Waylon Jennings

We feature Waylon Jennings. Why? Do we need a a reason. We play a track by ol Hoss every 10 songs so sit back and enjoy it.

Hank Thompson 'Humpty Dumpty Heart' singer dies of cancer.

 Honky-tonk singer Hank Thompson, who scored 29 top 10 country hits between 1948 and 1974 including "Humpty Dumpty Heart," "The Wild Side of Life" and "Hangover Tavern," died Tuesday at the age of 82.

Thompson died at his home in Keller, Texas, near Fort Worth. He had been treated recently for lung cancer.

Accompanied by his Brazos Valley Boys, voted the No. 1 Country-Western band for 14 consecutive years during the 1950s and '60s, Thompson was known for his Western swing sound which incorporated big band sounds, fiddle and pedal steel and had its roots in the early 1940s music of Spade Cooley and Bob Wills.

An electronics wizard, Thompson was known for state-of-the-art sound and lighting at his shows. He was the first act to tour with a sound and lighting system; first to receive corporate tour sponsorship; first country music show to play in Las Vegas; first to record in Hi-Fi stereo; and the first to perform on a color broadcast of a television variety show.

Born Sept. 3, 1925 in Waco, Texas, Thompson started playing at clubs in San Diego while in the Navy. He studied at Princeton University before returning home and forming the Brazos Valley Boys and recording locally. Singer Tex Ritter secured a contract with Capitol Records for Thompson in 1948 and the baritone started churning out hits immediately. He registered his last top 40 single in 1979 with "I Hear the South Callin' Me."

He was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1989 and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1997.

Thompson's last show was Oct. 8 in Waco. The day was declared "Hank Thompson Day" by Gov. Rick Perry and Waco Mayor Virginia DuPuy. Last week he announced he was retiring from perfoming.

He is survived by his wife, Ann.

There will be a celebration of Thompson's lifeNov. 14 in Fort Worth.

The Brazos Valley Boy leaves us to Wander the Plains

Country singer Thompson dead at 82

 DALLAS — Country singer Hank Thompson, who had 29 hits reach the top 10 between 1948 and 1974, has died of lung cancer just days after canceling his tour, his spokesman said Wednesday.

Thompson, 82, died late Tuesday at his home in the Fort Worth suburb of Keller, said Tracy Pitcox, who also is president of Heart of Texas Records.

Just last week, Thompson canceled the rest of his tour after being hospitalized.

"He was battling aggressive lung cancer," Pitcox said in a statement. "He remained conscious until the last couple of hours and passed away peacefully at about 10:45 p.m. on Tuesday night surrounded by his friends and family."

Fans loved Thompson's distinctive gravelly voice and his musical style, a mix of honky tonk and Western swing. He was named to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1989.

In 1952, his album "The Wild Side of Life" reached No. 1. Some of his most famous songs include "Humpty Dumpty Heart" and "A Six Pack to Go."

"The Wild Side of Life" inspired a famous "answer song" written by J.D. Miller, "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels." Recorded by Kitty Wells in 1952, it was the first No. 1 hit by a woman soloist on the country music charts and made Wells a star.

Thompson's song was about a guy who'd lost his wife when she left him "and went back to the wild side of life." The songs says, "I didn't know God made honky tonk angels."

Wells, who worked with Thompson for years, didn't write the response that nonetheless became her signature tune. In the song, she recalls how she had once been a trusting wife.

"It wasn't God who made honky tonk angels, as you said in the words of your song," she sang. "Too many times married men think they're still single, that has caused many married girl to go wrong."

Wells said Wednesday that she never took Thompson's tune personally, and she didn't record the response for personal reasons.

"It was just a song," she said from her Nashville home.

The two hits were both on the charts at the same time.

"I think mine kind of helped his record, and his helped mine," she said.

 Thompson's first recording was "Whoa, Sailor" in 1946. That year, he started a band called the Brazos Valley Boys, which went on to win Billboard Magazine's touring band of the year award 14 straight times.

The last show Thompson played was Oct. 8 in his native Waco. That day was declared "Hank Thompson Day" by Gov. Rick Perry and Waco Mayor Virginia DuPuy.

Thompson grew up a fan of movie idol Gene Autry, which fueled his love of the guitar. By the time he finished high school he was playing on a local radio show, where he was featured as "Hank the Hired Hand."

Thompson served in the Navy and was well educated. He studied electrical engineering at Southern Methodist University, the University of Texas and Princeton.

