Podcasts about He Stopped Loving Her Today

In this week's episode of Diving in Deep, Sara Evans sits down with country music breakout star, Ernest! They dive deep into their matching passions including sports, travel and song writing. Sara asks the all important question that drives every artist- “How did you know you were meant to be a musician?” The pair talk about the importance of Nashville being a hub for songwriters, and dissect the pendulum that they see in the country music genre. They mutually agree on the importance of holding the genre to a high standard and how crucial it is for the future of country music that the past is not forgotten, but rather celebrated. Don't miss this wholesome episode and be sure to watch the special ending!    Watch the special ending here:  Ernest & Sara Evans cover George Jones' "He Stopped Loving Her Today" & "Golden Ring" #countrymusic https://youtu.be/TCfVa5FduG8   About Ernest: Nashville's most unpredictable hitmaker ERNEST is “The Charmer” (MusicRow), a triple threat talent and one of Music City's on the rise artist / writers who is changing the status quo. The two-time 2023 ACM Award nominee and 2022/3 Variety Hitmaker fuses influences ranging from Eminem to George Jones, crafting a twist-heavy verse style that's become his signature, proving its mettle, and earning him nine No. 1 hits to date. The eccentric free spirit and 2X CMA Triple Play Award winner announced his new album, NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE will drop April 12. The album is the follow-up to ERNEST's critically acclaimed debut albumFLOWER SHOPS (THE ALBUM) and FLOWER SHOPS (THE ALBUM): Two Dozen Roses, the rebranded edition doubling its track list with 13 fresh cuts. Praised as one of Holler and The Tennessean's best albums of the year, FLOWER SHOPS showcased the more classically country side of his craft, and that “ERNEST creates a sound all his own" (Pollstar).   LET'S BE SOCIAL: Follow Diving in Deep Podcast: Instagram –(@divingindeeppod) TikTok – (@divingindeeppod) Twitter – (@divingindeeppod) Facebook – (@divingindeeppod)   Follow Sara Evans: Instagram – (@saraevansmusic) TikTok – (@saraevansmusic) Twitter – (@saraevansmusic) Facebook – (@saraevansmusic)   Follow Ernest: Website: https://ernestformayor.com/ Instagram: (@ernest) TikTok: (@ernest) Twitter: (@ernest615) Facebook: (@ernest)   Produced and Edited by: The Cast Collective (Nashville, TN) YouTube – ( @TheCastCollective ) Instagram – (@TheCastCollective) Twitter – (@TheCastCollective) Directed by: Erin Dugan Edited By: Sean Dugan, Corey Williams & Tara Down Executive Assistance: Rachel Ellis https://www.thecastcollective.com

In this week's episode of Diving in Deep, Sara Evans sits down with country music breakout star, Ernest! They dive deep into their matching passions including sports, travel and song writing. Sara asks the all important question that drives every artist- "How did you know you were meant to be a musician?" The pair talk about the importance of Nashville being a hub for songwriters, and dissect the pendulum that they see in the country music genre. They mutually agree on the importance of holding the genre to a high standard and how crucial it is for the future of country music that the past is not forgotten, but rather celebrated. Don't miss this wholesome episode and be sure to watch the special ending!    Watch the special ending here:  Ernest & Sara Evans cover George Jones' "He Stopped Loving Her Today" & "Golden Ring" #countrymusic https://youtu.be/TCfVa5FduG8   About Ernest: Nashville's most unpredictable hitmaker ERNEST is "The Charmer" (MusicRow), a triple threat talent and one of Music City's on the rise artist / writers who is changing the status quo. The two-time 2023 ACM Award nominee and 2022/3 Variety Hitmaker fuses influences ranging from Eminem to George Jones, crafting a twist-heavy verse style that's become his signature, proving its mettle, and earning him nine No. 1 hits to date. The eccentric free spirit and 2X CMA Triple Play Award winner announced his new album, NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE will drop April 12. The album is the follow-up to ERNEST's critically acclaimed debut albumFLOWER SHOPS (THE ALBUM) and FLOWER SHOPS (THE ALBUM): Two Dozen Roses, the rebranded edition doubling its track list with 13 fresh cuts. Praised as one of Holler and The Tennessean's best albums of the year, FLOWER SHOPS showcased the more classically country side of his craft, and that "ERNEST creates a sound all his own" (Pollstar).   LET'S BE SOCIAL: Follow Diving in Deep Podcast: Instagram -(@divingindeeppod) TikTok - (@divingindeeppod) Twitter - (@divingindeeppod) Facebook - (@divingindeeppod)   Follow Sara Evans: Instagram - (@saraevansmusic) TikTok - (@saraevansmusic) Twitter - (@saraevansmusic) Facebook - (@saraevansmusic)   Follow Ernest: Website: https://ernestformayor.com/ Instagram: (@ernest) TikTok: (@ernest) Twitter: (@ernest615) Facebook: (@ernest)   Produced and Edited by: The Cast Collective (Nashville, TN) YouTube - ( @TheCastCollective ) Instagram - (@TheCastCollective) Twitter - (@TheCastCollective) Directed by: Erin Dugan Edited By: Sean Dugan, Corey Williams & Tara Down Executive Assistance: Rachel Ellis https://www.thecastcollective.com

What happens when a business coach and a copywriter get together?  They have fun sharing about what makes content creation easier and more effective.Rachel Eubanks and I bonded on social media over the name of a book we both love – Obviously Awesome and this led to us talking about:What makes content writing/copywriting more effectiveWhy email is so importantWhy frequency and fun are keys to great content writingHow templates for writing are essentialHer 4 part newsletter templateACTION PLAN: How to improve your copywritingGet super clear on your ideal clientWrite your content to that ideal client (one person)Use everyday language in your copyUse templates where every possibleBe consistent with your blogs, emails, etc.Plan your content creationInsert your content creation into your overall marketing planNeed help planning?  https://dianalidstone.com/shop/quarterly-retreat/ABOUT RACHELRachel is a copywriter for creatives and e-commerce business owners and the founder of Inspire to Engage.She is also a mother, wife, daughter, podcast junkie, caffeine addict, left handed and a lover of old country music. (He Stopped Loving Her Today gets me every time)Connect with Rachel:Inspiretoengage.comFacebook here or hereLinkedIn hereABOUT ME:I'm a best-selling author, award-winning speaker and podcast host. After almost 40 years as an entrepreneur, I'm best known for my straight-talk, no BS and the simple business and marketing strategies that bring my clients more joy, profit and freedom.  This podcast offers tips and strategies for small business owners who are tired of working too hard for too little profit, and having little or no free time.Connect with me here:diana@dianalidstone.comwww.dianalidstone.comhttps://www.facebook.com/diana.lidstonehttps://www.linkedin.com/in/hiredianalidstone/MOST POPULAR 2023 EPISODES:Ep. 61 – What do an 11-year old entrepreneur, cookies & Tesla have in common? (here)Ep. 112 – How to plan your week effectively like a small business CEO (here)Ep. 71 – 99% of Small Firms don't do this! (here)Ep. 111 – Grow & Run your business effectively like a CEO (here)Ep. 99 – Elevate your brand & grow your online presence: 5 Actionable Marketing Strategies with Genevieve Rochon (here)Share your feedback with me by clicking here and leaving a short voice message!

