 1997, twenty-seven years after that first meeting on a Mississippi fairground. By then, Stuart had gone from playing mandolin and guitar as a teenager for Lester Flatt and Johnny Cash to building his own career and preserving more than 20,000 pieces of country music history, from Patsy Cline’s boots to Hank Williams’s guitar. Even with that massive archive, he often said his most prized possession remained the faded 1970 Polaroid of himself as a boy with a short haircut standing beside Smith. When the Country Music Association named Stuart to the Hall of Fame’s Modern Era Artist category in August 2020 alongside Hank Williams Jr. and songwriter Dean Dillon, the pandemic delayed the formal induction for more than a year. The Medallion Ceremony finally took place on November 21, 2021, at the CMA Theater in Nashville. Hall of Fame rules require an existing member to welcome the new inductee, and Stuart immediately chose his wife. Nine years earlier, in 2012, he had sat in the audience watching Smith enter the Hall of Fame. At 80, her voice broke several times as she introduced him to the Nashville crowd and credited him with reigniting her love for performing after twenty-four years of marriage. With that induction, Stuart and Smith became the first living married couple to hold individual places in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Speaking at the podium beside the woman he first admired from a fairground lawn, Stuart remembered his late mother driving him to that 1970 show and told the room that his greatest honor was finally standing as an equal beside his wife.

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Before eleven-year-old Marty Stuart walked onto the Choctaw High School football field in Philadelphia, Mississippi, on July 24, 1970, he asked his mother Hilda to buy him a brand-new yellow shirt so country star Connie Smith might notice him in the crowd.

At home, the Stuart family kept a copy of Smith’s 1966 RCA Victor LP *Miss Smith Goes to Nashville* propped against the living room stereo. After watching his mother’s favorite singer perform at the Choctaw Indian Fair, Stuart and his younger sister Jennifer waited in line to get Smith’s autograph and pose for a snapshot. On the drive home that evening, the boy with the short haircut told his mother that he was going to marry Connie Smith someday.

Neither of them was anywhere close to that possibility for the next two decades. Seventeen years older than Stuart, Smith had been a Grand Ole Opry member since 1965 and spent the 1970s stepping back from heavy touring to raise her five children across three marriages.

Stuart left Mississippi at thirteen to play mandolin on the road with bluegrass bandleader Lester Flatt, joined Johnny Cash’s backing band at twenty-one, and briefly married Cash’s daughter Cindy before their divorce in 1988. While building a solo career in the early 1990s, he also began assembling an archive of more than 20,000 country music artifacts, including Hank Williams’s guitar and Patsy Cline’s stage boots. Even with museum-grade relics filling his vaults, Stuart kept the faded 1970 Polaroid of himself in that yellow shirt beside Smith as his favorite piece.

Their paths crossed again in the mid-1990s through a Native American music project and backstage conversations at the Grand Ole Opry. Impressed by Stuart’s deep command of traditional country history, Smith asked if he would help write songs and produce her first studio album in nearly twenty years.

Stuart agreed immediately, and the pair ended up writing dozens of songs together while working on her 1998 self-titled Warner Bros. comeback record. As those daytime writing sessions turned into daily phone calls, Stuart realized his childhood feelings had never gone away.

When he confided in his mother Hilda about falling in love with his songwriting partner, she reminded him of what he had promised in the car after the 1970 fair and told him to go for it. Encouraged by that talk, Stuart asked Smith to meet him in a Nashville grocery store parking lot, walked straight up to her car, and kissed her.

Smith looked at him and suggested they do that again.

After three years of dating, Smith overcame her hesitation about marrying for a fourth time. Because both shared a strong bond with Indigenous communities and had first met at the Choctaw fair, the 38-year-old Stuart and 55-year-old Smith wed on July 8, 1997, on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota.

Nine years after watching Smith enter the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2012, Stuart received his own induction notice in the Modern Era Artist category alongside Hank Williams Jr. and songwriter Dean Dillon. Pandemic delays pushed the formal Medallion Ceremony at Nashville’s CMA Theater to November 21, 2021.

Hall of Fame tradition calls for an existing member to place the medallion around the new inductee’s neck, and Stuart asked his wife to do the honors. At eighty, Smith had to pause several times as her voice broke, telling the Nashville crowd that twenty-four years with Stuart had brought back her joy for performing.

