# They gave him his orders at Monroe, Virginia
# Saying, "Steve, you're way behind time
# "This is not 38 this is old 97
# "You must put her into Spencer on time..." #
When I was growing up on Route 8, Ceausescu Road
in Philadelphia, Mississippi,
the Gulf, Mobil and Ohio ran right behind our house
and it sounded like the train was coming through my bedroom at night,
and I loved it.
# "Watch old 97 roll." #
I used to dream about getting on the train and riding,
and just going... I didn't want to go to New York or Hollywood,
I wanted to go to Nashville
and play that kind of music that touched my heart.
# He was found in the wreck with his hand on the throttle
# Scalded to death by the steam. #
From the time he was a little boy,
growing up in Mississippi in the 1960s,
music was a central part of Marty Stuart's life.
His mother had named him after her favourite country singer,
Marty Robbins,
and gave him a cowboy guitar when he was only three.
By age nine, he had mastered the instrument
and performed wherever he could.
The first record young Stuart ever owned
was by his musical hero
Johnny Cash.
After meeting country star Connie Smith at the local fairground
when he was 11, he vowed to his mama
that he would marry her someday.
At a different concert,
Bill Monroe ignited a passion for bluegrass music and the mandolin.
And he gave me his mandolin pick.
He said, "Do you want to play the mandolin, boy?"
I said, "Yes, sir, just like you."
He said, "This right here will help you out."
And I carried that pick to school with me every day
like it was kryptonite in my pocket or something.
I felt special because I had something in my pocket
that nobody else had and nobody else knew about.
Stuart was soon good enough on the mandolin
to impress a member of Lester Flatt's bluegrass band,
who suggested that some day the boy might travel with them.
The chance came in 1972, when he was 13.
He got permission from his parents to go to Nashville
and try out for Lester Flatt's band.
The only disappointment was that he had to take a bus, not the train.
It dropped him off in decaying downtown Nashville,
not far from the Ryman Auditorium, at 2am.
2am on any night around the Ryman,
back in those days, was not the place to be.
I walked around the corner of the Greyhound station
and there was the Ryman Auditorium...
..the building that I knew so much about,
and it was tired and it was weary,
the paint was cracked and some of the windows were out,
but it looked beautiful to me.
Within a week, Lester Flatt brought him along
to perform at the Grand Ole Opry.
Walking into the Grand Ole Opry with Lester Flatt
toting his guitar was liked walking
into the Vatican with the Pope.
It was a big moment.
It was like that old scene in the Wizard of Oz where the world
went from black-and-white to colour,
that's what it was like for me.
Everything I'd ever dreamed of came true when I was 13 years old.
And I played the mandolin.
I was so little, I had told the mandolin
way up in the air like I was shooting birds or something.
At the end of the song,
the crowd just kept applauding and applauding, and applauding.
I thought I had done something wrong, I looked at Lester,
I said, "What did I do?" He said, "Do it again."
And I knew I'd found a home and I knew that was where I belonged,
and I was where I wanted to be.
# Well, my mind is to marry and never depart. #
There was definitely a time that bluegrass, you know,
got marginalised.
I don't know who the alien brainchild was
that came up with the idea that,
"Hey, we need to separate bluegrass and country on radio."
By the late '60s, bluegrass and string band music
had all but disappeared from country radio stations,
where the electrified Bakersfield sound
and smoother Nashville sound still held sway.
Bluegrass music was all part of country music,
but about 1963, we started to see this phasing out.
The music was changing in a big-time way.
And if you had an acoustic band like the Stanley Brothers,
being played back-to-back with a racket by Skeeter Davis,
say The End Of The World with the voices and the strings,
I mean, it was a head-on collision.
And the programme director would come in and say,
"What in the road was that?"
"Well, that was the latest bluegrass record."
"Well, no more bluegrass. We don't want any of that."
YODELLING
But old-time music began to find new fans
among middle-class college students
caught up in the folk revival.
Groups like the New Lost City Ramblers helped to lead them back
to country music's roots.
# Now did you see that goal of mine there? #
They were actually embracing hillbilly music,
and race music, and gospel music, and Cajun music.
It was exciting. It was so old that it was new.
And once that helped them,
the next step is for people to go back and start finding records
by the people from whom the New Lost City Ramblers had borrowed.
"Let's go see if we can find a Carter Family record,"
"Let's see if we can find some Uncle Dave Macon records," and so on.