For those who haven't heard the announcement I just posted , songs from this point on will sometimes be split among multiple episodes, so this is the second part of a multi-episode look at the Byrds in 1966-69 and the birth of country rock. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a half-hour bonus episode, on "With a Little Help From My Friends" by Joe Cocker. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Resources No Mixcloud at this time as there are too many Byrds songs in the first chunk, but I will try to put together a multi-part Mixcloud when all the episodes for this song are up. My main source for the Byrds is Timeless Flight Revisited by Johnny Rogan, I also used Chris Hillman's autobiography, the 331/3 books on The Notorious Byrd Brothers and The Gilded Palace of Sin, I used Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California and John Einarson's Desperadoes as general background on Californian country-rock, Calling Me Hone, Gram Parsons and the Roots of Country Rock by Bob Kealing for information on Parsons, and Requiem For The Timeless Vol 2 by Johnny Rogan for information about the post-Byrds careers of many members. Information on Gary Usher comes from The California Sound by Stephen McParland. And this three-CD set is a reasonable way of getting most of the Byrds' important recordings. The International Submarine Band's only album can be bought from Bandcamp. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Before we begin, a brief warning – this episode contains brief mentions of suicide, alcoholism, abortion, and heroin addiction, and a brief excerpt of chanting of a Nazi slogan. If you find those subjects upsetting, you may want to read the transcript rather than listen. As we heard in the last part, in October 1967 Roger McGuinn and Chris Hillman fired David Crosby from the Byrds. It was only many years later, in a conversation with the group's ex-manager Jim Dickson, that Crosby realised that they didn't actually have a legal right to fire him -- the Byrds had no partnership agreement, and according to Dickson given that the original group had been Crosby, McGuinn, and Gene Clark, it would have been possible for Crosby and McGuinn to fire Hillman, but not for McGuinn and Hillman to fire Crosby. But Crosby was unaware of this at the time, and accepted a pay-off, with which he bought a boat and sailed to Florida, where saw a Canadian singer-songwriter performing live: [Excerpt: Joni Mitchell, "Both Sides Now (live Ann Arbor, MI, 27/10/67)"] We'll find out what happened when David Crosby brought Joni Mitchell back to California in a future story... With Crosby gone, the group had a major problem. They were known for two things -- their jangly twelve-string guitar and their soaring harmonies. They still had the twelve-string, even in their new slimmed-down trio format, but they only had two of their four vocalists -- and while McGuinn had sung lead on most of their hits, the sound of the Byrds' harmony had been defined by Crosby on the high harmonies and Gene Clark's baritone. There was an obvious solution available, of course, and they took it. Gene Clark had quit the Byrds in large part because of his conflicts with David Crosby, and had remained friendly with the others. Clark's solo album had featured Chris Hillman and Michael Clarke, and had been produced by Gary Usher who was now producing the Byrds' records, and it had been a flop and he was at a loose end. After recording the Gene Clark with the Gosdin Brothers album, Clark had started work with Curt Boettcher, a singer-songwriter-producer who had produced hits for Tommy Roe and the Association, and who was currently working with Gary Usher. Boettcher produced two tracks for Clark, but they went unreleased: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Only Colombe"] That had been intended as the start of sessions for an album, but Clark had been dropped by Columbia rather than getting to record a second album. He had put together a touring band with guitarist Clarence White, bass player John York, and session drummer "Fast" Eddie Hoh, but hadn't played many gigs, and while he'd been demoing songs for a possible second solo album he didn't have a record deal to use them on. Chisa Records, a label co-owned by Larry Spector, Peter Fonda, and Hugh Masekela, had put out some promo copies of one track, "Yesterday, Am I Right", but hadn't released it properly: [Excerpt: Gene Clark, "Yesterday, Am I Right"] Clark, like the Byrds, had left Dickson and Tickner's management organisation and signed with Larry Spector, and Spector was wanting to make the most of his artists -- and things were very different for the Byrds now. Clark had had three main problems with being in the Byrds -- ego clashes with David Crosby, the stresses of being a pop star with a screaming teenage fanbase, and his fear of flying. Clark had really wanted to have the same kind of role in the Byrds that Brian Wilson had with the Beach Boys -- appear on the records, write songs, do TV appearances, maybe play local club gigs, but not go on tour playing to screaming fans. But now David Crosby was out of the group and there were no screaming fans any more -- the Byrds weren't having the kind of pop hits they'd had a few years earlier and were now playing to the hippie audience. Clark promised that with everything else being different, he could cope with the idea of flying -- if necessary he'd just take tranquilisers or get so drunk he passed out. So Gene Clark rejoined the Byrds. According to some sources he sang on their next single, "Goin' Back," though I don't hear his voice in the mix: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Goin' Back"] According to McGuinn, Clark was also an uncredited co-writer on one song on the album they were recording, "Get to You". But before sessions had gone very far, the group went on tour. They appeared on the Smothers Brothers TV show, miming their new single and "Mr. Spaceman", and Clark seemed in good spirits, but on the tour of the Midwest that followed, according to their road manager of the time, Clark was terrified, singing flat and playing badly, and his guitar and vocal mic were left out of the mix. And then it came time to get on a plane, and Clark's old fears came back, and he refused to fly from Minneapolis to New York with the rest of the group, instead getting a train back to LA. And that was the end of Clark's second stint in the Byrds. For the moment, the Byrds decided they were going to continue as a trio on stage and a duo in the studio -- though Michael Clarke did make an occasional return to the sessions as they progressed. But of course, McGuinn and Hillman couldn't record an album entirely by themselves. They did have several tracks in a semi-completed state still featuring Crosby, but they needed people to fill his vocal and instrumental roles on the remaining tracks. For the vocals, Usher brought in his friend and collaborator Curt Boettcher, with whom he was also working at the time in a band called Sagittarius: [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "Another Time"] Boettcher was a skilled harmony vocalist -- according to Usher, he was one of the few vocal arrangers that Brian Wilson looked up to, and Jerry Yester had said of the Modern Folk Quartet that “the only vocals that competed with us back then was Curt Boettcher's group” -- and he was more than capable of filling Crosby's vocal gap, but there was never any real camaraderie between him and the Byrds. He particularly disliked McGuinn, who he said "was just such a poker face. He never let you know where you stood. There was never any lightness," and he said of the sessions as a whole "I was really thrilled to be working with The Byrds, and, at the same time, I was glad when it was all over. There was just no fun, and they were such weird guys to work with. They really freaked me out!" Someone else who Usher brought in, who seems to have made a better impression, was Red Rhodes: [Excerpt: Red Rhodes, "Red's Ride"] Rhodes was a pedal steel player, and one of the few people to make a career on the instrument outside pure country music, which is the genre with which the instrument is usually identified. Rhodes was a country player, but he was the country pedal steel player of choice for musicians from the pop and folk-rock worlds. He worked with Usher and Boettcher on albums by Sagittarius and the Millennium, and played on records by Cass Elliot, Carole King, the Beach Boys, and the Carpenters, among many others -- though he would be best known for his longstanding association with Michael Nesmith of the Monkees, playing on most of Nesmith's recordings from 1968 through 1992. Someone else who was associated with the Monkees was Moog player Paul Beaver, who we talked about in the episode on "Hey Jude", and who had recently played on the Monkees' Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones, Ltd album: [Excerpt: The Monkees, "Star Collector"] And the fourth person brought in to help the group out was someone who was already familiar to them. Clarence White was, like Red Rhodes, from the country world -- he'd started out in a bluegrass group called the Kentucky Colonels: [Excerpt: The Kentucky Colonels, "Clinch Mountain Backstep"] But White had gone electric and formed one of the first country-rock bands, a group named Nashville West, as well as becoming a popular session player. He had already played on a couple of tracks on Younger Than Yesterday, as well as playing with Hillman and Michael Clarke on Gene Clark's album with the Gosdin Brothers and being part of Clark's touring band with John York and "Fast" Eddie Hoh. The album that the group put together with these session players was a triumph of sequencing and production. Usher had recently been keen on the idea of crossfading tracks into each other, as the Beatles had on Sgt Pepper, and had done the same on the two Chad and Jeremy albums he produced. By clever crossfading and mixing, Usher managed to create something that had the feel of being a continuous piece, despite being the product of several very different creative minds, with Usher's pop sensibility and arrangement ideas being the glue that held everything together. McGuinn was interested in sonic experimentation. He, more than any of the others, seems to have been the one who was most pushing for them to use the Moog, and he continued his interest in science fiction, with a song, "Space Odyssey", inspired by the Arthur C. Clarke short story "The Sentinel", which was also the inspiration for the then-forthcoming film 2001: A Space Odyssey: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Space Odyssey"] Then there was Chris Hillman, who was coming up with country material like "Old John Robertson": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Old John Robertson"] And finally there was David Crosby. Even though he'd been fired from the group, both McGuinn and Hillman didn't see any problem with using the songs he had already contributed. Three of the album's eleven songs are compositions that are primarily by Crosby, though they're all co-credited to either Hillman or both Hillman and McGuinn. Two of those songs are largely unchanged from Crosby's original vision, just finished off by the rest of the group after his departure, but one song is rather different: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] "Draft Morning" was a song that was important to Crosby, and was about his -- and the group's -- feelings about the draft and the ongoing Vietnam War. It was a song that had meant a lot to him, and he'd been part of the recording for the backing track. But when it came to doing the final vocals, McGuinn and Hillman had a problem -- they couldn't remember all the words to the song, and obviously there was no way they were going to get Crosby to give them the original lyrics. So they rewrote it, coming up with new lyrics where they couldn't remember the originals: [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] But there was one other contribution to the track that was very distinctively the work of Usher. Gary Usher had a predilection at this point for putting musique concrete sections in otherwise straightforward pop songs. He'd done it with "Fakin' It" by Simon and Garfunkel, on which he did uncredited production work, and did it so often that it became something of a signature of records on Columbia in 1967 and 68, even being copied by his friend Jim Guercio on "Susan" by the Buckinghams. Usher had done this, in particular, on the first two singles by Sagittarius, his project with Curt Boettcher. In particular, the second Sagittarius single, "Hotel Indiscreet", had had a very jarring section (and a warning here, this contains some brief chanting of a Nazi slogan): [Excerpt: Sagittarius, "Hotel Indiscreet"] That was the work of a comedy group that Usher had discovered and signed to Columbia. The Firesign Theatre were so named because, like Usher, they were all interested in astrology, and they were all "fire signs".  Usher was working on their first album, Waiting For The Electrician or Someone Like Him, at the same time as he was working on the Byrds album: [Excerpt: The Firesign Theatre, "W.C. Fields Forever"] And he decided to bring in the Firesigns to contribute to "Draft Morning": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Draft Morning"] Crosby was, understandably, apoplectic when he heard the released version of "Draft Morning". As far as Hillman and McGuinn were concerned, it was always a Byrds song, and just because Crosby had left the band didn't mean they couldn't use material he'd written for the Byrds. Crosby took a different view, saying later "It was one of the sleaziest things they ever did. I had an entire song finished. They just casually rewrote it and decided to take half the credit. How's that? Without even asking me. I had a finished song, entirely mine. I left. They did the song anyway. They rewrote it and put it in their names. And mine was better. They just took it because they didn't have enough songs." What didn't help was that the publicity around the album, titled The Notorious Byrd Brothers minimised Crosby's contributions. Crosby is on five of the eleven tracks -- as he said later, "I'm all over that album, they just didn't give me credit. I played, I sang, I wrote, I even played bass on one track, and they tried to make out that I wasn't even on it, that they could be that good without me." But the album, like earlier Byrds albums, didn't have credits saying who played what, and the cover only featured McGuinn, Hillman, and Michael Clarke in the photo -- along with a horse, which Crosby took as another insult, as representing him. Though as McGuinn said, "If we had intended to do that, we would have turned the horse around". Even though Michael Clarke was featured on the cover, and even owned the horse that took Crosby's place, by the time the album came out he too had been fired. Unlike Crosby, he went quietly and didn't even ask for any money. According to McGuinn, he was increasingly uninterested in being in the band -- suffering from depression, and missing the teenage girls who had been the group's fans a year or two earlier. He gladly stopped being a Byrd, and went off to work in a hotel instead. In his place came Hillman's cousin, Kevin Kelley, fresh out of a band called the Rising Sons: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Take a Giant Step"] We've mentioned the Rising Sons briefly in some previous episodes, but they were one of the earliest LA folk-rock bands, and had been tipped to go on to greater things -- and indeed, many of them did, though not as part of the Rising Sons. Jesse Lee Kincaid, the least well-known of the band, only went on to release a couple of singles and never had much success, but his songs were picked up by other acts -- his "Baby You Come Rollin' 'Cross My Mind" was a minor hit for the Peppermint Trolley Company: [Excerpt: The Peppermint Trolley Company, "Baby You Come Rollin' 'Cross My Mind"] And Harry Nilsson recorded Kincaid's "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune": [Excerpt: Harry Nilsson, "She Sang Hymns Out of Tune"] But Kincaid was the least successful of the band members, and most of the other members are going to come up in future episodes of the podcast -- bass player Gary Marker played for a while with Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band, lead singer Taj Mahal is one of the most respected blues singers of the last sixty years, original drummer Ed Cassidy went on to form the progressive rock band Spirit, and lead guitarist Ry Cooder went on to become one of the most important guitarists in rock music. Kelley had been the last to join the Rising Sons, replacing Cassidy but he was in the band by the time they released their one single, a version of Rev. Gary Davis' "Candy Man" produced by Terry Melcher, with Kincaid on lead vocals: [Excerpt: The Rising Sons, "Candy Man"] That hadn't been a success, and the group's attempt at a follow-up, the Goffin and King song "Take a Giant Step", which we heard earlier, was blocked from release by Columbia as being too druggy -- though there were no complaints when the Monkees released their version as the B-side to "Last Train to Clarksville". The Rising Sons, despite being hugely popular as a live act, fell apart without ever releasing a second single. According to Marker, Mahal realised that he would be better off as a solo artist, but also Columbia didn't know how to market a white group with a Black lead vocalist (leading to Kincaid singing lead on their one released single, and producer Terry Melcher trying to get Mahal to sing more like a white singer on "Take a Giant Step"), and some in the band thought that Terry Melcher was deliberately trying to sink their career because they refused to sign to his publishing company. After the band split up, Marker and Kelley had formed a band called Fusion, which Byrds biographer Johnny Rogan describes as being a jazz-fusion band, presumably because of their name. Listening to the one album the group recorded, it is in fact more blues-rock, very like the music Marker made with the Rising Sons and Captain Beefheart. But Kelley's not on that album, because before it was recorded he was approached by his cousin Chris Hillman and asked to join the Byrds. At the time, Fusion were doing so badly that Kelley had to work a day job in a clothes shop, so he was eager to join a band with a string of hits who were just about to conclude a lucrative renegotiation of their record contract -- a renegotiation which may have played a part in McGuinn and Hillman firing Crosby and Clarke, as they were now the only members on the new contracts. The choice of Kelley made a lot of sense. He was mostly just chosen because he was someone they knew and they needed a drummer in a hurry -- they needed someone new to promote The Notorious Byrd Brothers and didn't have time to go through a laborious process of audtioning, and so just choosing Hillman's cousin made sense, but Kelley also had a very strong, high voice, and so he could fill in the harmony parts that Crosby had sung, stopping the new power-trio version of the band from being *too* thin-sounding in comparison to the five-man band they'd been not that much earlier. The Notorious Byrd Brothers was not a commercial success -- it didn't even make the top forty in the US, though it did in the UK -- to the presumed chagrin of Columbia, who'd just paid a substantial amount of money for this band who were getting less successful by the day. But it was, though, a gigantic critical success, and is generally regarded as the group's creative pinnacle. Robert Christgau, for example, talked about how LA rather than San Francisco was where the truly interesting music was coming from, and gave guarded praise to Captain Beefheart, Van Dyke Parks, and the Fifth Dimension (the vocal group, not the Byrds album) but talked about three albums as being truly great -- the Beach Boys' Wild Honey, Love's Forever Changes, and The Notorious Byrd Brothers. (He also, incidentally, talked about how the two songs that Crosby's new discovery Joni Mitchell had contributed to a Judy Collins album were much better than most folk music, and how he could hardly wait for her first album to come out). And that, more or less, was the critical consensus about The Notorious Byrd Brothers -- that it was, in Christgau's words "simply the best album the Byrds have ever recorded" and that "Gone are the weak--usually folky--tracks that have always flawed their work." McGuinn, though, thought that the album wasn't yet what he wanted. He had become particularly excited by the potentials of the Moog synthesiser -- an instrument that Gary Usher also loved -- during the recording of the album, and had spent a lot of time experimenting with it, coming up with tracks like the then-unreleased "Moog Raga": [Excerpt: The Byrds, "Moog Raga"] And McGuinn had a concept for the next Byrds album -- a concept he was very excited about. It was going to be nothing less than a grand sweeping history of American popular music. It was going to be a double album -- the new contract said that they should deliver two albums a year to Columbia, so a double album made sense -- and it would start with Appalachian folk music, go through country, jazz, and R&B, through the folk-rock music the Byrds had previously been known for, and into Moog experimentation. But to do this, the Byrds needed a keyboard player. Not only would a keyboard player help them fill out their thin onstage sound, if they got a jazz keyboardist, then they could cover the jazz material in McGuinn's concept album idea as well. So they went out and looked for a jazz piano player, and happily Larry Spector was managing one. Or at least, Larry Spector was managing someone who *said* he was a jazz pianist. But Gram Parsons said he was a lot of things... [Excerpt: Gram Parsons, "Brass Buttons (1965 version)"] Gram Parsons was someone who had come from a background of unimaginable privilege. His maternal grandfather was the owner of a Florida citrus fruit and real-estate empire so big that his mansion was right in the centre of what was then Florida's biggest theme park -- built on land he owned. As a teenager, Parsons had had a whole wing of his parents' house to himself, and had had servants to look after his every need, and as an adult he had a trust fund that paid him a hundred thousand dollars a year -- which in 1968 dollars would be equivalent to a little under nine hundred thousand in today's money. Two events in his childhood had profoundly shaped the life of young Gram. The first was in February 1956, when he went to see a new singer who he'd heard on the radio, and who according to the local newspaper had just recorded a new song called "Heartburn Motel".  Parsons had tried to persuade his friends that this new singer was about to become a big star -- one of his friends had said "I'll wait til he becomes famous!" As it turned out, the day Parsons and the couple of friends he did manage to persuade to go with him saw Elvis Presley was also the day that "Heartbreak Hotel" entered the Billboard charts at number sixty-eight. But even at this point, Elvis was an obvious star and the headliner of the show. Young Gram was enthralled -- but in retrospect he was more impressed by the other acts he saw on the bill. That was an all-star line-up of country musicians, including Mother Maybelle and the Carter Sisters, and especially the Louvin Brothers, arguably the greatest country music vocal duo of all time: [Excerpt: The Louvin Brothers, "The Christian Life"] Young Gram remained mostly a fan of rockabilly music rather than country, and would remain so for another decade or so, but a seed had been planted. The other event, much more tragic, was the death of his father. Both Parsons' parents were functioning alcoholics, and both by all accounts were unfaithful to each other, and their marriage was starting to break down. Gram's father was also, by many accounts, dealing with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder from his time serving in the second world war. On December the twenty-third 1958, Gram's father died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Everyone involved seems sure it was suicide, but it was officially recorded as natural causes because of the family's wealth and prominence in the local community. Gram's Christmas present from his parents that year was a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and according to some stories I've read his father had left a last message on a tape in the recorder, but by the time the authorities got to hear it, it had been erased apart from the phrase "I love you, Gram." After that Gram's mother's drinking got even worse, but in most ways his life still seemed charmed, and the descriptions of him as a teenager are about what you'd expect from someone who was troubled, with a predisposition to addiction, but who was also unbelievably wealthy, good-looking, charming, and talented. And the talent was definitely there. One thing everyone is agreed on is that from a very young age Gram Parsons took his music seriously and was determined to make a career as a musician. Keith Richards later said of him "Of the musicians I know personally (although Otis Redding, who I didn't know, fits this too), the two who had an attitude towards music that was the same as mine were Gram Parsons and John Lennon. And that was: whatever bag the business wants to put you in is immaterial; that's just a selling point, a tool that makes it easier. You're going to get chowed into this pocket or that pocket because it makes it easier for them to make charts up and figure out who's selling. But Gram and John were really pure musicians. All they liked was music, and then they got thrown into the game." That's not the impression many other people have of Parsons, who is almost uniformly described as an incessant self-promoter, and who from his teens onwards would regularly plant fake stories about himself in the local press, usually some variant of him having been signed to RCA records. Most people seem to think that image was more important to him than anything. In his teens, he started playing in a series of garage bands around Florida and Georgia, the two states in which he was brought up. One of his early bands was largely created by poaching the rhythm section who were then playing with Kent Lavoie, who later became famous as Lobo and had hits like "Me and You and a Dog Named Boo". Lavoie apparently held a grudge -- decades later he would still say that Parsons couldn't sing or play or write. Another musician on the scene with whom Parsons associated was Bobby Braddock, who would later go on to co-write songs like "D-I-V-O-R-C-E" for Tammy Wynette, and the song "He Stopped Loving Her Today", often considered the greatest country song ever written, for George Jones: [Excerpt: George Jones, "He Stopped Loving Her Today"] Jones would soon become one of Parsons' musical idols, but at this time he was still more interested in being Elvis or Little Richard. We're lucky enough to have a 1962 live recording of one of his garage bands, the Legends -- the band that featured the bass player and drummer he'd poached from Lobo. They made an appearance on a local TV show and a friend with a tape recorder recorded it off the TV and decades later posted it online. Of the four songs in that performance, two are R&B covers -- Little Richard's "Rip It Up" and Ray Charles' "What'd I Say?", and a third is the old Western Swing classic "Guitar Boogie Shuffle". But the interesting thing about the version of "Rip it Up" is that it's sung in an Everly Brothers style harmony, and the fourth song is a recording of the Everlys' "Let It Be Me". The Everlys were, of course, hugely influenced by the Louvin Brothers, who had so impressed young Gram six years earlier, and in this performance you can hear for the first time the hints of the style that Parsons would make his own a few years later: [Excerpt: Gram Parsons and the Legends, "Let it Be Me"] Incidentally, the other guitarist in the Legends, Jim Stafford, also went on to a successful musical career, having a top five hit in the seventies with "Spiders & Snakes": [Excerpt: Jim Stafford, "Spiders & Snakes"] Soon after that TV performance though, like many musicians of his generation, Parsons decided to give up on rock and roll, and instead to join a folk group. The group he joined, The Shilos, were a trio who were particularly influenced by the Journeymen, John Phillips' folk group before he formed the Mamas and the Papas, which we talked about in the episode on "San Francisco". At various times the group expanded with the addition of some female singers, trying to capture something of the sound of the New Chrisy Minstrels. In 1964, with the band members still in school, the Shilos decided to make a trip to Greenwich Village and see if they could make the big time as folk-music stars. They met up with John Phillips, and Parsons stayed with John and Michelle Phillips in their home in New York -- this was around the time the two of them were writing "California Dreamin'". Phillips got the Shilos an audition with Albert Grossman, who seemed eager to sign them until he realised they were still schoolchildren just on a break. The group were, though, impressive enough that he was interested, and we have some recordings of them from a year later which show that they were surprisingly good for a bunch of teenagers: [Excerpt: The Shilos, "The Bells of Rhymney"] Other than Phillips, the other major connection that Parsons made in New York was the folk singer Fred Neil, who we've talked about occasionally before. Neil was one of the great songwriters of the Greenwich Village scene, and many of his songs became successful for others -- his "Dolphins" was recorded by Tim Buckley, most famously his "Everybody's Talkin'" was a hit for Harry Nilsson, and he wrote "Another Side of This Life" which became something of a standard -- it was recorded by the Animals and the Lovin' Spoonful, and Jefferson Airplane, as well as recording the song, included it in their regular setlists, including at Monterey: [Excerpt: Jefferson Airplane, "The Other Side of This Life (live at Monterey)"] According to at least one biographer, though, Neil had another, more pernicious, influence on Parsons -- he may well have been the one who introduced Parsons to heroin, though several of Parsons' friends from the time said he wasn't yet using hard drugs. By spring 1965, Parsons was starting to rethink his commitment to folk music, particularly after "Mr. Tambourine Man" became a hit. He talked with the other members about their need to embrace the changes in music that Dylan and the Byrds were bringing about, but at the same time he was still interested enough in acoustic music that when he was given the job of arranging the music for his high school graduation, the group he booked were the Dillards. That graduation day was another day that would change Parsons' life -- as it was the day his mother died, of alcohol-induced liver failure. Parsons was meant to go on to Harvard, but first he went back to Greenwich Village for the summer, where he hung out with Fred Neil and Dave Van Ronk (and started using heroin regularly). He went to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium, and he was neighbours with Stephen Stills and Richie Furay -- the three of them talked about forming a band together before Stills moved West. And on a brief trip back home to Florida between Greenwich Village and Harvard, Parsons spoke with his old friend Jim Stafford, who made a suggestion to him -- instead of trying to do folk music, which was clearly falling out of fashion, why not try to do *country* music but with long hair like the Beatles? He could be a country Beatle. It would be an interesting gimmick. Parsons was only at Harvard for one semester before flunking out, but it was there that he was fully reintroduced to country music, and in particular to three artists who would influence him more than any others. He'd already been vaguely aware of Buck Owens, whose "Act Naturally" had recently been covered by the Beatles: [Excerpt: Buck Owens, "Act Naturally"] But it was at Harvard that he gained a deeper appreciation of Owens. Owens was the biggest star of what had become known as the Bakersfield Sound, a style of country music that emphasised a stripped-down electric band lineup with Telecaster guitars, a heavy drumbeat, and a clean sound. It came from the same honky-tonk and Western Swing roots as the rockabilly music that Parsons had grown up on, and it appealed to him instinctively.  In particular, Parsons was fascinated by the fact that Owens' latest album had a cover version of a Drifters song on it -- and then he got even more interested when Ray Charles put out his third album of country songs and included a version of Owens' "Together Again": [Excerpt: Ray Charles, "Together Again"] This suggested to Parsons that country music and the R&B he'd been playing previously might not quite be so far apart as he'd thought. At Harvard, Parsons was also introduced to the work of another Bakersfield musician, who like Owens was produced by Ken Nelson, who also produced the Louvin Brothers' records, and who we heard about in previous episodes as he produced Gene Vincent and Wanda Jackson. Merle Haggard had only had one big hit at the time, "(My Friends Are Gonna Be) Strangers": [Excerpt: Merle Haggard, "(My Friends are Gonna Be) Strangers"] But he was about to start a huge run of country hits that would see every single he released for the next twelve years make the country top ten, most of them making number one. Haggard would be one of the biggest stars in country music, but he was also to be arguably the country musician with the biggest influence on rock music since Johnny Cash, and his songs would soon start to be covered by everyone from the Grateful Dead to the Everly Brothers to the Beach Boys. And the third artist that Parsons was introduced to was someone who, in most popular narratives of country music, is set up in opposition to Haggard and Owens, because they were representatives of the Bakersfield Sound while he was the epitome of the Nashville Sound to which the Bakersfield Sound is placed in opposition, George Jones. But of course anyone with ears will notice huge similarities in the vocal styles of Jones, Haggard, and Owens: [Excerpt: George Jones, "The Race is On"] Owens, Haggard, and Jones are all somewhat outside the scope of this series, but are seriously important musicians in country music. I would urge anyone who's interested in them to check out Tyler Mahan Coe's podcast Cocaine and Rhinestones, season one of which has episodes on Haggard and Owens, as well as on the Louvin Brothers who I also mentioned earlier, and season two of which is entirely devoted to Jones. When he dropped out of Harvard after one semester, Parsons was still mostly under the thrall of the Greenwich Village folkies -- there's a recording of him made over Christmas 1965 that includes his version of "Another Side of This Life": [Excerpt: Gram Parsons, "Another Side of This Life"] But he was encouraged to go further in the country direction by John Nuese (and I hope that's the correct pronunciation – I haven't been able to find any recordings mentioning his name), who had introduced him to this music and who also played guitar. Parsons, Neuse, bass player Ian Dunlop and drummer Mickey Gauvin formed a band that was originally called Gram Parsons and the Like. They soon changed their name though, inspired by an Our Gang short in which the gang became a band: [Excerpt: Our Gang, "Mike Fright"] Shortening the name slightly, they became the International Submarine Band. Parsons rented them a house in New York, and they got a contract with Goldstar Records, and released a couple of singles. The first of them, "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming" was a cover of the theme to a comedy film that came out around that time, and is not especially interesting: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "The Russians are Coming, The Russians are Coming"] The second single is more interesting. "Sum Up Broke" is a song by Parsons and Neuse, and shows a lot of influence from the Byrds: [Excerpt: The international Submarine Band, "Sum Up Broke"] While in New York with the International Submarine Band, Parsons made another friend in the music business. Barry Tashian was the lead singer of a band called the Remains, who had put out a couple of singles: [Excerpt: The Remains, "Why Do I Cry?"] The Remains are now best known for having been on the bill on the Beatles' last ever tour, including playing as support on their last ever show at Candlestick Park, but they split up before their first album came out. After spending most of 1966 in New York, Parsons decided that he needed to move the International Submarine Band out to LA. There were two reasons for this. The first was his friend Brandon DeWilde, an actor who had been a child star in the fifties -- it's him at the end of Shane -- who was thinking of pursuing a musical career. DeWilde was still making TV appearances, but he was also a singer -- John Nuese said that DeWilde sang harmony with Parsons better than anyone except Emmylou Harris -- and he had recorded some demos with the International Submarine Band backing him, like this version of Buck Owens' "Together Again": [Excerpt: Brandon DeWilde, "Together Again"] DeWilde had told Parsons he could get the group some work in films. DeWilde made good on that promise to an extent -- he got the group a cameo in The Trip, a film we've talked about in several other episodes, which was being directed by Roger Corman, the director who worked a lot with David Crosby's father, and was coming out from American International Pictures, the company that put out the beach party films -- but while the group were filmed performing one of their own songs, in the final film their music was overdubbed by the Electric Flag. The Trip starred Peter Fonda, another member of the circle of people around David Crosby, and another son of privilege, who at this point was better known for being Henry Fonda's son than for his own film appearances. Like DeWilde, Fonda wanted to become a pop star, and he had been impressed by Parsons, and asked if he could record Parsons' song "November Nights". Parsons agreed, and the result was released on Chisa Records, the label we talked about earlier that had put out promos of Gene Clark, in a performance produced by Hugh Masekela: [Excerpt: Peter Fonda, "November Nights"] The other reason the group moved West though was that Parsons had fallen in love with David Crosby's girlfriend, Nancy Ross, who soon became pregnant with his daughter -- much to Parsons' disappointment, she refused to have an abortion. Parsons bought the International Submarine Band a house in LA to rehearse in, and moved in separately with Nancy. The group started playing all the hottest clubs around LA, supporting bands like Love and the Peanut Butter Conspiracy, but they weren't sounding great, partly because Parsons was more interested in hanging round with celebrities than rehearsing -- the rest of the band had to work for a living, and so took their live performances more seriously than he did, while he was spending time catching up with his old folk friends like John Phillips and Fred Neil, as well as getting deeper into drugs and, like seemingly every musician in 1967, Scientology, though he only dabbled in the latter. The group were also, though, starting to split along musical lines. Dunlop and Gauvin wanted to play R&B and garage rock, while Parsons and Nuese wanted to play country music. And there was a third issue -- which record label should they go with? There were two labels interested in them, neither of them particularly appealing. The offer that Dunlop in particular wanted to go with was from, of all people, Jay Ward Records: [Excerpt: A Salute to Moosylvania] Jay Ward was the producer and writer of Rocky & Bullwinkle, Peabody & Sherman, Dudley Do-Right and other cartoons, and had set up a record company, which as far as I've been able to tell had only released one record, and that five years earlier (we just heard a snippet of it). But in the mid-sixties several cartoon companies were getting into the record business -- we'll hear more about that when we get to song 186 -- and Ward's company apparently wanted to sign the International Submarine Band, and were basically offering to throw money at them. Parsons, on the other hand, wanted to go with Lee Hazlewood International. This was a new label set up by someone we've only talked about in passing, but who was very influential on the LA music scene, Lee Hazlewood. Hazlewood had got his start producing country hits like Sanford Clark's "The Fool": [Excerpt: Sanford Clark, "The Fool"] He'd then moved on to collaborating with Lester Sill, producing a series of hits for Duane Eddy, whose unique guitar sound Hazlewood helped come up with: [Excerpt: Duane Eddy, "Rebel Rouser"] After splitting off from Sill, who had gone off to work with Phil Spector, who had been learning some production techniques from Hazlewood, Hazlewood had gone to work for Reprise records, where he had a career in a rather odd niche, producing hit records for the children of Rat Pack stars. He'd produced Dino, Desi, and Billy, who consisted of future Beach Boys sideman Billy Hinsche plus Desi Arnaz Jr and Dean Martin Jr: [Excerpt: Dino, Desi, and Billy, "I'm a Fool"] He'd also produced Dean Martin's daughter Deana: [Excerpt: Deana Martin, "Baby I See You"] and rather more successfully he'd written and produced a series of hits for Nancy Sinatra, starting with "These Boots are Made for Walkin'": [Excerpt: Nancy Sinatra, "These Boots are Made for Walkin'"] Hazlewood had also moved into singing himself. He'd released a few tracks on his own, but his career as a performer hadn't really kicked into gear until he'd started writing duets for Nancy Sinatra. She apparently fell in love with his demos and insisted on having him sing them with her in the studio, and so the two made a series of collaborations like the magnificently bizarre "Some Velvet Morning": [Excerpt: Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra, "Some Velvet Morning"] Hazlewood is now considered something of a cult artist, thanks largely to a string of magnificent orchestral country-pop solo albums he recorded, but at this point he was one of the hottest people in the music industry. He wasn't offering to produce the International Submarine Band himself -- that was going to be his partner, Suzi Jane Hokom -- but Parsons thought it was better to sign for less money to a label that was run by someone with a decade-long string of massive hit records than for more money to a label that had put out one record about a cartoon moose. So the group split up. Dunlop and Gauvin went off to form another band, with Barry Tashian -- and legend has it that one of the first times Gram Parsons visited the Byrds in the studio, he mentioned the name of that band, The Flying Burrito Brothers, and that was the inspiration for the Byrds titling their album The Notorious Byrd Brothers. Parsons and Nuese, on the other hand, formed a new lineup of The International Submarine Band, with bass player Chris Ethridge, drummer John Corneal, who Parsons had first played with in The Legends, and guitarist Bob Buchanan, a former member of the New Christy Minstrels who Parsons had been performing with as a duo after they'd met through Fred Neil. The International Submarine Band recorded an album, Safe At Home, which is now often called the first country-rock album -- though as we've said so often, there's no first anything. That album was a mixture of cover versions of songs by people like Johnny Cash and Merle Haggard: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "I Must Be Somebody Else You've Known"] And Parsons originals, like "Do You Know How It Feels To Be Lonesome?", which he cowrote with Barry Goldberg of the Electric Flag: [Excerpt: The International Submarine Band, "Do You Know How It Feels To Be Lonesome?"] But the recording didn't go smoothly. In particular, Corneal realised he'd been hoodwinked. Parsons had told him, when persuading him to move West, that he'd be able to sing on the record and that some of his songs would be used. But while the record was credited to The International Submarine Band, everyone involved agrees that it was actually a Gram Parsons solo album by any other name -- he was in charge, he wouldn't let other members' songs on the record, and he didn't let Corneal sing as he'd promised. And then, before the album could be released, he was off. The Byrds wanted a jazz keyboard player, and Parsons could fake being one long enough to get the gig. The Byrds had got rid of one rich kid with a giant ego who wanted to take control of everything and thought his undeniable talent excused his attempts at dominating the group, and replaced him with another one -- who also happened to be signed to another record label. We'll see how well that worked out for them in two weeks' time.  