When the medallion settled onto his shoulders, they became the first living married couple to hold individual places in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Standing at the podium beside the woman from his 1970 Polaroid, Stuart remembered his late mother driving him to that Mississippi fairground and told the room that his greatest achievement was finally standing as an equal beside his wife.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7-MZcW1vLo

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At the Grand Ole Opry’s 100th anniversary celebration, Vince Gill paused before singing “Go Rest High on That Mountain” to speak about his mother, who had also turned 100. For three decades, audiences have known the 1995 ballad as country music’s defining farewell hymn, performed at memorials for figures like George Jones and Charlie Daniels. Gill first began writing the piece after Keith Whitley died in 1989, only finishing the verses after his older brother, Bob Coen, died in 1993. Stepping onto the stage for the Opry’s centennial night, Gill stood in front of thousands of listeners gathered to honor a full century of country music and the hall’s departed members. Before starting the song, he connected the Opry’s milestone to his mother, Jerene Gill, whose own life spanned those same hundred years. His voice trembled in front of the quiet crowd as he spoke about how differently she hears the ballad. While the rest of the world listens to an anthem for fallen stars, he shared that for his mother, the song that night was simply about her son. That quiet dedication stripped away thirty years of awards and chart history in seconds. Even at a century old, Jerene still carried the weight of a mother who had buried her child, and Vince had carried the loss of his older brother right beside her. When the guitars finally came in under the stage lights, the grand centennial tribute gave way to something much closer to home. Gill was singing as a son sharing an old family ache with his mother, keeping Bob’s memory alive between them.

When Vince Gill chose the cover photo for his 50 Years From Home project, he set aside his famous guitars and picked up a Dobro for his mother, Jerene. Gill left Oklahoma City in 1975 at age 18 to chase a life in music. Over the next five decades, that path brought him 22 Grammy Awards, induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame, regular nights at the Grand Ole Opry, and years performing with the Eagles. Through all of those milestones, his closest tie to his roots remained his mother, who reached the age of 100. After his father, Judge Stan Gill, died in 1997, Jerene became his last living connection to the Oklahoma house where his father first encouraged him to learn music and where young Vince practiced during his early bluegrass days with his school band, Mountain Smoke. Millions of listeners know Gill for his pure tenor voice and the electric and acoustic guitars behind his biggest country hits. During quiet conversations with her son, Jerene shared a much simpler preference. She told him that as much as she liked hearing him sing, what she loved most was still listening to him play the Dobro. That resonator guitar was never the instrument that made him famous, though its warm, lingering notes carried his mother back to the afternoons when her family was still whole and her boy was playing in the living room. Nearing 70 and grateful to still have his mother here to listen, Gill placed the Dobro right on the cover of 50 Years From Home, turning a career retrospective into a quiet gift for the woman who heard him first.

Months before The Champion opened Super Bowl LII in 2018, Mike Fisher kept an unreleased demo of Carrie Underwood’s song in his headphones throughout the 2017 NHL playoffs. Underwood wrote the track in early 2017 with Brett James and Chris DeStefano while watching her husband, then 37, captain the Nashville Predators. Away from the arena lights, she saw the daily cost of his nearly twenty years in the league as he woke at dawn with sore joints to train beside players in their twenties and absorbed heavy collisions on the ice to shield younger teammates. Fisher was the first person to hear the demo. During Nashville’s historic run to its first Stanley Cup Final that spring, he listened to his wife’s voice in the tunnel before every game. He even begged her to let him play the recording in the locker room for his teammates, though Underwood had to say no to honor her confidentiality agreement with the television network. When the finished song arrived on January 12, 2018, featuring rapper Ludacris, it went straight to No. 1 on iTunes in the United States and nine other countries. NBC used the track to open Super Bowl LII on February 4 and played it across its coverage of the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang. For the official video and studio footage, Underwood included clips of Fisher sweating through workouts, taking hits in his yellow Predators jersey, and raising the Western Conference championship trophy alongside famous athletes from around the world. The Predators had fallen short in the final series of the 2017 season before Fisher’s retirement, leaving him without a Stanley Cup ring, yet Underwood used her biggest release of the year to show millions the man she already saw as a champion at home.