Maybelle Carter.
Maybelle Carter, of the original Carter family,
had been moonlighting as a practical nurse
in a Nashville hospital
when the New Lost City Ramblers took her with them
to play at the Newport Folk Festival.
Soon, festivals dedicated exclusively to bluegrass music
began sprouting up in places
as diverse as tiny Luray, Virginia, and metropolitan Chicago.
Combined with concerts on college campuses,
they became the principal lifeline,
keeping many string bands afloat.
So, bluegrass began to create its own world.
Bluegrass continued to be, in my opinion,
the most authentic form of country music,
the most reflective of its roots -
but, nevertheless,
it still had to come up with something different
in order to survive.
The exception was Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs,
who had eclipsed every other bluegrass act,
including Bill Monroe's.
# Come and listen to a story about a man named Jed... #
Their manager, Earl's wife Louise,
persuaded them to help with the theme song
of a new television comedy called The Beverly Hillbillies.
"We'd worked so hard to get away from that image," Earl said,
but Louise convinced them that the main characters were portrayed
more favourably than the city slickers.
The Ballad of Jed Clampett hit number one on the country charts -
unheard of at that time for a bluegrass band.
"The song wasn't our favourite," Flatt conceded,
"but after it sold 100,000 copies,
"we just learned to love it."
Y'all come back now, do you hear?
BELL RINGS
A few years later, Warren Beatty to used their recording
of Foggy Mountain Breakdown in the hit movie Bonnie and Clyde.
Let's catch them anyway.
The exposure from the film
transformed the song into the nation's best known bluegrass tune.
The funny thing about bluegrass is,
when I started playing in this mid '60s,
the first thing you heard was,
"Bluegrass is going to be big this year."
Then next year, "Well, bluegrass will be big this year."
Not much would happen.
"Oh, Bonnie and Clyde, Foggy Mountain Breakdown's on pop radio
"and it's respected.
"It's going to be big this year."
Nothing for a couple of years.
Dueling Banjos comes out.
"Bluegrass will be big this year."
The thing about bluegrass
is it's always been big!
If you look at all these careers,
they all kind of went up very slowly.
They didn't have pop success
and then disappear,
but it's just been kind of moving along
and they're doing fine. Thank you.
I think every generation comes up with their own sound.
Music starts out raw...
..and, as they go, it gets more polished, more polished,
more polished, and the next generation comes along and goes,
"We don't like that slick stuff,"
and it becomes funky and raw again.
By the 1970s,
with countrypolitan ruling the airwaves,
acoustic string band music
had virtually disappeared from country radio.
But there were still plenty of people playing it.
Bluegrass festivals were doing great.
The roots of it was great.
Everybody that mattered was still making plenty of good music,
they just weren't getting recognised as much.
Marty Stuart, still a teenager,
was now officially part of Lester Flatt's band The Nashville Grass.
On occasions, he also travelled with Bill Monroe,
the patriarch of bluegrass.
A lot of my early mandolin experiences
were just riding down the road
after some of those shows at night, and him just...
Us sitting there in the dark,
looking at the tail-lights to the bus in front of us, playing music.
And he kept his regular mandolin on here and sometimes he kept one
over here that was tuned in strange tunings,
a very ancient sound.
He called it "the ancient tone".
He was never one of those guys to say, "Listen to this tune."
You would go like...
And look off, and I was supposed to go...
And when I would get it, he would move on.
And when I'd miss it, he'd just kind of shake his head and run off,
and do something else, and it would kill me if I couldn't keep up.
Other bluegrass musicians were also coming-of-age.
Ricky Skaggs was from the mountains of eastern Kentucky.
I'd stand in the middle of the house
and I'd hear mum and dad listening to Flatt and Scruggs
or Ralph Stanley,
and I'd hear my sister listen to the Beatles over here,
and I would stand in the middle and it's like I would hear
two worlds going off and on, but it was...
You know, the harmonies that John and Paul were doing
was not different than what Ralph and Carter was doing to me.
I could hear it.
Like Marty Stuart,
Skaggs had taken up the mandolin at an early age.
And he was good at it, too.
I was six years old,
I'd only been playing the mandolin about a year
and Bill Monroe came to Martha, Kentucky,
and that night changed my life.
Some neighbours in the hood had started shouting out to Mr Monroe,
"Let little Ricky Skaggs get up here and sing one."