There is something so beautifully rendered in this piece of heartbreak I have always identified with.Written by husband and wife Dave Ellingson and Kim Carnes and released in March 1980,  it was the first single from Rogers' album Gideon. It's a tough three plus minutes to travel for some because the poetry informs with an unbearable truth for those paying rapt attention.When Kim cries "Put Out The Light" and Kenny counters with his plea of"Just Hold On", attaching their dramatic authenticity to the words, I Can't Keep From Crying Sometimes.A profound prayer from two dreamers who could never have imagined the twist of consequence dedication and attachment can bring.I'm a sucker for songs which dispense a healthy dose of yearning and  struggle.And when two gifted voices collide within a symphonic world of intense devotion real humans share , I'm Gone, Gone, Gone Like A Cool Breeze.I imagine that's why "He Stopped Loving Her Today" has been named in several surveys as the greatest country song of all time. It was released in April 1980, only a month after "Don't Fall In Love With A Dreamer". That Bobby Braddock / Curly Putman composed opera made 1980 quite A Good Year For The Roses."Don't fall in love with a dreamer‘Cause he'll always take you inJust when you think you've really changed himHe'll leave you againDon't fall in love with a dreamer‘Cause he'll break you every timeOh, put out the light, just hold onBefore we say goodbye".Damn Straight.-Rich Buckland