He considered an engineering career, but remained in show business and caught the attention of Tex Ritter, who helped him get a contract with Capitol Records. Thompson had a string of hits during the 1950s, including "Waiting in the Lobby of Your Heart," "Rub-A-Dub-Dub," "Yesterday's Girl," "Wake Up, Irene," "Honky Tonk Girl," "Most of All," "The Blackboard of My Heart," and "Squaws Along the Yukon."

Wells and her husband, singer Johnnie Wright, and Thompson knew each other from the Louisiana Hayride in Shreveport, La., in the late '40s and continued to work together occasionally all the way up until last year.

Wright called Thompson "one of the finest people I'd ever met."

"He'd help you if you needed help with anything. He was a super guy," Wright said.

Thompson requested no funeral, Pitcox said. A "celebration of life" open to fans and friends was being planned for Nov. 14 at Billy Bob's Texas, a Fort Worth honky tonk.

Survivors include his wife, Ann. He had no children.

Grammy Committee Says Merle Haggard's "The Bluegrass Sessions" Is Not Bluegrass

 Despite the Bluegrass community's acceptance, and Merle's extraordinary efforts at authenticity, nominating committee says it's not enough. What happened? Why is Merle Haggard's "The Bluegrass Sessions" in the Country category?
Anyone who knows the bluegrass community knows that its members like to debate definitions

Nashville, TN (Billboard Publicity Wire/PRWEB ) November 2, 2007 -- McCoury Music, the artist-owned and operated label that released legendary singer/songwriter Merle Haggard's The Bluegrass Sessions on October 2nd, expressed its shock today at a National Academy Of Recording Arts & Sciences committee's decision to exclude the acclaimed album from consideration for nomination in its "Best Bluegrass Album" Grammy category. The label, created by legendary bluegrass artist Del McCoury in 2004, earned its first bluegrass Grammy in 2005 with the Del McCoury Band's The Company We Keep.

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"Anyone who knows the bluegrass community knows that its members like to debate definitions," McCoury Music's General Manager Chris Harris said. "But this is an album that Merle and Del decided to call The Bluegrass Sessions, produced by a bluegrass musician with bluegrass musicians, recorded at a bluegrass studio, released on a bluegrass label, racked under bluegrass in record stores, aired on bluegrass radio, covered by the bluegrass press, and it's currently in it's fourth consecutive week at # 1 on Billboard's Bluegrass chart. If that's not enough, even The Washington Post wondered why 'no one had thought to pair Merle and Bluegrass together before.'"

McCoury, who holds nine International Bluegrass Music Association (IBMA) Entertainer of the Year awards, expressed his disappointment personally. "Merle did everything in his power to make this record authentic except remove that unique Haggard sound--and that's something he's brought to every genre of music he's ever visited," McCoury said. "Merle Haggard could make a polka record, and there'd be no mistaking it's Merle Haggard."

Album producer Ronnie Reno, a bluegrass veteran who earned his spurs performing with two Bluegrass Hall of Fame artists--father Don Reno's Reno & Smiley and the legendary Osborne Brothers--before spending some eight years in Haggard's band, reacted in a more down to earth fashion: "that's pure b******t."

Recorded at Ricky Skaggs' Hendersonville, TN studio, The Bluegrass Sessions features Haggard backed by an all-star--and all-bluegrass--cast of musicians that includes such IBMA award winners as fiddler Aubrey Haynie, dobro player Rob Ickes, guitarist and harmony singer Carl Jackson and Alison Krauss.

As veteran mandolin player Marty Stuart, who got his own youthful career start with Hall of Famer Lester Flatt (Flatt & Scruggs) in the 1970s, wrote following the recording sessions, "Merle Haggard has put the blues back into bluegrass. I was honored to be there alongside of him when he did it."

On its release, The Bluegrass Sessions rocketed to the top of Billboard's bluegrass album chart, racking up the legend's highest first-week sales for a new release since 2000, and Merle's first #1 on any of Billboard's charts since 1984. Bluegrass Sessions is currently enjoying it's 4th consecutive week at the top of the chart. There has been solid support from the Bluegrass media, from the monthly magazines to the increasingly popular Bluegrass Blog, the winner of this year's IBMA Media Award, in addition to features in mainstream media such as TIME Magazine and major newspapers across the country,

"When I contacted NARAS, they would not identify the committee, their qualifications, or why they don't classify this album as bluegrass. Their stance just doesn't make sense. With that said, of course, we're grateful that members can at least vote for The Bluegrass Sessions in other country categories, including Country Album of the Year," Harris said. "But by every reasonable definition, this is a bluegrass album, and we--Merle, Ronnie, Del and everyone involved in the project--think that Academy voters ought to be able to consider it for Best Bluegrass Album."