He was nice and he kept on doing his show
so, finally, after a couple more hee-haws from the audience,
I think he was ready to put a stop to it
so he invited little Ricky Skaggs to come up on stage.
I don't think he really knew how little Ricky Skaggs was at the time.
He took his big F5 size mandolin, like this,
and put the strap around the curl here and put it on me
when he found out I played mandolin, you know,
and we played a song called, Ruby, Are You Mad At Your Man?
Now, that is a six-year-old hit right there.
# Oh, Ruby
# Ruby
# Honey, are you mad at your man?
# Oh
# Ruby
# Ruby. #
I never knew what she was mad about.
In Norman, Oklahoma,
a young banjo and guitar player named Vince Gill
switched from playing rock and roll in high school
to join the bluegrass band Mountain Smoke.
They thought they had caught their big break
when they were asked to fill in at the last minute
as the opening act at a concert in Oklahoma City.
We went down to the Civic Centre in Oklahoma City,
and we were going to open for KISS
in our little bluegrass band,
and you couldn't script...
Spinal Tap couldn't script this.
They had their 30-foot drum risers
and stacks of amplifiers to the ceiling,
and death, and fire, and all this stuff.
We come out there with our little fiddles and our mandolins.
HE HUMS
These people flipped completely out.
They hated us so bad.
They started booing from the first note, and screaming.
And I must say, it was kind of a neat feeling,
having that many people pissed off at you and screaming at you,
that it was like a roomful of applause in a weird way.
We only lasted about three songs
and then the beer bottle started flying.
We said, "Well, we better get out of here,"
so I turned around and flipped them off and told them to kiss my ass.
The next day, there was a review in the paper that said,
"Group member Vince Gill, on his departure,
"showed the crowd which part of his anatomy
"the crowd could KISS" - in the block letters that was their logo.
Meanwhile, Lester Flatt and the Nashville Grass found themselves
playing on the same stage with the jazz pianist Chick Corea
and the funk band Kool & The Gang.
I remember putting my head down on the back of the bus going,
"They're going to laugh us off at this stage."
But we went out there in that traditional dress,
all these old guys,
and me as a youngster,
and the movie Deliverance was pretty hot at the time.
Unknowingly, Lester had always done Dueling Banjos
as a part of his show for years,
it was on the new record,
so it was just simply one of the instrumentals
that was played that night.
Well, that unlocked and we encored.
And at the end of the night,
we had encored nine times.
And the next day, Lester's manager booked 72 college shows
and rock shows off of that one 30 minute performance.
APPLAUSE
And the next thing I know,
we go from being a tired old Opry-band that's playing
mom and pops shows and bluegrass festivals,
to we were rock stars.
# They call it that good old mountain dew
# And them that refuse it are few
# I'll hush up my mug
# If you'll fill up my jug
# With that good old mountain dew
# My uncle Mort, he is sawed off and short
# He measures 'bout four foot two
# But he thinks he's a giant when you give him a pint
# Of that good old mountain dew
# They call it that old mountain dew
# And them that refuse it are few
# I'll hush up my mug
# If you'll fill up my jug
# With that good old mountain dew. #
I tell people, "Willie's not from around here."
I mean Earth.
Obviously his voice is different.
When I first moved to Texas, people said,
"That Willie Nelson sings through his nose."
Yeah, it's a hell of a nose.
# They call it that good old mountain dew
# And them that refuse it are few. #
We really didn't think that Willie could ever break through
to the mainstream because he was too different.
He was too good and too different,
and the stuff that made it mainstream was not different.
# That good old mountain dew. #
And then the mainstream found out.
And then it got really nuts.
In 1972, after ten discouraging years in Nashville,
Willie Nelson had returned home to Texas.
In Allston, he discovered an emerging music scene
that seemed, to him, much more freewheeling
than the Nashville he knew.
Much less concerned about labelling music
and more welcoming to offbeat artists like himself.
Its focal point was an old National Guard armoury
just across the Colorado River from downtown Austin.
A place called Armadillo World Headquarters
where live music ranged from BB King, Jerry Jeff Walker
and Taj Mahal,
to Frank Zappa, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Commander Cody,
and Ray Benson,
and his band Asleep At The Wheel.
We played at the Armadillo
and it was like, "This is it, it's heaven.
"We found heaven on Earth."
People our age love our music.