Helen and Gavin chat about Succession, 80 for Brady, and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, and it's Week 72 from the list of Rolling Stone's 500 Best Songs Ever, numbers 145 to 141; Ms Jackson by Outkast, Jumpin' Jack Flash by The Rolling Stones, London Calling by The Clash, He Stopped Loving Her Today by George Jones, and Maggie May by Rod Stewart.

Shit. I've burst into tears three times just trying to get through the opening track on this cart, He Stopped Loving Her Today. What is it about good country music that provokes such gut wrenching spasms of lonely grief? And here, the keening majesty of Mr. Jones' voice proves he was the undisputed master of the emotional body blow. He Stopped Loving Her Today revived Jone's career, even though he hated the song initially. He was quoted as saying that his: “…4 decade career had been salvaged by a 3 minute song.” It won him a Grammy and CMA Song of the Year. Producer Billy Sherrill loaded up the album with a raft of songs that reflected George's reputation for out of control drinking and self destruction, and the recording feels like an intimate tell-all. Sherrill testified that the singer was in such bad shape during the making of the album that he had to record the recitation portion of the hit song 18 months after laying down the first verse. The track became inextricably linked with The Possum, making the top country charts, for the second time, a week after the singer's death in 2013. The toxic co-dependency between the singer and his wife Tammy Wynettte is the stuff of legend, and one of the most compelling soap operatic storylines in Country music history. And, it underlines every lyric offered here. The couple divorced in 1976, but kept working together, all the while as the dissipated Jones kept hoping for a reconciliation. (They recorded their single “Two Story House” in the same year as this album). Thankfully, in 1981, George met and married Nancy Sepulvado who provided a stabilizing influence for him. She managed his career and got him sober (mostly), and surviving to the age of 81. This is a classic recording by one of the all time greats. 

Recordamos a Ronnie Spector, lider de The Ronettes, además de The Grass Roots, Clarence Carter, Ella Fitzgerald, Tracey Ullman, Jay Ramsey, James Intveld, 4 versiones del clásico de los 60´s "The First Cut Is The Deepest", la historia de una de las canciones más populares del Country, "He Stopped Loving Her Today", 3 versiones del bolero-son "Cuando tú me querías" y otros boleros de Zenet con Silvia Pérez Cruz y el Trío Los Soberanos

It's a known fact that "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is the best and saddest country song of all time. But... is it?

Marshall reviews one of George Jones' biggest hits, He Stopped Loving Her Today. Know a musician that might be interested in being a guest on the RDR Pod? Show them our podcast and have them message us on Facebook! Hooky with Sloane by Bird Creek Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...​Music provided by FreeMusic109 https://youtube.com/FreeMusic109

1. Walk Through This World With Me [00:31]2. He Stopped Loving Her Today [02:38]3. Radio Lover [05:50]4. Golden Ring [09:04]5. Why Baby Why [12:00]6. Window Up Above [14:21]7. A Drunk Can t Be a Man [16:51]8. If Drinkin' Don't Kill Me [19:30]9. I've Aged Twenty Years In Five [22:37]10. The Race Is On [25:50]___________کاری از حامد کیان Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Like Cam, Kenzie has built a path for himself alongside a coach that probably wasn't his first choice. Kelly used her block on Blake in the blinds to win Kenzie to her team and has since let him do his own thing while fangirling over him for what she calls one of her favorite country voices of all time. Kenzie may not have the most exciting stage presence, but his class country style is so genuine to his character that it's hard to not be drawn in by his voice. His semi-final performance of "He Stopped Loving Her Today," while not the episode-ending showstopper we could have hoped for, was his most dynamic number yet and is a good sign that he's ready to dig even deeper for the finale.

Like Cam, Kenzie has built a path for himself alongside a coach that probably wasn't his first choice. Kelly used her block on Blake in the blinds to win Kenzie to her team and has since let him do his own thing while fangirling over him for what she calls one of her favorite country voices of all time. Kenzie may not have the most exciting stage presence, but his class country style is so genuine to his character that it's hard to not be drawn in by his voice. His semi-final performance of "He Stopped Loving Her Today," while not the episode-ending showstopper we could have hoped for, was his most dynamic number yet and is a good sign that he's ready to dig even deeper for the finale.

Like Cam, Kenzie has built a path for himself alongside a coach that probably wasn't his first choice. Kelly used her block on Blake in the blinds to win Kenzie to her team and has since let him do his own thing while fangirling over him for what she calls one of her favorite country voices of all time. Kenzie may not have the most exciting stage presence, but his class country style is so genuine to his character that it's hard to not be drawn in by his voice. His semi-final performance of "He Stopped Loving Her Today," while not the episode-ending showstopper we could have hoped for, was his most dynamic number yet and is a good sign that he's ready to dig even deeper for the finale.

Like Cam, Kenzie has built a path for himself alongside a coach that probably wasn't his first choice. Kelly used her block on Blake in the blinds to win Kenzie to her team and has since let him do his own thing while fangirling over him for what she calls one of her favorite country voices of all time. Kenzie may not have the most exciting stage presence, but his class country style is so genuine to his character that it's hard to not be drawn in by his voice. His semi-final performance of "He Stopped Loving Her Today," while not the episode-ending showstopper we could have hoped for, was his most dynamic number yet and is a good sign that he's ready to dig even deeper for the finale.

Nashville musician Charlie McCoy's Dylan-related achievements include those distinctive guitar licks on Desolation Row, that blues harmonica on Obviously Five Believers (a rare example of another person playing harp on a Dylan session) and the inventive bass lines on John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait. His motto: “Say yes - and then figure it out!” On his work as a session musician: “The song is the picture and we are the frame”. On Dylan's harmonica style: “I've tried to do it like that and it doesn't sound as good”. On waiting until 4:00 in the morning to record Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands: “How much coffee can you drink?”Charlie has played with them all: Elvis (13 albums), Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Ringo Starr, Paul Simon, Kris Kristofferson, Robbie Robertson, Linda Ronstadt; even the rockers known as Ween. His tale of Leonard Cohen and the horsewhip is worth the price of admission. Any regrets? “I never played bass for Elvis” (only harmonica, organ, vibes and guitar). We are honoured to welcome the Nashville cat who has been there and done pretty much everything.In addition to being a fixture in Nashville recording studios for almost 60 years, Charlie McCoy has released 35 solo albums and served as music director for the long-running television series, “Hee Haw”. Charlie is member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. His session work includes Oh Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison, Simon and Garfunkel's The Boxer, George Jones's He Stopped Loving Her Today and Johnny Cash's Orange Blossom Special. He has played harmonica for Waylon Jennings, Steve Miller, Gordon Lightfoot, Loretta Lynn, Leon Russell, Rodney Crowell and countless others. Charlie won a Grammy for his album, The Real McCoy. He has won the CMA's Instrumentalist of the Year Award two times and the Academy Of Country Music's Specialty Instrument Award seven times. Charlie was a member of legendary Nashville band Area Code 615, whose song Stone Fox Chase was the theme tune for the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test TV series.WebsiteTrailerSpotify playlistListeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating.Twitter @isitrollingpodRecorded 19th February 2021This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts

Nashville musician Charlie McCoy’s Dylan-related achievements include those distinctive guitar licks on Desolation Row, that blues harmonica on Obviously Five Believers (a rare example of another person playing harp on a Dylan session) and the inventive bass lines on John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait. His motto: “Say yes - and then figure it out!” On his work as a session musician: “The song is the picture and we are the frame”. On Dylan’s harmonica style: “I’ve tried to do it like that and it doesn’t sound as good”. On waiting until 4:00 in the morning to record Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands: “How much coffee can you drink?” Charlie has played with them all: Elvis (13 albums), Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Ringo Starr, Paul Simon, Kris Kristofferson, Robbie Robertson, Linda Ronstadt; even the rockers known as Ween. His tale of Leonard Cohen and the horsewhip is worth the price of admission. Any regrets? “I never played bass for Elvis” (only harmonica, organ, vibes and guitar). We are honoured to welcome the Nashville cat who has been there and done pretty much everything. In addition to being a fixture in Nashville recording studios for almost 60 years, Charlie McCoy has released 35 solo albums and served as music director for the long-running television series, “Hee Haw”. Charlie is member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. His session work includes Oh Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison, Simon and Garfunkel’s The Boxer, George Jones’s He Stopped Loving Her Today and Johnny Cash’s Orange Blossom Special. He has played harmonica for Waylon Jennings, Steve Miller, Gordon Lightfoot, Loretta Lynn, Leon Russell, Rodney Crowell and countless others. Charlie won a Grammy for his album, The Real McCoy. He has won the CMA’s Instrumentalist of the Year Award two times and the Academy Of Country Music’s Specialty Instrument Award seven times. Charlie was a member of legendary Nashville band Area Code 615, whose song Stone Fox Chase was the theme tune for the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test TV series. Website Trailer Spotify playlist Listeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating. Twitter @isitrollingpod Recorded 19th February 2021 This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts

Nashville musician Charlie McCoy's Dylan-related achievements include those distinctive guitar licks on Desolation Row, that blues harmonica on Obviously Five Believers (a rare example of another person playing harp on a Dylan session) and the inventive bass lines on John Wesley Harding, Nashville Skyline and Self Portrait. His motto: “Say yes - and then figure it out!” On his work as a session musician: “The song is the picture and we are the frame”. On Dylan's harmonica style: “I've tried to do it like that and it doesn't sound as good”. On waiting until 4:00 in the morning to record Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands: “How much coffee can you drink?”Charlie has played with them all: Elvis (13 albums), Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison, George Jones, Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash, Ringo Starr, Paul Simon, Kris Kristofferson, Robbie Robertson, Linda Ronstadt; even the rockers known as Ween. His tale of Leonard Cohen and the horsewhip is worth the price of admission. Any regrets? “I never played bass for Elvis” (only harmonica, organ, vibes and guitar). We are honoured to welcome the Nashville cat who has been there and done pretty much everything.In addition to being a fixture in Nashville recording studios for almost 60 years, Charlie McCoy has released 35 solo albums and served as music director for the long-running television series, “Hee Haw”. Charlie is member of the Country Music Hall of Fame. His session work includes Oh Pretty Woman by Roy Orbison, Simon and Garfunkel's The Boxer, George Jones's He Stopped Loving Her Today and Johnny Cash's Orange Blossom Special. He has played harmonica for Waylon Jennings, Steve Miller, Gordon Lightfoot, Loretta Lynn, Leon Russell, Rodney Crowell and countless others. Charlie won a Grammy for his album, The Real McCoy. He has won the CMA's Instrumentalist of the Year Award two times and the Academy Of Country Music's Specialty Instrument Award seven times. Charlie was a member of legendary Nashville band Area Code 615, whose song Stone Fox Chase was the theme tune for the BBC's Old Grey Whistle Test TV series.WebsiteTrailerEpisode playlist on AppleEpisode playlist on SpotifyListeners: please subscribe and/or leave a review and a rating.Twitter @isitrollingpodRecorded 19th February 2021This show is part of Pantheon Podcasts

This week Katie and Staci try to bring awareness to John ‘Joey’ Tarver and Jose Nava. Both men went missing from Mississippi without a trace. ***at the end of each episode we try to leave y’all with clips of the missing person and their favorite songs, this week we had no clips of either gentlemen and only Joey’s favorite song ‘He Stopped Loving Her Today’ by George Jones*** --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

The artist needed a win! Desperation led him to the biggest song of his career.