By 2016, Carrie Underwood already held seven Grammy Awards, yet she stepped onto the Nashville set of Forever Country feeling like a nervous student among her childhood heroes. Producer Shane McAnally had gathered 30 CMA Award winners that September to mark the 50th anniversary of the CMA Awards. Together, they recorded an ambitious mashup weaving John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” Willie Nelson’s “On the Road Again,” and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” into a single track. Across a three-day shoot in Nashville directed by Joseph Kahn, contemporary stars like Underwood, Keith Urban, Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert, and Luke Bryan shared the studio with George Strait, Reba McEntire, Alan Jackson, Vince Gill, Alabama, and Brooks & Dunn. Instead of retreating to a private dressing room, Underwood lingered on set to listen to stories from the older pioneers and stood alongside Randy Travis, whose quiet smile among his peers three years after a life-threatening stroke deeply moved her. McAnally trusted Underwood to anchor several key transitions and carry the song’s final vocal climax. Even after selling tens of millions of records of her own, she admitted feeling nervous in the booth knowing she had to sing the high notes of Parton’s classic on a recording where Parton herself would appear. In the finished video, Underwood stands in a field of sunflowers delivering that soaring buildup before yielding the frame for Parton to close the song. Released in September 2016, “Forever Country” debuted straight at No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, only the third song since 1990 to do so, and won CMA Music Video of the Year. Beyond the chart history, those three days in Nashville preserved one last gathering with Charley Pride and the pioneers who built the genre, giving Underwood the chance to honor her heroes while they were still in the room to hear it.

Growing up on an Oklahoma cattle farm, Carrie Underwood stopped eating beef at age 13 after listening to mother cows cry for their calves outside her bedroom window. In the small town of Checotah, her father, Stephen Underwood, worked at a local sawmill while her mother, Carole, taught elementary school. To help support the family, they raised beef cattle on their land, where young Carrie spent her afternoons after school naming and petting the newborn calves in the pasture. That childhood view of the farm changed in 1996 when she turned 13. For the first time, she understood the hard reality of the family business as the young bull calves were castrated, taken from their mothers, and loaded onto trucks for the auction yards. Long after the trucks rolled away, the mother cows stood by the wooden fence for days, calling out hoarsely from early morning into the night. Hearing those cries through her bedroom window left Carrie in tears, and at the dinner table, she could not look at her plate without picturing the calves she had raised as friends. She told her parents she would never eat beef from their farm or anywhere else again. In rural 1990s Oklahoma, where cattle helped pay the bills and beef sat at the center of almost every meal, Stephen and Carole never scolded their youngest daughter. Her father quietly accepted her decision, and her mother cooked separate meatless meals for Carrie throughout the rest of her years at home. That teenage promise turned into a lifelong vegetarian path. Decades later, Underwood brought that same care back to Checotah through her C.A.T.S. Foundation, supporting her hometown animal shelter while rescuing stray dogs of her own.

When Mike Fisher announced his retirement on August 3, 2017, Carrie Underwood felt both pride in his career and quiet relief that he was finally coming home safe. At 37, the Nashville Predators captain published a farewell letter in The Tennessean, stepping away after 17 NHL seasons and 1,088 games split between the Ottawa Senators and Nashville. His decision came just weeks after he led the Predators to the first Stanley Cup Final in franchise history. Fisher had arrived in Tennessee in 2011, leaving Ottawa after more than a decade in Canada just months after marrying Underwood in 2010 so they could build a home together in Nashville. Nearly twenty years of playing center had taken a heavy physical toll. He played through a broken foot, a dislocated shoulder, cracked ribs, torn cartilage, and nights where team doctors stitched his face in the locker room between periods so he could return to the ice. Fans saw a country star cheering from a suite at Bridgestone Arena, while Underwood spent years holding her breath whenever Fisher stayed down for a few seconds after a collision against the boards. When the arena lights went out, she was the one watching him wake up with chronic joint pain and fresh scars after months on the road. Sharing a photo of her husband on the ice that August afternoon, Underwood praised the integrity and faith he carried from the locker room to his quiet visits at Nashville children’s hospitals. She also admitted how grateful she was to no longer share him with the physical risks of the sport. Stepping off the ice meant closing a childhood dream that began on frozen ponds in Ontario, while giving Fisher his evenings back outside Nashville with Underwood and their two-year-old son, Isaiah, as the family began their next chapter under one roof.