They had beer, there were college girls to chase,
rent was 100 a month
and pot was cheap.
We needed money but we were not motivated just by making money.
But it was more important that we had the freedom.
# Whiskey river, take my mind... #
Willie Nelson was nearly a generation older
than most of the patrons and the other musicians at the Armadillo.
From his first appearance on that stage,
they fell in love with him.
He was on a personal journey to play the music and create the music,
and become the person that he was going to become.
This was a town that allowed him to do that.
He let his hair grow, he said,
"They don't need to me to wear a suit and a tie
"and a turtle neck, or whatever."
Nelson could sense, from the strange mixture people showing up
that something new was happening.
He called his friend Waylon Jennings in Nashville.
Willie said, "Waylon, I've got preachers and pilgrims,
"and poets, poor people,
"hillbillies, college graduates -
"they're all sitting side-by-side watching me play my songs
"and sing my music.
"You need to come down here and see what's going on."
Jennings soon became a regular
at Willie's annual Fourth of July Picnics,
where long-haired college students
and redneck truck drivers partied together.
They're out there drinking beer, smoking pot,
and finding out that they really didn't hate each other.
Willie's Picnics.
The most disorganised...
..gathering of the tribes.
I don't know how to describe them except chaos.
Nobody was in charge, nobody knew what was going on,
Willie would lose money every time
but the people would show up.
I don't know, 20,000 or 30,000 people, but who paid?
It was like Woodstock, nobody paid, you know.
Lone Star beer would sponsor everything.
We didn't care.
# Take care of me. #
# And while I blow, I see her
# Blue eyes crying and rain... #
When Nelson signed a new contract with Columbia Records,
he negotiated the same terms Waylon Jennings got
and immediately went to work on his next album,
Red Headed Stranger -
a collection of haunting songs
that, together, tell a story of a man
who kills his unfaithful wife and her lover,
then rides off across the West,
grieving and seeking redemption.
# And only memories remain
# And through the ages, I'll remember... #
Nelson chose a small studio near Dallas to make the album
because he thought his previous records
had been overproduced.
If you want to know the truth, I think money was the bottom line.
There's no money to be split up if you go in
and take three guys and do an album.
You've got to have strings and voices, and horns,
and so there's hundreds of thousands of dollars in the record
before you get it out -
which also means you're never going to get a quarter out of it
because it's all tied up in the beginning.
Nelson spent only 4,000 recording Red Headed Stranger
and got the simple, unvarnished sound he was looking for.
His singular voice untouched
by any engineering tricks,
and the sparest backup instrumentation -
including his own idiosyncratic guitar playing.
# Blue eyes crying... #
Columbia Records didn't know what to make of it.
We all were in agreement that it was a poor, lousy sounding record.
They said, "We can't put this out."
I said, "Well, I agree."
He said, "Totally felt like a bad demo."
I said, "Let's do this,
"let's appease Willie by releasing the record.
"It'll die a quick death.
"That way, he'll be more receptive to what everybody wants him to do."
So, we put it out
and we were wrong as hell.
It was a big, big record
and, after that,
everybody left Willie alone - including me.
The album attracted near universal acclaim.
# The red headed stranger from Blue Rock, Montana
# Rode into town one day... #
One reviewer called it a masterpiece.
Another compared Nelson's unsentimental style to Hemingway's.
And it sold steadily,
staying on the charts for an unprecedented 120 weeks.
In Texas, Willie and his band seemed to be everywhere.
Performing at a fundraiser for a Houston radio station
after it was firebombed by the KKK,
drawing 10,000 people to a concert in his tiny hometown of Abbott,
and doing the pilot show for his adopted city's
public television station,
experimenting on the idea of an hour-long programme
devoted exclusively to one artist's live performances.
..would go on to become the longest-running music programme
in television history.
Only a few years earlier, drunk and despairing over his career,
Nelson had sprawled out in the middle of Broadway in Nashville.
Now Newsweek magazine called him, "The King of Country Music."
Rolling Stone put him on its cover.
# Don't fight it, don't spite it
# Wait till tomorrow
# Maybe he'll ride on again. #
# Lowdown leaving sun
# Done did everything that needs done. #
They wanted their music to sound, on record,
like it sounded when they stood on the stage and sung it.
That's all it was about.
Hazel Smith was the office manager at Hillbilly Central in Nashville
where Waylon Jennings and his friends
were now turning out hit after hit.