Bobby Braddock has written #1 songs in five consecutive decades and has written 13 #1 songs. He is a member of the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame and, in 2015, was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame. Many of his songs have become country music standards covered by bands all over the world. He has been nominated for the Country Music Association Song of The Year six times and has won it twice. Born in the citrus farm country near Orlando, Florida, he began playing piano in rock and roll bands before migrating to Nashville where he became the touring piano player in Marty Robbins band. There he began writing songs that were recorded and the rest is the stuff of legends. Bobby discusses his songs “D-I-V-O-R-C-E,” “Golden Ring,” “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” “People Are Crazy,” “Faking Love,” “I Wanna Talk About Me,” “Womanhood,” “Time Marches On,” “Did You Ever,” “Her Name Is,” “Bleep Her,” and “The Nerve.”Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/back-story-song/exclusive-contentAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “You Better Move On”, and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on “Mother-In-Law” by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt’s irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ —-more—- Resources As always, I’ve created Mixcloud playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This week it’s been split into two parts because of the number of songs by Arthur Alexander. Part one. Part two. This compilation collects the best of Alexander’s Dot work. Much of the information in this episode comes from Richard Younger’s biography of Alexander. It’s unfortunately not in print in the UK, and goes for silly money, though I believe it can be bought cheaply in the US. And a lot of the background on Muscle Shoals comes from Country Soul by Charles L. Hughes.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we start, a warning for those who need it. This is one of the sadder episodes we’re going to be doing, and it deals with substance abuse, schizophrenia, and miscarriage. One of the things we’re going to see a lot of in the next few weeks and months is the growing integration of the studios that produced much of the hit music to come out of the Southern USA in the sixties — studios in what the writer Charles L. Hughes calls the country-soul triangle: Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. That integration produced some of the greatest music of the era, but it’s also the case that with few exceptions, narratives about that have tended to centre the white people involved at the expense of the Black people. The Black musicians tend to be regarded as people who allowed the white musicians to cast off their racism and become better people, rather than as colleagues who in many cases somewhat resented the white musicians — there were jobs that weren’t open to Black musicians in the segregated South, and now here were a bunch of white people taking some of the smaller number of jobs that *were* available to them.  This is not to say that those white musicians were, individually, racist — many were very vocally opposed to racism — but they were still beneficiaries of a racist system. These white musicians who loved Black music slowly, over a decade or so, took over the older Black styles of music, and made them into white music. Up to this point, when we’ve looked at R&B, blues, or soul recordings, all the musicians involved have been Black people, almost without exception. And for most of the fifties, rock and roll was a predominantly Black genre, before the influx of the rockabillies made it seem, briefly, like it could lead to a truly post-racial style of music. But over the 1960s, we’re going to see white people slowly colonise those musics, and push Black musicians to the margins. And this episode marks a crucial turning point in the story, as we see the establishment of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as a centre of white people making music in previously Black genres. But the start of that story comes with a Black man making music that most people at the time saw as coded as white. Today we’re going to look at someone whose music is often considered the epitome of deep soul, but who worked with many of the musicians who made the Nashville Sound what it was, and who was as influenced by Gene Autry as he was by many of the more obvious singers who might influence a soul legend. Today, we’re going to look at Arthur Alexander, and at “You Better Move On”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “You’d Better Move On”] Arthur Alexander’s is one of the most tragic stories we’ll be looking at. He was a huge influence on every musician who came up in the sixties, but he never got the recognition for it. He was largely responsible for the rise of Muscle Shoals studios, and he wrote songs that were later covered by the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, as well as many, many more. The musician Norbert Putnam told the story of visiting George Harrison in the seventies, and seeing his copy of Alexander’s hit single “You Better Move On”. He said to Harrison, “Did you know I played bass on that?” and Harrison replied, “If I phoned Paul up now, he’d come over and kiss your feet”. That’s how important Arthur Alexander was to the Beatles, and to the history of rock music. But he never got to reap the rewards his talent entitled him to. He spent most of his life in poverty, and is now mostly known only to fans of the subgenre known as deep soul. Part of this is because his music is difficult to categorise. While most listeners would now consider it soul music, it’s hard to escape the fact that Alexander’s music has an awful lot of elements of country music in it. This is something that Alexander would point out himself — in interviews, he would talk about how he loved singing cowboys in films — people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry — and about how when he was growing up the radio stations he would listen to would “play a Drifters record and maybe an Eddy Arnold record, and they didn’t make no distinction. That’s the way it was until much later”. The first record he truly loved was Eddy Arnold’s 1946 country hit “That’s How Much I Love You”: [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, “That’s How Much I Love You”] Alexander grew up in Alabama, but in what gets described as a relatively integrated area for the time and place — by his own account, the part of East Florence he grew up in had only one other Black family, and all the other children he played with were white, and he wasn’t even aware of segregation until he was eight or nine. Florence is itself part of a quad-city area with three other nearby towns – Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia. This area as a whole is often known as either “the Shoals”, or “Muscle Shoals”, and when people talk about music, it’s almost always the latter, so from this point on, I’ll be using “Muscle Shoals” to refer to all four towns. The consensus among people from the area seems to have been that while Alabama itself was one of the most horribly racist parts of the country, Muscle Shoals was much better than the rest of Alabama. Some have suggested that this comparative integration was part of the reason for the country influence in Alexander’s music, but as we’ve seen in many previous episodes, there were a lot more Black fans of country music than popular myth would suggest, and musicians like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley were very obviously influenced by country singers. Alexander’s father was also called Arthur, and so for all his life the younger Arthur Alexander was known to family and friends as “June”, for Junior. Arthur senior had been a blues guitarist in his youth, and according to his son was also an excellent singer, but he got very angry the one time June picked up his guitar and tried to play it — he forbade him from ever playing the guitar, saying that he’d never made a nickel as a player, and didn’t want that life for his son. As Arthur was an obedient kid, he did as his father said — he never in his life learned to play any musical instrument. But that didn’t stop him loving music and wanting to sing. He would listen to the radio all the time, listening to crooners like Patti Page and Nat “King” Cole, and as a teenager he got himself a job working at a cafe owned by a local gig promoter, which meant he was able to get free entry to the R&B shows the promoter put on at a local chitlin circuit venue, and get to meet the stars who played there. He would talk to people like Clyde McPhatter, and ask him how he managed to hit the high notes — though he wasn’t satisfied by McPhatter’s answer that “It’s just there”, thinking there must be more to it than that. And he became very friendly with the Clovers, once having a baseball game with them, and spending a lot of time with their lead singer, Buddy Bailey, asking him details of how he got particular vocal effects in the song “One Mint Julep”: [Excerpt: The Clovers, “One Mint Julep”] He formed a vocal group called the Heartstrings, who would perform songs like “Sixty Minute Man”, and got a regular spot on a local TV show, but according to his account, after a few weeks one of the other members decided he didn’t need to bother practising any more, and messed up on live TV. The group split up after that. The only time he got to perform once that group split up was when he would sit in in a band led by his friend George Brooks, who regularly gigged around Muscle Shoals. But there seemed no prospect of anything bigger happening — there were no music publishing companies or recording studios in Alabama, and everyone from Alabama who had made an impact in music had moved away to do it — W.C. Handy, Hank Williams, Sam Phillips, they’d all done truly great things, but they’d done them in Memphis or Nashville, not in Montgomery or Birmingham. There was just not the music industry infrastructure there to do anything. That started to change in 1956, when the first record company to set up in Muscle Shoals got its start. Tune Records was a tiny label run from a bus station, and most of its business was the same kind of stuff that Sam Phillips did before Sun became big — making records of people’s weddings and so on. But then the owner of the label, James Joiner, came up with a song that he thought might be commercial if a young singer he knew named Bobby Denton sang it. “A Fallen Star” was done as cheaply as humanly possible — it was recorded at a radio station, cut live in one take. The engineer on the track was a DJ who was on the air at the time — he put a record on, engineered the track while the record was playing, and made sure the musicians finished before the record he was playing did, so he could get back on the air. That record itself wasn’t a hit, and was so unsuccessful that I’ve not been able to find a copy of it anywhere, but it inspired hit cover versions from Ferlin Husky and Jimmy C. Newman: [Excerpt: Jimmy C. Newman, “A Fallen Star”] Off the back of those hit versions, Joiner started his own publishing company to go with his record company. Suddenly there was a Muscle Shoals music scene, and everything started to change. A lot of country musicians in the area gravitated towards Joiner, and started writing songs for his publishing company. At this point, this professional music scene in the area was confined to white people — Joiner recalled later that a young singer named Percy Sledge had auditioned for him, but that Joiner simply didn’t understand his type of music — but a circle of songwriters formed that would be important later. Jud Phillips, Sam’s brother, signed Denton to his new label, Judd, and Denton started recording songs by two of these new songwriters, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill. Denton’s recordings were unsuccessful, but they started getting cover versions. Roy Orbison’s first single on RCA was a Hall and Sherrill song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, “Sweet and Innocent”] Hall and Sherrill then started up their own publishing company, with the help of a loan from Joiner, and with a third partner, Tom Stafford. Stafford is a figure who has been almost written out of music history, and about whom I’ve been able to find out very little, but who seems in some ways the most intriguing person among these white musicians and entrepreneurs. Friends from the time describe him as a “reality-hacking poet”, and he seems to have been a beatnik, or a proto-hippie, the only one in Muscle Shoals and maybe the only one in the state of Alabama at the time. He was the focal point of a whole group of white musicians, people like Norbert Puttnam, David Briggs, Dan Penn, and Spooner Oldham. These musicians loved Black music, and wanted to play it, thinking of it as more exciting than the pop and country that they also played. But they loved it in a rather appropriative way — and in the same way, they had what they *thought* was an anti-racist attitude. Even though they were white, they referred to themselves collectively as a word I’m not going to use, the single most offensive slur against Black people. And so when Arthur Alexander turned up and got involved in this otherwise-white group of musicians, their attitudes varied widely. Terry Thompson, for example, who Alexander said was one of the best players ever to play guitar, as good as Nashville legends like Roy Clark and Jerry Reed, was also, according to Alexander, “the biggest racist there ever was”, and made derogatory remarks about Black people – though he said that Alexander didn’t count. Others, like Dan Penn, have later claimed that they took an “I don’t even see race” attitude, while still others were excited to be working with an actual Black man. Alexander would become close friends with some of them, would remain at arm’s length with most, but appreciated the one thing that they all had in common – that they, like him, wanted to perform R&B *and* country *and* pop. For Hall, Sherrill, and Stafford’s fledgling publishing company FAME, Alexander and one of his old bandmates from the Heartstrings, Henry Lee Bennett, wrote a song called “She Wanna Rock”, which was recorded in Nashville by the rockabilly singer Arnie Derksen, at Owen Bradley’s studio with the Nashville A-Team backing him: [Excerpt: Arnie Derksen, “She Wanna Rock”] That record wasn’t a success, and soon after that, the partnership behind FAME dissolved. Rick Hall was getting super-ambitious and wanted to become a millionaire by the time he was thirty, Tom Stafford was content with the minor success they had, and wanted to keep hanging round with his friends, watching films, and occasionally helping them make a record, and Billy Sherrill had a minor epiphany and decided he wanted to make country music rather than rock and roll. Rick Hall kept the FAME name for a new company he was starting up and Sherrill headed over to Nashville and got a job with Sam Phillips at Sun’s Nashville studio. Sherrill would later move on from Sun and produce and write for almost every major country star of the sixties and seventies – most notably, he co-wrote “Stand By Your Man” with Tammy Wynette, and produced “He Stopped Loving Her Today” for George Jones. And Stafford kept the studio and the company, which was renamed Spar. Arthur Alexander stuck with Tom Stafford, as did most of the musicians, and while he was working a day job as a bellhop, he would also regularly record demos for other writers at Stafford’s studio. By the start of 1960, 19-year-old June had married another nineteen-year-old, Ann. And it was around this point that Stafford came to him with a half-completed lyric that needed music. Alexander took Stafford’s partial lyric, and finished it. He added a standard blues riff, which he had liked in Brook Benton’s record “Kiddio”: [Excerpt: Brook Benton, “Kiddio”] The resulting song, “Sally Sue Brown”, was a mixture of gutbucket blues and rockabilly, with a soulful vocal, and it was released under the name June Alexander on Judd Records: [Excerpt: June Alexander, “Sally Sue Brown”] It’s a good record, but it didn’t have any kind of success. So Arthur started listening to the radio more, trying to see what the current hits were, so he could do something more commercial. He particularly liked the Drifters and Ben E. King, and he decided to try to write a song that fit their styles. He eventually came up with one that was inspired by real events — his wife, Ann, had an ex who had tried to win her back once he’d found out she was dating Arthur. He took the song, “You Better Move On”, to Stafford, who knew it would be a massive hit, but also knew that he couldn’t produce the record himself, so they got in touch with Rick Hall, who agreed to produce the track. There were multiple sessions, and after each one, Hall would take the tapes away, study them, and come up with improvements that they would use at the next session. Hall, like Alexander, wanted to get a sound like Ben E. King — he would later say, “It was my conception that it should have a groove similar to ‘Stand By Me’, which was a big record at the time. But I didn’t want to cop it to the point where people would recognise it was a cop. You dig? So we used the bass line and modified it just a little bit, put the acoustic guitar in front of that.”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “You Better Move On”] For a B-side, they chose a song written by Terry Thompson, “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues”, which would prove almost as popular as the A-side: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “A Shot of Rhythm and Blues”] Hall shopped the record around every label in Nashville, with little success. Eventually, in February 1961, the record was released by Dot Records, the label that Pat Boone was on. It went to number twenty-four on the pop charts, becoming the first ever hit record to be made in Alabama. Rick Hall made enough money from it that he was able to build a new, much better, studio, and Muscle Shoals was set to become one of the most important recording centres in the US. As Norbert Puttnam, who had played bass on “You Better Move On”, and who would go on to become one of the most successful session bass players and record producers in Nashville, later said “If it wasn’t for Arthur Alexander, we’d all be at Reynolds” — the local aluminium factory. But Arthur Alexander wouldn’t record much at Muscle Shoals from that point on. His contracts were bought out — allegedly, Stafford, a heavy drug user, was bought off with a case of codeine — and instead of working with Rick Hall, the perfectionist producer who would go on to produce a decade-long string of hits, he was being produced by Noel Ball, a DJ with little production experience, though one who had a lot of faith in Alexander’s talent, and who had been the one to get him signed to Dot. His first album was a collection of covers of current hits. The album is widely regarded as a failure, and Alexander’s heart wasn’t in it — his father had just died, his wife had had a miscarriage, and his marriage was falling apart. But his second single for Dot was almost as great as his first. Recorded at Owen Bradley’s studio with top Nashville session players, the A-side, “Where Have You Been?” was written by the Brill Building team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and was very much in the style of “You Better Move On”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Where Have You Been?”] While the B-side, “Soldiers of Love” (and yes, it was called “Soldiers of Love” on the original label, rather than “Soldier”), was written by Buzz Cason and Tony Moon, two members of Brenda Lee’s backing band, The Casuals: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Soldiers of Love”] The single was only a modest hit, reaching number fifty-eight, but just like his first single, both sides became firm favourites with musicians in Britain. Even though he wasn’t having a huge amount of commercial success, music lovers really appreciated his music, and bands in Britain, playing long sets, would pick up on Arthur’s songs. Almost every British guitar group had Arthur Alexander songs in their setlists, even though he was unaware of it at the time. For his third Dot single, Arthur was in trouble. He’d started drinking a lot, and taking a lot of speed, and his marriage was falling apart. Meanwhile, Noel Ball was trying to get him to record all sorts of terrible songs. He decided he’d better write one himself, and he’d make it about the deterioration of his marriage to Ann — though in the song he changed her name to Anna, because it scanned better: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Anna (Go To Him)”] Released with a cover version of Gene Autry’s country classic “I Hang My Head and Cry” as the B-side, that made the top ten on the R&B chart, but it only made number sixty-eight on the pop charts. His next single, “Go Home Girl”, another attempt at a “You Better Move On” soundalike, only made number 102. Meanwhile, a song that Alexander had written and recorded, but that Dot didn’t want to put out, went to number forty-two when it was picked up by the white singer Steve Alaimo: [Excerpt: Steve Alaimo, “Every Day I Have To Cry”] He was throwing himself into his work at this point, to escape the problems in his personal life. He’d often just go to a local nightclub and sit in with a band featuring a bass player called Billy Cox, and Cox’s old Army friend, who was just starting to get a reputation as a musician, a guitarist they all called Marbles but who would later be better known as Jimi Hendrix. He was drinking heavily, divorced, and being terribly mismanaged, as well as being ripped off by his record and publishing companies. He was living with a friend, Joe Henderson, who had had a hit a couple of years earlier with “Snap Your Fingers”: [Excerpt: Joe Henderson, “Snap Your Fingers”] Henderson and Alexander would push each other to greater extremes of drug use, enabling each other’s addiction, and one day Arthur came home to find his friend dead in the bathroom, of what was officially a heart attack but which everyone assumes was an overdose. Not only that, but Noel Ball was dying of cancer, and for all that he hadn’t been the greatest producer, Arthur cared deeply about him. He tried a fresh start with Monument Records, and he was now being produced by Fred Foster, who had produced Roy Orbison’s classic hits, and his arrangements were being done by Bill Justis, the saxophone player who had had a hit with “Raunchy” on a subsidiary of Sun a few years earlier. Some of his Monument recordings were excellent, like his first single for the label, “Baby For You”: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Baby For You”] On the back of that single, he toured the UK, and appeared on several big British TV shows, and was generally feted by all the major bands who were fans of his work, but he had no more commercial success at Monument than he had at the end of his time on Dot. And his life was getting worse and worse. He had a breakdown, brought on by his constant use of amphetamines and cannabis, and started hallucinating that people he saw were people from his past life — he stopped a taxi so he could get out and run after a man he was convinced was his dead father, and assaulted an audience member he was convinced was his ex-wife. He was arrested, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after he got out, Arthur visited his friend Otis Redding, who was in the studio in Memphis, and was cutting a song that he and Arthur had co-written several years earlier, “Johnny’s Heartbreak”: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, “Johnny’s Heartbreak”] Otis asked Arthur to join him on a tour he was going to be going on a couple of weeks later, but fog grounded Arthur’s plane so he was never able to meet up with Otis in Atlanta, and the tour proceeded without him — and so Arthur was not on the plane that Redding was on, on December 10 1967, which crashed and killed him. Arthur saw this as divine intervention, but he was seeing patterns in everything at this point, and he had several more breakdowns. He ended up getting dropped by Monument in 1970. He was hospitalised again after a bad LSD trip led to him standing naked in the middle of the road, and he spent several years drifting, unable to have a hit, though he was still making music. He kept having bad luck – for example, he recorded a song by the songwriter Dennis Linde, which was an almost guaranteed hit, and could have made for a comeback for him: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Burning Love”] But between him recording it and releasing it as a single, Elvis Presley released his version, which went to number two on the charts, and killed any chance of Arthur’s version being a success: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Burning Love”] He did, though, have a bit of a comeback in 1975, when he rerecorded his old song “Every Day I Have To Cry”, as “Every Day I Have To Cry Some”, in a version which many people think likely inspired Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart” a few years later: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Every Day I Have To Cry Some”] That made number forty-five, but unfortunately his follow-up, “Sharing the Night Together”, was another song where multiple people released versions of it at the same time, without realising, and so didn’t chart – Dr. Hook eventually had a hit with it a year later. Arthur stepped away from music. He managed to get himself more mentally well, and spent the years from 1978 through 1993 working a series of blue-collar jobs in Cleveland — construction worker, bus driver, and janitor. He rarely opened up to people about ever having been a singer. He suffered through more tragedy, too, like the murder of one of his sons, but he remained mentally stable. But then, in March 1993, he made a comeback. The producer Ben Vaughn persuaded him into the studio, and he got a contract with Elektra records. He made his first album in twenty-two years, a mixture of new songs and reworkings of his older ones. It got great reviews, and he was rediscovered by the music press as a soul pioneer. He got a showcase spot at South by Southwest, he was profiled by NPR on Fresh Air, and he was playing to excited crowds of new, young fans. He was in the process of getting his publishing rights back, and might finally start to see some money from his hits. And then, three months after that album came out, in the middle of a meeting with a publisher about the negotiations for his new contracts, he had a massive heart attack, and died the next day, aged fifty-three. His bad luck had caught up with him again.