Country music lost one of its' greatest legends today when Porter Wagoner passed away at 80 years of age.

For 50 years, Porter Wagoner starred on the Grand Ole Opry, wearing otherworldly suits and singing about salt-of-the-earth concerns.

The Country Music Hall of Famer died at age 80 tonight, as dignitaries and stars gathered at the Country Music Hall of Fame to induct its three newest members. Mr. Wagoner was admitted to the hospital on Monday, Oct. 15 and had been under doctors’ care since then. Mr. Wagoner was released to hospice care on Friday, days after the announcement of a lung cancer diagnosis.
 

Known as “The Thin Man From West Plains,” Mr. Wagoner’s contributions to country music are manifold and consequential. Marty Stuart, who produced this year’s much-heralded comeback album Wagonmaster, calls him “an American master and a cornerstone of our music.”

A hit-maker for more than a quarter-century, he was a Country Music Hall of Famer and a three-time Grammy winner whose best-loved singles included “A Satisfied Mind,” “Misery Loves Company” and “Green, Green Grass of Home.”

His syndicated television show allowed him to serve as an ambassador for the genre, and it proved invaluable in spreading the fame of Wagoner’s hand-picked “girl singer,” Dolly Parton, with whom he had hit duets including “Just Someone I Used To Know” and “Making Plans.”

In the studio, he was an innovator who tweaked traditional country arrangements and found fresh sounds in a genre that often tugs against change.

He was among the pioneers of the country “concept album,” releasing song-sets such as “What Ain’t To Be Just Might Happen” and “The Cold, Hard Facts of Life” that offered unified themes. As a performer and producer, he sought the beauty of harmony and the reality of dissonance.

He was a tenacious song-scavenger, listening to outside material even during down-time at the Opry in this new millennium, hoping to find hit songs and new ideas. And in the wake of Minnie Pearl’s 1996 death, Mr. Wagoner and Jimmy Dickens became the public faces of the Grand Ole Opry.

Oh, yes, and there were the suits. Mr. Wagoner wasn’t the first to wear a rhinestone suit on the Opry — Dickens has that designation — but he was certainly a famed and ardent devotee of the power of garb.

Backstage in his dressing room, the suits were so heavy that they were hard to hoist with one hand. They must have been hot, and burdensome to wear. But under the lights, on the grand stage, they sparkled and dazzled. Opry patrons would always applaud at the first sight of Wagoner, cheering him as a vision and as a visionary as he welcomed them to the show, professed his pleasure to be there and told a joke or two.

Clothes didn’t make the man, but they accentuated him, and Mr. Wagoner’s stage outfits could be read like rhinestone novels, with glittering wagon wheels and other symbols that told stories of the songs and life of this farmer’s son from Missouri.

EARLY LIFE

Mr. Wagoner was born in the Ozark Mountains in 1927. His early childhood was marked by the Great Depression of the 1930s, when the Wagoners worked to keep their farm alive during a decade in which 18,000 farms foreclosed in the Show Me State.

His older brother, Glenn Lee, taught him to play the guitar, and music became a balm for the hard times.

Young Mr. Wagoner attended a one-room schoolhouse with no heat or water, and in the afternoon the teenager would commandeer an oak tree stump on his family’s property, pretend the stump was the Grand Ole Opry stage and pretend he was introducing Roy Acuff, the King of the Hillbillies. Then he’d leap off the stump, get back on it from the other side and pretend he WAS Acuff, singing “Wabash Cannonball.”

A neighbor once caught this pre-rhinestone act and told the boy, “You’ll still be plowing these mules when you’re 65.”

(Mr. Wagoner turned 65 in August of 1992, without a mule in sight.)

In 1942, brother Glenn Lee died. Mr. Wagoner quit school a few months later, and the farm was soon sold to pay off family debts. Mr. Wagoner worked in a service station, as a butcher and as a truck driver. He also began performing on West Plains radio station KWPM, becoming popular enough to encourage his dream of being a professional singer.

His first break came in 1951 when KWTO in Springfield, Mo., hired him for a show that later became the famous Ozark Jubilee. In 1952, he recorded for RCA Victor, and one year later Carl Smith had a No. 2 country hit with Wagoner’s “Trademark.” Two years later, Wagoner had a Top 10 hit of his own with “Company’s Comin’, and in 1955 he went to No. 1 with “A Satisfied Mind.” Less than two years later, he moved to Nashville and joined the Opry.