Reporters started asking her how to describe the music
Jennings, Willie Nelson and others were creating.
In my mind,
I thought everything needed a title for it to happen.
So, I always did, and still do,
have my dictionary under my desk.
One day, I reached under there and I pulled it out,
and just went through it and come to the word "outlaw".
And it was about that much information there
that meant very little
but then the last sentence said it all, and here's what it said.
"Living on the outside of the written law."
And I leaned back in my chair, and I thought...
I said, "That's it."
They are not going along with the national establishment,
they are doing their own thing
and they're doing it the way they want to.
# Where does it go?
# The good Lord only knows
# Seems like it was just the other day... #
That's why outlaw music was born.
Thank you very much.
That was what outlaw music was right there.
And if anybody tells you anything else,
say, "You're a liar, the woman that named it outlaw music
"looked at me in the face and she knew what she did, and knew why."
Meanwhile, executives at RCA
saw an opportunity
to inexpensively cash in on the outlaw mystique.
In their vaults, they had some unreleased recordings of Jennings
along with songs performed by Willie Nelson and Waylon's wife
Jessi Colter, and decided to put them together into a new album.
At Jennings' insistence,
they added some tracks by Tompall Glaser,
the owner of Hillbilly Central,
and called the compilation album Wanted! The Outlaws.
# A long time forgotten are dreams that just fell by the way
# The good life he promised ain't what she's living today
Willie!
# But she never complains of the bad times... #
The album rose to the top of the country charts,
crossed over to the top 10 on pop charts
and, after selling a million copies,
became the first certified platinum album in country music history.
# She's a good-hearted woman in love with a good-timin' man... #
Then it sold a million more.
The Jennings-Nelson duet on Good Hearted Woman,
which they had written years earlier during a poker game,
became a number one single.
My God, that was a song worth singing, wasn't it?
I mean, you ain't got no songs like that
coming out of this hillbilly town now. Good Hearted Woman,
ain't nobody going to sing nothing that makes that much sense, don't you see?
You asked me what about the music, it was truth.
And boy, if there was ever a truer song than that one
I don't know what it is.
A long time forgotten with dreams that just fell by the way,
and the good life she's living ain't what she's living today.
Ain't that great?
"Suddenly we didn't need Nashville," Jennings recalled.
"They needed us."
We thrived on it. We thought it was the best thing that happened.
"Hey, they're calling us outlaws!"
Everybody in the creative business has to have a little outlaw in them.
I think there was a lot of people out in the audience who had
a little outlaw in them too, so they were willing to forgive us
some of our misgivings as long as the music was good.
# Sometimes I wonder
# Why I spend the lonely nights... #
Willie Nelson was bigger than ever
and even more steadfast in refusing to bow to any musical orthodoxy.
He slipped some old pop standards like Stardust and Georgia On My Mind
into his live performances in Austin
and discovered an enthusiastic response.
"The kids in the crowd thought Stardust was a new song
"I had written," he explained.
"The older folks remembered the song well and loved it as much as I did."
Against his label's objections, he recorded an entire album
of similar songs. It stayed on the charts for 551 weeks.
# Beside the garden wall
# When stars are bright
# You are in my arms
# The nightingale tells his fairy tale
# A paradise where roses bloom... #
Johnny Cash's oldest child Rosanne had been 12
when he divorced her mother.
She and her little sisters spent summers with Cash
but grew up mostly in Southern California.
I loved country music when I was a little kid
but then as preteen and teen,
that was my parents' music.
I didn't care, didn't want to know,
and then the day after I graduated from high school,
my dad came to the high school graduation and he took me with him
the next day and I went on the road with him for three years.
When I left I thought, I'm just going to hang with my dad
and I'll go to college later.
This is going to be great, travel the world, stay in nice hotels
and see Dad play.
So it was that, but it very quickly became an education.
# I'm 500 miles away from home... #
We were on the bus one day talking about songs
and I was talking to Dad about wanting to be a songwriter
and he said, "Well, do you know this song?"
And I said no, and he played it for me
and he said, "Do you know this song?"
I said, "Never heard that one either."
He got really alarmed
and he sat on the bus and made this list.
He wrote across the top, "100 essential country songs."
He said, "This is your education."
Rosanne was unsure about following in her father's footsteps.