Episode ninety-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at "You Better Move On", and the sad story of Arthur Alexander. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Mother-In-Law" by Ernie K-Doe. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ ----more---- Resources As always, I've created Mixcloud playlists with full versions of all the songs in the episode. This week it's been split into two parts because of the number of songs by Arthur Alexander. Part one. Part two. This compilation collects the best of Alexander's Dot work. Much of the information in this episode comes from Richard Younger's biography of Alexander. It's unfortunately not in print in the UK, and goes for silly money, though I believe it can be bought cheaply in the US. And a lot of the background on Muscle Shoals comes from Country Soul by Charles L. Hughes.   Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript   Before we start, a warning for those who need it. This is one of the sadder episodes we're going to be doing, and it deals with substance abuse, schizophrenia, and miscarriage. One of the things we're going to see a lot of in the next few weeks and months is the growing integration of the studios that produced much of the hit music to come out of the Southern USA in the sixties -- studios in what the writer Charles L. Hughes calls the country-soul triangle: Nashville, Memphis, and Muscle Shoals. That integration produced some of the greatest music of the era, but it's also the case that with few exceptions, narratives about that have tended to centre the white people involved at the expense of the Black people. The Black musicians tend to be regarded as people who allowed the white musicians to cast off their racism and become better people, rather than as colleagues who in many cases somewhat resented the white musicians -- there were jobs that weren't open to Black musicians in the segregated South, and now here were a bunch of white people taking some of the smaller number of jobs that *were* available to them.  This is not to say that those white musicians were, individually, racist -- many were very vocally opposed to racism -- but they were still beneficiaries of a racist system. These white musicians who loved Black music slowly, over a decade or so, took over the older Black styles of music, and made them into white music. Up to this point, when we've looked at R&B, blues, or soul recordings, all the musicians involved have been Black people, almost without exception. And for most of the fifties, rock and roll was a predominantly Black genre, before the influx of the rockabillies made it seem, briefly, like it could lead to a truly post-racial style of music. But over the 1960s, we're going to see white people slowly colonise those musics, and push Black musicians to the margins. And this episode marks a crucial turning point in the story, as we see the establishment of Muscle Shoals, Alabama, as a centre of white people making music in previously Black genres. But the start of that story comes with a Black man making music that most people at the time saw as coded as white. Today we're going to look at someone whose music is often considered the epitome of deep soul, but who worked with many of the musicians who made the Nashville Sound what it was, and who was as influenced by Gene Autry as he was by many of the more obvious singers who might influence a soul legend. Today, we're going to look at Arthur Alexander, and at "You Better Move On": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "You'd Better Move On"] Arthur Alexander's is one of the most tragic stories we'll be looking at. He was a huge influence on every musician who came up in the sixties, but he never got the recognition for it. He was largely responsible for the rise of Muscle Shoals studios, and he wrote songs that were later covered by the Beatles, and Bob Dylan, and the Rolling Stones, as well as many, many more. The musician Norbert Putnam told the story of visiting George Harrison in the seventies, and seeing his copy of Alexander's hit single "You Better Move On". He said to Harrison, "Did you know I played bass on that?" and Harrison replied, "If I phoned Paul up now, he'd come over and kiss your feet". That's how important Arthur Alexander was to the Beatles, and to the history of rock music. But he never got to reap the rewards his talent entitled him to. He spent most of his life in poverty, and is now mostly known only to fans of the subgenre known as deep soul. Part of this is because his music is difficult to categorise. While most listeners would now consider it soul music, it's hard to escape the fact that Alexander's music has an awful lot of elements of country music in it. This is something that Alexander would point out himself -- in interviews, he would talk about how he loved singing cowboys in films -- people like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry -- and about how when he was growing up the radio stations he would listen to would "play a Drifters record and maybe an Eddy Arnold record, and they didn't make no distinction. That's the way it was until much later". The first record he truly loved was Eddy Arnold's 1946 country hit "That's How Much I Love You": [Excerpt: Eddy Arnold, "That's How Much I Love You"] Alexander grew up in Alabama, but in what gets described as a relatively integrated area for the time and place -- by his own account, the part of East Florence he grew up in had only one other Black family, and all the other children he played with were white, and he wasn't even aware of segregation until he was eight or nine. Florence is itself part of a quad-city area with three other nearby towns – Muscle Shoals, Sheffield, and Tuscumbia. This area as a whole is often known as either “the Shoals”, or “Muscle Shoals”, and when people talk about music, it's almost always the latter, so from this point on, I'll be using “Muscle Shoals” to refer to all four towns. The consensus among people from the area seems to have been that while Alabama itself was one of the most horribly racist parts of the country, Muscle Shoals was much better than the rest of Alabama. Some have suggested that this comparative integration was part of the reason for the country influence in Alexander's music, but as we've seen in many previous episodes, there were a lot more Black fans of country music than popular myth would suggest, and musicians like Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, and Bo Diddley were very obviously influenced by country singers. Alexander's father was also called Arthur, and so for all his life the younger Arthur Alexander was known to family and friends as "June", for Junior. Arthur senior had been a blues guitarist in his youth, and according to his son was also an excellent singer, but he got very angry the one time June picked up his guitar and tried to play it -- he forbade him from ever playing the guitar, saying that he'd never made a nickel as a player, and didn't want that life for his son. As Arthur was an obedient kid, he did as his father said -- he never in his life learned to play any musical instrument. But that didn't stop him loving music and wanting to sing. He would listen to the radio all the time, listening to crooners like Patti Page and Nat "King" Cole, and as a teenager he got himself a job working at a cafe owned by a local gig promoter, which meant he was able to get free entry to the R&B shows the promoter put on at a local chitlin circuit venue, and get to meet the stars who played there. He would talk to people like Clyde McPhatter, and ask him how he managed to hit the high notes -- though he wasn't satisfied by McPhatter's answer that "It's just there", thinking there must be more to it than that. And he became very friendly with the Clovers, once having a baseball game with them, and spending a lot of time with their lead singer, Buddy Bailey, asking him details of how he got particular vocal effects in the song "One Mint Julep": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "One Mint Julep"] He formed a vocal group called the Heartstrings, who would perform songs like "Sixty Minute Man", and got a regular spot on a local TV show, but according to his account, after a few weeks one of the other members decided he didn't need to bother practising any more, and messed up on live TV. The group split up after that. The only time he got to perform once that group split up was when he would sit in in a band led by his friend George Brooks, who regularly gigged around Muscle Shoals. But there seemed no prospect of anything bigger happening -- there were no music publishing companies or recording studios in Alabama, and everyone from Alabama who had made an impact in music had moved away to do it -- W.C. Handy, Hank Williams, Sam Phillips, they'd all done truly great things, but they'd done them in Memphis or Nashville, not in Montgomery or Birmingham. There was just not the music industry infrastructure there to do anything. That started to change in 1956, when the first record company to set up in Muscle Shoals got its start. Tune Records was a tiny label run from a bus station, and most of its business was the same kind of stuff that Sam Phillips did before Sun became big -- making records of people's weddings and so on. But then the owner of the label, James Joiner, came up with a song that he thought might be commercial if a young singer he knew named Bobby Denton sang it. "A Fallen Star" was done as cheaply as humanly possible -- it was recorded at a radio station, cut live in one take. The engineer on the track was a DJ who was on the air at the time -- he put a record on, engineered the track while the record was playing, and made sure the musicians finished before the record he was playing did, so he could get back on the air. That record itself wasn't a hit, and was so unsuccessful that I've not been able to find a copy of it anywhere, but it inspired hit cover versions from Ferlin Husky and Jimmy C. Newman: [Excerpt: Jimmy C. Newman, “A Fallen Star”] Off the back of those hit versions, Joiner started his own publishing company to go with his record company. Suddenly there was a Muscle Shoals music scene, and everything started to change. A lot of country musicians in the area gravitated towards Joiner, and started writing songs for his publishing company. At this point, this professional music scene in the area was confined to white people -- Joiner recalled later that a young singer named Percy Sledge had auditioned for him, but that Joiner simply didn't understand his type of music -- but a circle of songwriters formed that would be important later. Jud Phillips, Sam's brother, signed Denton to his new label, Judd, and Denton started recording songs by two of these new songwriters, Rick Hall and Billy Sherrill. Denton's recordings were unsuccessful, but they started getting cover versions. Roy Orbison's first single on RCA was a Hall and Sherrill song: [Excerpt: Roy Orbison, "Sweet and Innocent"] Hall and Sherrill then started up their own publishing company, with the help of a loan from Joiner, and with a third partner, Tom Stafford. Stafford is a figure who has been almost written out of music history, and about whom I've been able to find out very little, but who seems in some ways the most intriguing person among these white musicians and entrepreneurs. Friends from the time describe him as a "reality-hacking poet", and he seems to have been a beatnik, or a proto-hippie, the only one in Muscle Shoals and maybe the only one in the state of Alabama at the time. He was the focal point of a whole group of white musicians, people like Norbert Puttnam, David Briggs, Dan Penn, and Spooner Oldham. These musicians loved Black music, and wanted to play it, thinking of it as more exciting than the pop and country that they also played. But they loved it in a rather appropriative way -- and in the same way, they had what they *thought* was an anti-racist attitude. Even though they were white, they referred to themselves collectively as a word I'm not going to use, the single most offensive slur against Black people. And so when Arthur Alexander turned up and got involved in this otherwise-white group of musicians, their attitudes varied widely. Terry Thompson, for example, who Alexander said was one of the best players ever to play guitar, as good as Nashville legends like Roy Clark and Jerry Reed, was also, according to Alexander, “the biggest racist there ever was”, and made derogatory remarks about Black people – though he said that Alexander didn't count. Others, like Dan Penn, have later claimed that they took an “I don't even see race” attitude, while still others were excited to be working with an actual Black man. Alexander would become close friends with some of them, would remain at arm's length with most, but appreciated the one thing that they all had in common – that they, like him, wanted to perform R&B *and* country *and* pop. For Hall, Sherrill, and Stafford's fledgling publishing company FAME, Alexander and one of his old bandmates from the Heartstrings, Henry Lee Bennett, wrote a song called “She Wanna Rock”, which was recorded in Nashville by the rockabilly singer Arnie Derksen, at Owen Bradley's studio with the Nashville A-Team backing him: [Excerpt: Arnie Derksen, "She Wanna Rock"] That record wasn't a success, and soon after that, the partnership behind FAME dissolved. Rick Hall was getting super-ambitious and wanted to become a millionaire by the time he was thirty, Tom Stafford was content with the minor success they had, and wanted to keep hanging round with his friends, watching films, and occasionally helping them make a record, and Billy Sherrill had a minor epiphany and decided he wanted to make country music rather than rock and roll. Rick Hall kept the FAME name for a new company he was starting up and Sherrill headed over to Nashville and got a job with Sam Phillips at Sun's Nashville studio. Sherrill would later move on from Sun and produce and write for almost every major country star of the sixties and seventies – most notably, he co-wrote "Stand By Your Man" with Tammy Wynette, and produced "He Stopped Loving Her Today" for George Jones. And Stafford kept the studio and the company, which was renamed Spar. Arthur Alexander stuck with Tom Stafford, as did most of the musicians, and while he was working a day job as a bellhop, he would also regularly record demos for other writers at Stafford's studio. By the start of 1960, 19-year-old June had married another nineteen-year-old, Ann. And it was around this point that Stafford came to him with a half-completed lyric that needed music. Alexander took Stafford's partial lyric, and finished it. He added a standard blues riff, which he had liked in Brook Benton's record “Kiddio”: [Excerpt: Brook Benton, “Kiddio”] The resulting song, “Sally Sue Brown”, was a mixture of gutbucket blues and rockabilly, with a soulful vocal, and it was released under the name June Alexander on Judd Records: [Excerpt: June Alexander, "Sally Sue Brown"] It's a good record, but it didn't have any kind of success. So Arthur started listening to the radio more, trying to see what the current hits were, so he could do something more commercial. He particularly liked the Drifters and Ben E. King, and he decided to try to write a song that fit their styles. He eventually came up with one that was inspired by real events -- his wife, Ann, had an ex who had tried to win her back once he'd found out she was dating Arthur. He took the song, "You Better Move On", to Stafford, who knew it would be a massive hit, but also knew that he couldn't produce the record himself, so they got in touch with Rick Hall, who agreed to produce the track. There were multiple sessions, and after each one, Hall would take the tapes away, study them, and come up with improvements that they would use at the next session. Hall, like Alexander, wanted to get a sound like Ben E. King -- he would later say, "It was my conception that it should have a groove similar to 'Stand By Me', which was a big record at the time. But I didn't want to cop it to the point where people would recognise it was a cop. You dig? So we used the bass line and modified it just a little bit, put the acoustic guitar in front of that.": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "You Better Move On"] For a B-side, they chose a song written by Terry Thompson, "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues", which would prove almost as popular as the A-side: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "A Shot of Rhythm and Blues"] Hall shopped the record around every label in Nashville, with little success. Eventually, in February 1961, the record was released by Dot Records, the label that Pat Boone was on. It went to number twenty-four on the pop charts, becoming the first ever hit record to be made in Alabama. Rick Hall made enough money from it that he was able to build a new, much better, studio, and Muscle Shoals was set to become one of the most important recording centres in the US. As Norbert Puttnam, who had played bass on "You Better Move On", and who would go on to become one of the most successful session bass players and record producers in Nashville, later said "If it wasn't for Arthur Alexander, we'd all be at Reynolds" -- the local aluminium factory. But Arthur Alexander wouldn't record much at Muscle Shoals from that point on. His contracts were bought out -- allegedly, Stafford, a heavy drug user, was bought off with a case of codeine -- and instead of working with Rick Hall, the perfectionist producer who would go on to produce a decade-long string of hits, he was being produced by Noel Ball, a DJ with little production experience, though one who had a lot of faith in Alexander's talent, and who had been the one to get him signed to Dot. His first album was a collection of covers of current hits. The album is widely regarded as a failure, and Alexander's heart wasn't in it -- his father had just died, his wife had had a miscarriage, and his marriage was falling apart. But his second single for Dot was almost as great as his first. Recorded at Owen Bradley's studio with top Nashville session players, the A-side, "Where Have You Been?" was written by the Brill Building team of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weill, and was very much in the style of "You Better Move On": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Where Have You Been?"] While the B-side, "Soldiers of Love" (and yes, it was called "Soldiers of Love" on the original label, rather than "Soldier"), was written by Buzz Cason and Tony Moon, two members of Brenda Lee's backing band, The Casuals: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Soldiers of Love"] The single was only a modest hit, reaching number fifty-eight, but just like his first single, both sides became firm favourites with musicians in Britain. Even though he wasn't having a huge amount of commercial success, music lovers really appreciated his music, and bands in Britain, playing long sets, would pick up on Arthur's songs. Almost every British guitar group had Arthur Alexander songs in their setlists, even though he was unaware of it at the time. For his third Dot single, Arthur was in trouble. He'd started drinking a lot, and taking a lot of speed, and his marriage was falling apart. Meanwhile, Noel Ball was trying to get him to record all sorts of terrible songs. He decided he'd better write one himself, and he'd make it about the deterioration of his marriage to Ann -- though in the song he changed her name to Anna, because it scanned better: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Anna (Go To Him)"] Released with a cover version of Gene Autry's country classic "I Hang My Head and Cry" as the B-side, that made the top ten on the R&B chart, but it only made number sixty-eight on the pop charts. His next single, "Go Home Girl", another attempt at a "You Better Move On" soundalike, only made number 102. Meanwhile, a song that Alexander had written and recorded, but that Dot didn't want to put out, went to number forty-two when it was picked up by the white singer Steve Alaimo: [Excerpt: Steve Alaimo, "Every Day I Have To Cry"] He was throwing himself into his work at this point, to escape the problems in his personal life. He'd often just go to a local nightclub and sit in with a band featuring a bass player called Billy Cox, and Cox's old Army friend, who was just starting to get a reputation as a musician, a guitarist they all called Marbles but who would later be better known as Jimi Hendrix. He was drinking heavily, divorced, and being terribly mismanaged, as well as being ripped off by his record and publishing companies. He was living with a friend, Joe Henderson, who had had a hit a couple of years earlier with "Snap Your Fingers": [Excerpt: Joe Henderson, "Snap Your Fingers"] Henderson and Alexander would push each other to greater extremes of drug use, enabling each other's addiction, and one day Arthur came home to find his friend dead in the bathroom, of what was officially a heart attack but which everyone assumes was an overdose. Not only that, but Noel Ball was dying of cancer, and for all that he hadn't been the greatest producer, Arthur cared deeply about him. He tried a fresh start with Monument Records, and he was now being produced by Fred Foster, who had produced Roy Orbison's classic hits, and his arrangements were being done by Bill Justis, the saxophone player who had had a hit with "Raunchy" on a subsidiary of Sun a few years earlier. Some of his Monument recordings were excellent, like his first single for the label, "Baby For You": [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Baby For You"] On the back of that single, he toured the UK, and appeared on several big British TV shows, and was generally feted by all the major bands who were fans of his work, but he had no more commercial success at Monument than he had at the end of his time on Dot. And his life was getting worse and worse. He had a breakdown, brought on by his constant use of amphetamines and cannabis, and started hallucinating that people he saw were people from his past life -- he stopped a taxi so he could get out and run after a man he was convinced was his dead father, and assaulted an audience member he was convinced was his ex-wife. He was arrested, diagnosed with schizophrenia, and spent several months in a psychiatric hospital. Shortly after he got out, Arthur visited his friend Otis Redding, who was in the studio in Memphis, and was cutting a song that he and Arthur had co-written several years earlier, "Johnny's Heartbreak": [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Johnny's Heartbreak"] Otis asked Arthur to join him on a tour he was going to be going on a couple of weeks later, but fog grounded Arthur's plane so he was never able to meet up with Otis in Atlanta, and the tour proceeded without him -- and so Arthur was not on the plane that Redding was on, on December 10 1967, which crashed and killed him. Arthur saw this as divine intervention, but he was seeing patterns in everything at this point, and he had several more breakdowns. He ended up getting dropped by Monument in 1970. He was hospitalised again after a bad LSD trip led to him standing naked in the middle of the road, and he spent several years drifting, unable to have a hit, though he was still making music. He kept having bad luck – for example, he recorded a song by the songwriter Dennis Linde, which was an almost guaranteed hit, and could have made for a comeback for him: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, “Burning Love”] But between him recording it and releasing it as a single, Elvis Presley released his version, which went to number two on the charts, and killed any chance of Arthur's version being a success: [Excerpt: Elvis Presley, “Burning Love”] He did, though, have a bit of a comeback in 1975, when he rerecorded his old song "Every Day I Have To Cry", as "Every Day I Have To Cry Some", in a version which many people think likely inspired Bruce Springsteen's "Hungry Heart" a few years later: [Excerpt: Arthur Alexander, "Every Day I Have To Cry Some"] That made number forty-five, but unfortunately his follow-up, “Sharing the Night Together”, was another song where multiple people released versions of it at the same time, without realising, and so didn't chart – Dr. Hook eventually had a hit with it a year later. Arthur stepped away from music. He managed to get himself more mentally well, and spent the years from 1978 through 1993 working a series of blue-collar jobs in Cleveland -- construction worker, bus driver, and janitor. He rarely opened up to people about ever having been a singer. He suffered through more tragedy, too, like the murder of one of his sons, but he remained mentally stable. But then, in March 1993, he made a comeback. The producer Ben Vaughn persuaded him into the studio, and he got a contract with Elektra records. He made his first album in twenty-two years, a mixture of new songs and reworkings of his older ones. It got great reviews, and he was rediscovered by the music press as a soul pioneer. He got a showcase spot at South by Southwest, he was profiled by NPR on Fresh Air, and he was playing to excited crowds of new, young fans. He was in the process of getting his publishing rights back, and might finally start to see some money from his hits. And then, three months after that album came out, in the middle of a meeting with a publisher about the negotiations for his new contracts, he had a massive heart attack, and died the next day, aged fifty-three. His bad luck had caught up with him again.