‘Appointment television’

In 1960, Mr. Wagoner launched The Porter Wagoner Show, a program that brought country and gospel music into millions of homes. That show became appointment viewing for plenty of people.

“It was the only time of the week I had with my daddy,” Stuart said. “We’d see Porter in black and white on television, and then I got to see him in living color, with the suit on, on the Opry.”

Mr. Wagoner’s television program featured plenty of striking musicians. Buck Trent played an electric banjo that sounded like a steel guitar. Fiddler Mack Magaha was a deft instrumentalist and performer, Speck Rhodes provided comedy, and the singer known as “Pretty Miss Norma Jean” stole hearts and shared duets.

In 1967, Norma Jean left the show, and Wagoner chose an East Tennessee native named Dolly Parton as a replacement. Audiences were at first resistant to Parton, who had a high voice and who tended to talk faster than most Southern ladies, but they warmed to her in part because of the lovely duets she recorded with Mr. Wagoner. Those recordings, coupled with the exposure of the television show, helped launch Parton to her eventual superstar-level success.

 The television program reached plenty of viewers who were previously unfamiliar with country music. Two of those viewers were Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead and Robert Hunter, who served as the Dead’s primary lyricist.

“We (the Dead) were getting off of that psychedelic run that we were on,” said Hunter, who watched the show each week with Garcia in Northern California. “We had evolved from bluegrass and old-timey bands, but what we didn’t know was country & western, or whatever it was that Dolly and Porter were doing. So a little bit of Nashville moved into the Bay Area, and it was like nothing I’d ever seen.”

Hunter eventually made his way backstage at the Opry, where he told that story to Mr. Wagoner, who smiled and said, “Well, I never did hear nothing by that Grateful Dead that I didn’t like.”

In 1972, Mr. Wagoner tried his own bit of psychedelia with the What Ain’t To Be, Just Might Happen album. That one included “Rubber Room,” a song that found him singing “Doom, doom, doom, zoom, room tomb … rubber room” amid waves of reverb.

“People thought I was crazy, man,” Mr. Wagoner said in 2000. “I mean, actually crazy. They thought I’d lost my mind.”

He hadn’t lost his mind, though. He was just trying something new, again. It was the same thing he’d done when he used those tight, trio harmonies on “A Satisfied Mind” in 1955, and when he used a spacey, tremolo effect on “Heartbreak Affair” in 1960.

“Every now and then, you’ve got to rattle the cage a little,” Mr. Wagoner told The Tennessean.

In 1974, after recording 14 Top 10 hits, winning a Grammy and three Country Music Association duo of the year awards with Mr. Wagoner, Parton split with him. Though Parton wrote the gentle “I Will Always Love You” about a breakup that was both personal and professional, the parting turned contentious. In 1978, Mr. Wagoner told The Tennessean he could never trust Parton again. Later, though, the two reunited for performances and they rekindled their friendship. This year, on a show that celebrated his 50th year on the Opry, Mr. Wagoner introduced Parton as “One of my best friends today,” and he wept onstage as Parton sand “I Will Always Love You,” looking right at him.

Mr. Wagoner did not record any country hits after 1983, and talks of a comeback album were halted after he nearly died from an aneurysm in 2006. But he slowly returned to good health, and he and Stuart set about making an album that highlighted his talents. Wagonmaster was released to rave reviews, Mr. Wagoner’s legacy was reevaluated by The New York Times, No Depression magazine and other publications, and Mr. Wagoner wound up opening for rock band The White Stripes at Madison Square Garden.

“I’m just so grateful, and feel so good about the fact that God let me live through that aneurysm,” Mr. Wagoner said earlier this year. “I guess I think he had some other things that he wanted me to do.”

Mr. Wagoner’s death was announced tonight by a publicist for the Grand Ole Opry. Mr Wagoner – who was honored on May 19 for his 50 years as an Opry member- died at 8:25 p.m. at Alive Hospice in Nashville.

“The Grand Ole Opry family is deeply saddened by the news of the passing of our dear friend, Porter Wagoner. His passion for the Opry and all of country music was truly immeasurable. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family at this difficult time,” says Pete Fisher, vice-president and general manager of The Grand Ole Opry.

Mr. Wagoner is survived by three children, Richard, Debra and Denise.

Visitation and funeral arrangements are incomplete at this time.