I wanted to be a songwriter
and I was just torn with how to do that
and not be completely eclipsed by my dad's shadow,
so I did a lot of things.
I lived in Europe for a while, I made my first album in Europe.
I thought, maybe I'll try to do this quietly
and no-one will notice that he's my dad.
She returned to the United States
and in 1979 married Rodney Crowell,
who became her producer.
# In this modern world we're livin' in
# The rules ain't like they've ever been
# Speakin' of spreading it thin
# That's what you do when you're flashing your soul... #
The albums they would create reflected her own life
and experiences as distinctively
as her father's life had marked his music,
including a dispute with her husband
which she turned into her first number one song.
Got in this big fight with Rodney outside a French restaurant
on Ventura Boulevard, and I started writing
what was a long poem
and I distilled it down to Seven year Ache.
And I didn't know if it was a country song.
I didn't know if I had achieved what I was trying to do.
When I first heard Rosanne's song, Seven Year Ache,
I was really happy with it because she wrote it because I was
being an idiot, and she was really writing about me
and I thought, "Oh, great, this is a great song and it's about me!"
# You act like you were just born tonight
# Face down in a memory but feeling all right
# So who does your past belong to today?
# Baby, you don't say nothing when you're feeling this way
# The girls in the bars thinking, "who is this guy?"
# But they don't think nothing when they're telling you lies... #
The album would become a gold record and be nominated for a Grammy.
# Tell them you're trying to cure a seven-year ache... #
Rosanne Cash was 25 years old.
# The boys say, "when is he gonna give us some room"
# The girls say, "God, I hope he comes back soon"... #
I have a daughter that sings and I know how hard it is for her,
so in a sense, I probably have some good knowledge of how hard it was
for Rosanne to be taken seriously.
But the cool thing was that she was nothing like her dad.
The music was nothing like her father's.
She came from a totally different place
and she was her own artist from day one.
By this time, Johnny Cash had made an addition to his musical family.
Lester Flatt had died and Marty Stuart joined Cash's band.
It's interesting, the first two records I ever owned in my life,
was a Johnny Cash record
and a Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs record,
and the only two jobs I've ever had.
was with Lester Flatt and Johnny Cash, so that worked out.
# There are those who'd like to change the way I'm living... #
I think I was sweeping the floor or something
and I had a George Jones record on
and all of a sudden I heard him.
I don't know how to explain it but it was like a veil
lifted from my ears attached to my soul and my heart, and the way
I listen to music, I heard him, truly heard him, for the first time.
The soulfulness in his voice
and it was just this incredible a-ha moment where I thought,
there's just no-one like him.
# I've done everything I can to make you happy... #
I don't think you can understand George Jones.
I don't think there's a way on God's green Earth
to understand George Jones.
I quit trying a long time ago.
In the years following his divorce from Tammy Wynette,
George Jones's life spiralled out of control.
Already prone to violent bouts of heavy drinking,
he now became addicted to cocaine.
He continued to record
and no-one disputed the singular power of his voice,
but Jones seemed intent on self-destruction.
He began missing concerts,
so many that promoters and fans alike gave him a new nickname.
It had been Possum.
Now it was No-Show Jones.
The mixture of whiskey and cocaine made him chronically sleepless
and paranoid. He lost weight, dropping to under 100 lbs.
He had repeated run-ins with the police for speeding around
in one of his Cadillacs while drunk.
Entangled in lawsuits for bad debts and cancelled shows,
he filed for bankruptcy,
lost his house and lived in his car for a while.
Tammy Wynette's life was in shambles too.
Now married to her fifth husband and plagued by health problems,
she had become hooked on prescription painkillers
and then involved in a string of bizarre incidents,
including a sensational claim
that she had been kidnapped and beaten up before being released.
Wynette hadn't had a number one hit for four years
and neither had George Jones
when Billy Sherrill brought the two of them back into the studio
in January 1980 for another album of duets, Together Again.
# We always wanted a big two story house... #
It was kind of like two wounded animals.
Not too wounded to keep doing what they wanted to do
but what they loved doing.
A single from the album,
Two Story House, which Wynette had co-written especially
for the occasion, would rise to number two on the country charts
in the spring of 1980.
But its success paled compared to a song Jones recorded by himself
less than a month later.
The epitome of a country song,
probably He Stopped Loving Her Today.
It's just a love story, it's sad, it's a wonderful melody.