In this episode of “The Cross & the Jukebox,” I talk about one of the most iconic songs of country music: “He Stopped Loving Her Today” by George Jones. Join me each week as I think about some of my favorite songs. I hope you’ll subscribe and leave a review or a comment. The post The Cross & the Jukebox: George Jones’ “He Stopped Loving Her Today” appeared first on Russell Moore.

Minisode hors série sur trois artistes essentiels de la Country Music: Gram Parsons, Jerry Reed et George Jones Intro: Ooh Las Vegas par Gram Parsons Morceaux: One Hundred Years From Now et Hickery Wind par les Byrds Return of the Grievous Angel et A Song for You par Gram Parsons Alabama Wild Man, She Got the Goldmine, Amos Moses, Eastbound and Down, Guitar Man et The Claw par Jerry Reed She Thinks I Still Care, Bartender's Blues, The King Is Gone (And So Are You) et He Stopped Loving Her Today par George Jones Binouze USA fait partie du label Podcut. Retrouvez tous les podcasts du label sur www.podcut.studio. Vous pouvez aussi aider le label ur www.patreon.com/podcut

Minisode hors série sur trois artistes essentiels de la Country Music: Gram Parsons, Jerry Reed et George Jones Intro: Ooh Las Vegas par Gram Parsons Morceaux: One Hundred Years From Now et Hickory Wind par les Byrds Return of the Grievous Angel et A Song for You par Gram Parsons Alabama Wild Man, She Got the Goldmine, Amos Moses, Eastbound and Down, Guitar Man et The Claw par Jerry Reed She Thinks I Still Care, Bartender's Blues, The King Is Gone (And So Are You) et He Stopped Loving Her Today par George Jones Binouze USA fait partie du label Podcut. Retrouvez tous les podcasts du label sur www.podcut.studio. Vous pouvez aussi aider le label ur www.patreon.com/podcut

349 - Bobby Braddock It's the grand finale interview of 2019, the last one of this decade. Recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, with a man who has been called "arguably the greatest country songwriter of all time." Dolly Parton called him a "songwriter's songwriter." One of only a few people to be an inductee all three of these "halls" of fame: the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the national Songwriters Hall of Fame. My guest Bobby Braddock has been writing songs for more than 50 years and continues to this day. Some of the artists who have recorded his work would include George Jones, Tammy Wynette, Tanya Tucker, Bill Anderson, Willie Nelson, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Paycheck, John Conlee, Johnny Cash, Bobby Bare, Nancy Sinatra, George Strait, Toby Keith, Bill Currington, Joe Nichols and Blake Shelton. Some of his songs are almost as famous as their singers: "He Stopped Loving Her Today," "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," "Golden Ring," and "I Wanna Talk About Me." It is a great honor to present an interview with songwriter, record producer, and author Bobby Braddock, a man called "The King of Tears," by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a fascinating interview from one of the greatest storytellers to pick up pen and paper.