Travis Tritt built his early career on a strict rule never to wear a cowboy hat, until the night Waylon Jennings placed his own black hat on his head. When Tritt arrived in Nashville in the late 1980s and early 1990s, industry traditionalists kept their distance from his long hair, leather clothes, and Southern rock edge. Refusing to dress like the commercial hat acts of the era left him isolated, until Jennings stepped forward to defend him in public and call him the true future of country music. Jennings recognized the same lonely fight he had faced against Nashville studio control in the 1970s. Having paid a heavy price during his own wild years on the road, the older outlaw sat with Tritt in quiet dressing rooms, warning him how to survive sudden fame and the temptations of touring. During a shared concert in front of thousands of fans, Jennings took off his signature black hat and set it on the younger singer. Tritt bowed his head and wore it, accepting the trust of the man who had stood up for him. That bond made February 13, 2002, hit hard when Jennings died at age 64 from complications of diabetes. At the memorial service inside Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium, Tritt and Hank Williams Jr. stood together with red eyes, holding hands and talking through their memories of the mentor who had treated them both like sons. Tritt later stepped into the wooden circle at the Grand Ole Opry beside Marty Stuart to perform “Outlaw’s Reward” in Jennings’ honor, his voice catching as they sang for their friend. More than two decades later, Tritt still speaks Waylon Jennings’ name at nearly every show, keeping his mentor’s memory alive on the stages he helped him reach.

By the early 1990s, Travis Tritt had told reporters he would never marry again, convinced after two divorces in his twenties that he was built for the road alone. Those doubts came from two early heartbreaks. His first marriage to high school sweetheart Karen Ryon in 1982 began when he was 19 and ended two years later under money troubles and family opposition to his music. A second marriage to Jodi Barnett, who was 12 years older, ended in 1989 right as he signed his first major deal with Warner Bros. Walking out of divorce court just as his records began selling in the millions left a quiet sting. He could hold the attention of thousands under arena lights, yet he felt powerless to keep a home together. The leather jackets, motorcycles, and rowdy outlaw image soon became armor for a man who did not want to be left again. That changed when he met Theresa Nelson, a soft-spoken college student and model who cared about James Travis Tritt rather than the platinum plaques on his wall. Instead of rushing, they dated quietly for years between heavy touring schedules until he felt safe coming home from the road. Taking back a public vow meant swallowing his pride in front of the country music press, though the fear of losing Theresa had grown larger than the fear of another heartbreak. On April 12, 1997, at age 34, Tritt stood at the altar in his hometown of Marietta, Georgia, fighting back tears as Theresa walked down the aisle. That afternoon in Georgia closed the chapter on his years as a solitary rebel. Nearly three decades later, he and Theresa are still together at home in Georgia, after raising their daughter, Tyler Reese, and their two sons, Tristan and Tarian.

On June 2, 2011, Shania Twain received the 2,442nd star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, yet her thoughts at the podium stayed with the parents who never saw her name on a record cover. Introduced by actress Bo Derek at 6270 Hollywood Boulevard, the Canadian singer accepted the Recording category honor at a turning point in her life. She was emerging from her 2008 divorce from producer Robert “Mutt” Lange and years of vocal dysphonia tied to Lyme disease and emotional strain, a condition that had kept her off the stage before her eventual 2012 return in Las Vegas. Watching from the crowd was her new husband, Frédéric Thiébaud, whom she had married on New Year’s Day 2011. When Twain stepped up to speak, her voice broke as she remembered her mother, Sharon, and her stepfather, Jerry Twain. Growing up poor in the northern mining town of Timmins, Ontario, she sometimes went to school hungry, and her mother scraped together gas money on freezing winter nights to drive an eight-year-old Shania to sing late sets in local bars. On November 1, 1987, Sharon and Jerry died in a car accident in Ontario. At 22, still known as Eileen Twain, she put her early music ambitions on hold and took a stage job at Deerhurst Resort in Huntsville to raise her three younger siblings, Mark, Darryl, and Carrie-Ann. Calling her path from northern Canada to Hollywood a small miracle, she told the crowd how proud her mother would have been to witness the day. As she knelt to touch the brass star bearing the Ojibwe name she later adopted in honor of Jerry Twain, the family history that began in the woods of Ontario remained right there on the pavement beside her.