It's probably one of the most well-written songs ever.
He Stopped Loving Her Today
was written by Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman.
It describes a man who waits all his life,
pining away for the woman who's left him.
Midway through the song,
it's revealed that the only reason he stopped loving her
is because he has died.
Billy Sherrill believed the song was a perfect fit for George Jones.
The only problem was Jones kept confusing the melody
with Kris Kristofferson's Help Me Make It Through The Night.
He's going, "He said I love you till I die."
I said, "That's Help Me Make It Through The Night, fool!"
Finally he said, he got mad and said,
"He said I'll love you till I die."
"Is that good enough?" I said, "That's fine."
# He said "I'll love you till I die"
# She told him "You'll forget in time"
# As the years went slowly by
# She still preyed upon his mind
# He kept her picture on his wall
# Went half-crazy now and then
# He still loved her through it all
# Hoping she'd come back again... #
With some of Nashville's best session musicians,
Sherrill created an arrangement that had a classic countrypolitan sound -
a faint weeping steel guitar, without a hint of twang,
sweet background vocals and an ensemble of strings
that built steadily towards the song's climax.
This may sound strange coming from the songwriter,
but I think that roomful of cellos and violas and violins
ascending on that record,
sounding like the man's soul going up to heaven,
I thought that was the most powerful thing on the record.
Word for word, after I played him the finished product,
so help me God, Jones said, "You've got your record,
"but listen, son, nobody will ever buy that morbid son of a bitch."
# He stopped loving her today
# They placed a wreath upon his door... #
I am convinced George Jones might be the most soulful singer
the planet has ever known.
# And soon they'll carry him away
He stopped loving her today... #
Three months after its release,
He Stopped Loving Her today reached the top of the country charts.
George Jones's first solo number one hit in six years.
It would go on to sell a million records
and win every possible award for the songwriters and the artist.
It's one of those songs that was meant to be
and it was one of those songs that George Jones was meant to record,
and when he got done with it, it had been done.
The first time I heard it I was driving out 65,
I had to pull off the road.
I couldn't see I was crying so hard.
That song just really touched me
and I honestly think it may have happened.
# He stopped loving her today. #
I asked Merle one-time who his favourite country singer was,
he said George Jones.
I asked George who his favourite country singer was,
he said Merle Haggard.
By the early 1980s, Merle Haggard, already considered
one of country music's greatest singer songwriters,
had recorded more than 40 albums
and had more than 30 number one singles.
In 1983, he began work on an album with Willie Nelson.
They had been recording for five days at Nelson's studio in Texas
but still hadn't found the right song to anchor the album.
Haggard had gone to sleep on his bus.
Meanwhile, Willie's daughter played her father a tune
he had never heard before.
It was on an Emmylou Harris album, a ballad written by Townes Van Zandt.
Willie came and knocked on my bus late one night,
about four in the morning, actually, and I'd just laid down,
and he said, "I think I've found a title for our album."
And he had a paper sack rolled out and these words were that long.
And like I said, I'd just got to bed and I said,
"Willie, I can't even see the lyrics."
I said, "You guys go ahead and put it down,
"I'll put my voice on in the morning."
"No," he said, "Get up and come in there with me.
"Let's do it all at once."
So I went in there, I was real sleepy
and we recorded that thing and I was thinking
while I was doing it, "I'll do this sober in the morning."
So I got up the next morning, went in the studio
and I said, "Can I do that vocal track over?"
And they said, "Hell, that's on the way to New York."
# Living on the road, my friend
# Was gonna keep you free and clean
The song was Pancho and Lefty.
The album would shoot to number one on the country charts,
cross over to pop and sell more than a million records.
# And that's the way it goes... #
And on his 60th birthday,
Willie Nelson would sing Pancho and Lefty again,
this time with someone else who also defied musical categories,
Bob Dylan.
Backing them up on the mandolin
was the kid from Philadelphia, Mississippi,
who had played in Lester Flatt's and Johnny Cash's band,
Marty Stuart.
Music cuts through all the boundaries
and a lot of us know that.
So we're not afraid to play anything for anybody,
because music will get through.
# There ain't nobody knows
# All the Federales say
# They could've had him any day
# They only let him go so long
# Out of kindness, I suppose. #
# Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene
# I'm begging of you please don't take my man
# I had to have this talk with you
# My happiness depends on you
# And whatever you decide to do, Jolene... #