In this episode we talking about the Possum, George Jones! A Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award winner, "No Show" Jones wrote several Country Classics, including "He Stopped Loving Her Today", and "White Lightening." His youth was spend dealing with an alcoholic father and having five sisters. To escape his home life, George would busk on the streets with his guitar. After getting a gig playing guitar on a radio show, George started his journey to musical stardom.  George Jones brushed elbows with the greats of country music; Merle Hagard, Waylon Jennings, Johnny PayCheck and even the King, Elvis himself! (check out their episodes for more on Country Music Mayhem) Ben & I discuss George's arrest record, including the time he got a DUI on a lawnmower and this one time, when he flushed $2,500 down the toilet for fun! Ben details a method on dealing with gofers/groundhogs, we come up with a nickname, Bumper-Deuce and all the Scooby-Doo copycats. Learn all that and more in the Genesis of George Jones! Leave an Anonymous SpeakPipe Voice Msg: www.crimeinmusic.com Tweet Us: www.twitter.com/crimeinmusic IG: www.instagram.com/crimeinusic FaceBook: www.facebook.com/crimeinmusic

Pulled from deep in our archives, we present the long-lost final interview with two-time Grammy nominee and Nashville Songwriters Hall of Famer Curly Putman, who wrote "Green, Green Grass of Home," "He Stopped Loving Her Today," "My Elusive Dreams," "D-I-V-O-R-C-E," and many others.  EPISODE DETAILS: PART ONE  Scott and Paul chat about how the long-lost final interview with Curly Putman went missing and how they finally recovered it. Plus, they discuss the new Ken Burns documentary, Country Music. PART TWO - 9:24 mark Scott heads over to the now-departed songwriting legend's house to chat about the unusual instrument Curly began on; what Roger Miller said that encouraged him when he was a struggling shoe salesman; why Dottie West being late for a recording session opened a door for “Green, Green Grass of Home;” how Curly became known for killing off the characters in his songs; the reason he didn’t want to rent his house to Paul McCartney; why he thinks “He Stopped Loving Her Today” appeals to so many listeners; which of his songs he’d like to be remembered for in the distant future; and the secret to his sixty year marriage. ABOUT CURLY PUTMAN The late Claude “Curly” Putman, Jr. enjoyed a streak of more than 30 years of consistent country chart success. Many of his songs have become iconic country recordings, including “Green Green Grass of Home” by Porter Wagoner, “Dumb Blonde” by Dolly Parton, “My Elusive Dreams” by Tammy Wynette and David Houston, “D-I-V-O-R-C-E” by Tammy Wynette, “Blood Red and Going Down” by Tanya Tucker, and “He Stopped Loving Her Today” by George Jones, which won CMA Song of the Year for two years in a row. Transcending country music’s classic era, Curly continued to enjoy Top 10 hits with a new generation of artists that included “I Meant Every Word He Said” by Ricky Van Shelton and “Made For Lovin’ You” by Doug Stone. Curly became one of the few songwriters to have a song written in tribute to him when Paul McCartney composed “Junior’s Farm” following a six week stay at Putman’s ranch when Wings was recording in Nashville. Curly, a two-time Grammy nominee, was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and the Alabama Music Hall of Fame. Twenty-three of his songs have earned BMI performance awards, and his music has been recorded by Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Wanda Jackson, Waylon Jennings, Merle Haggard, Marty Robbins, Charley Pride, Johnny Paycheck, Ray Price, Conway Twitty, Loretta Lynn, Joe Tex, Esther Phillips, Tom Jones, Dean Martin, Keith Whitley, George Strait, Randy Travis, Alan Jackson, Trisha Yearwood, Blake Shelton, Gram Parsons, The Grateful Dead, and literally hundreds of others.

In this week's episode, we're featuring a stone-cold country tribute to The Possum from Tennessee-native James Carothers: "Still Country, Still King: A Tribute To George Jones" (2018). After leaving a good job as a technican at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and with some encouragement from his wife and two kids - the Carothers moved the homeplace to Nashville, Tennessee to allow James to pursue country music. Gigs were hard to come by in the first few months - until a chance encounter with Nancy Jones (George's fourth and final wife) at the newly opened George Jones Museum in 2015 led to a residency there. Carothers played almost two years straight there - honing his craft and making friends with like-minded Possum tragics. Amongst strong original projects - he was approached with the opportunity to record a tribute album to George Jones and jumped at the opportunity. The results are simply superb: half hits, half deeper cuts, Carothers and his team have expertly mined Jones' later material for some un-thrashed gems as well as worthy favourites. James Carothers' Jones-like howl shines on the harrowing "What Am I Doing There" and "Still Doin' Time"; the longing in "Wood & Wire" is palpable and the best cover this reviewer has ever heard of "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is not just the cherry on top: it's the jewel in the crown of a sparkling tribute album. Bloody sensational.

In this week's episode, we're featuring a stone-cold country tribute to The Possum from Tennessee-native James Carothers: "Still Country, Still King: A Tribute To George Jones" (2018). After leaving a good job as a technican at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, and with some encouragement from his wife and two kids - the Carothers moved the homeplace to Nashville, Tennessee to allow James to pursue country music. Gigs were hard to come by in the first few months - until a chance encounter with Nancy Jones (George's fourth and final wife) at the newly opened George Jones Museum in 2015 led to a residency there. Carothers played almost two years straight there - honing his craft and making friends with like-minded Possum tragics. Amongst strong original projects - he was approached with the opportunity to record a tribute album to George Jones and jumped at the opportunity. The results are simply superb: half hits, half deeper cuts, Carothers and his team have expertly mined Jones' later material for some un-thrashed gems as well as worthy favourites. James Carothers' Jones-like howl shines on the harrowing "What Am I Doing There" and "Still Doin' Time"; the longing in "Wood & Wire" is palpable and the best cover this reviewer has ever heard of "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is not just the cherry on top: it's the jewel in the crown of a sparkling tribute album. Bloody sensational.

Musicians Hall of Famer, Jimmy Capps, has a resume a mile long. Capps can be heard on classic songs like "Stand By Your Man," "The Gambler," "Smoky Mountain Rain," "He Stopped Loving Her Today," "Amarillo By Morning," "Elvira," and "Here In The Real World." As prolific as they come, at one time, Jimmy averaged 520 recording sessions a year.

Jackie and Dunlap are back for a second podcast this week!  McCain James Brown Capes the Health Care vote, Turtle squirts, the Mooch talks to the New Yorker about Bannon's cock and whether or not he can suck it, Priebus is out, Kelly is in, Trump speeches to Scouts about sex and speeches to cops about violence, drain the swamp!, North Korea fires another missile, Joint Chiefs of Staff are like uh what? about the transgender military ban, Murkowski gets threats from the Secretary of  the Interior (wakes up with the head of a buffalo in her bed), plus Collins, McConnell, Ryan, The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, The Ballad of the Blue Cyclone Parts I and II, Cool Down Willard, and a very thorough Genius-style breakdown of the lyrics of He Stopped Loving Her Today.    Sponsors: Jackies Market and I guess Famous Cabbage and the Christian Vegetables suing Jackie for dressing up like Flip Flop the Baloney for Cocktail Baloney is a sponsor maybe?   "The Magic Cowboy" courtesy Seth Timbs. Check out 20 Minutes by Quick and Dirty!  Red State Update theme "Tasty Sorghum Biscuit" by William Sherry Jr.  For more context on this incomprehensible nonsense, listen to the original episodes (listed below) or check out our Wikipedia page. Thanks, Guy Lancaster! Podcasting from a bunker underneath Jockie's Market in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Jackie Broyles and Dunlap yell about President Ultimate Yankee Donald Trump and his baby tantrums and his alt-right Nazi cabinet henchmen, about Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner, about Chuck Shumer and Mitch McConnell, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, Priebus and Putin, Russia and Reagan, liberals and conservatives, cucks and con-men, Democrats and Republicans, Never-Trumps and Bernie bros, Deplorables and RINOs, fake news, fake sponsors, local businesses, national politics, populism, pop culture, old references, current events, the white working class, Trump's America and, let's be honest, the end of the world. If you like sophisticated satire, nuanced political humor, and redneck shitkicking hillbilly country comedy Hee-Haw moonshine outhouse Blue Collar donkey cartoon face, this is the podcast for you. I mean "y'all."  

  Howcee Productions Gospel.  We Thank CMT.com  and edward morris Edward Morris is a veteran of country music journalism. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee, and is a frequent contributor to CMT.com. http://www.cmt.com/news/1775076/country-music-deaths-of-2016 Gone, too, were the writers of such emotional treasures as “Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye,” “The Closer You Get,” “Drift Away,” “From a Jack to a King,” “Daddy's Hands,” “Luckenbach, Texas,” “Looking for a Place to Fall Apart,” “Green, Green Grass of Home” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today.” Three of Elvis Presley's compadres made their final bows — his original guitar player, one of his favorite background singers and his longtime road manager. Look at their ages and works, and you'll see the passing of country's own greatest generation:

Legendary recording engineer, Lou Bradley talks about recording George Jones’ all time classic, He Stopped Loving Her Today.

Jackie and Dunlap on the tightening race between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, James Comey sayin' the FBI was looking into more Hillary emails, the loss of Curly Putnam, writer of "He Stopped Loving Her Today."  Is Dunlap more of a Steve Bannon or a Kellyanne Conway? Why is Jackie running for mayor? Who's dead in Murfreesboro now?  And are there really just two episodes left after this one? We're not sure, probably! We're not good at making plans.   Also: Twix Ghost vs. Twix Fun Size vs. Twix Egg. TWIX EGG IS BACK, IDIOTS!!! Sponsors: Nashville Lawyers' Market and Jim Beavers Formerly of Comcast Cable. Thank you kindly for watching! Subscribe to us over on iTunes and YouTube (http://youtube.com/travisandjonathan). Rates and reviews!  Podcasting from a bunker underneath Jackie's Market in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Jackie Broyles and Dunlap yell about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans, nevertrumps and Bernie bros, Deplorables and RINOs, polls and debates, fake local sponsors, real national politics, pop culture and the 2016 presidential election. If you like sophisticated satire, nuanced political humor, and redneck shitkicking hillbilly country comedy Hee-Haw moonshine outhouse Blue Collar donkey cartoon face, this is the podcast for you. I mean "y'all."

Dan and Eric talk about Frank Gifford, Tianjin explosion, Sesame Street, HOB, PBS, economic inequality, correlation, random facts, Donald Trump, Target trolls, EPA, toxic waste, Whole Foods, wolves, bears, Yellostone, Alphabet, Google, Vinmo, Fitbit Charge, Okilly Dokilly, Harbinger Down, Mission Impossible, Minority Report, Tom Cruise, The IT Crowd, George Jones, He Stopped Loving Her Today, Willie Nelson, Red Headed Stranger, Wilco, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds

Obama's goin' Back 2 Iraq! Plus Tennessee election results, Lamar Alexander, Stacey Campfield, ISIS, Death Race, Cowboys and Aliens, Leprechaun, Lonesome Dove, and My Way vs. He Stopped Loving Her Today. Sponsored by Jim Beavers of Comcast Cable and Sullivan's Auto Parts.

Hey there!  I'm Kelly Sutton.  We are so glad you’re here for another Inside Music Row!  We’ve got plenty of entertainment news for you this week, so let’s get started!  Even though Kenny Chesney is taking some time off, he’s still hard at work, now co-producing his 16th studio album.  He’s working hard collecting great songs and pushing the boundaries without betraying his true self.  You can see part of that in the new single “American Kids,” written by Rodney Clawson, Luke Laird, and Shane McAnally.  Kenny says the song ‘just grabs you and holds on, but even more importantly…it feels really good.”  Look for Kenny to hit the road again in 20-15 with tons of new material.   Randy Houser recently helped open a new Operation Homefront Village in Gaithersburg, Maryland.  He helped cut the ribbon for the facility, which helps wounded military service members and their families.  Randy also performed for the group and visited with them before a special cookout.   Thomas Rhett teamed up with his father Rhett Akins to support a charity in their hometown.  Their performance together raised over 40-thousand dollars for Great Strides Valdosta in honor of their cousin Sophie, who has been diagnosed with Cystic Fibrosis.    Sammy Kershaw is honoring his late friend and mentor George Jones with the release of a new album dedicated entirely to the “Possum.”  The project includes a total of fourteen tracks, including renditions of some of George’s biggest hits like “White Lightning” and “He Stopped Loving Her Today.”  Also included are two new tracks that were inspired by the legend, plus a special “Near You” duet with Georgette Jones.  Look for “Do You Know Me? – A Tribute to George Jones” to hit stores July 22nd.    Now it's time to go “Inside The Song.”  John Oates met his songwriting match when he was teamed up with hit writer Craig Wiseman.  John recently shared a fun story about how they wrote “Lose It In Louisiana” together, which is on his latest “Good Road To Follow” project.

The Candi and Randy show pay tribute to legendary Country Music Singer George Jones. From Candi: "My heart is filled with so much sadness that we lost a great artist today. George brought so many things to life for me in childhood. "He Stopped Loving Her Today", "She's My Rock", "Wine Colored Roses" and so many more. "George Jones was a true trubadour who brought tears to many an eye with his soulful singing. You will be missed."