This Week in Country Music History: August 10–16 — Hank Williams’ Big Week, Elvis Falls Silent, and the Session That Bridged Two Generations

Seven days, twelve stories, and not one of them small. The week of August 10–16 stacks up like few others on the country music calendar: a #1 hit for Hank Williams, the recording session that talked bluegrass royalty into sitting down with a band of California longhairs, a comeback record cut by a woman still recovering from a car wreck, and — closing the week out — the night Elvis Presley stopped breathing at Graceland. In between: two future Bakersfield Sound legends born a day apart, a mortician who became a hitmaker, and a songwriter who wrote one of country’s most-covered lines from a lake cabin he didn’t even own. This is the week that had a little bit of everything. Let’s get into it.

August 10, 1928: Jimmy Dean Is Born in Seth Ward, Texas

Jimmy Ray Dean came into the world in Seth Ward, a small community outside Plainview, Texas, in 1928 — a beginning about as unremarkable as any other country singer’s origin story. What made Dean different wasn’t just his voice. It was how many different rooms he learned to fill with it.

Dean broke through commercially in 1961 with “Big Bad John,” a spoken-word narrative about a mountain of a coal miner who sacrifices himself to save his crew. The song crossed over from country radio to the top of the pop charts, and it made Dean a genuine crossover star at exactly the moment television was looking for country talent that could also carry a variety show.

He got that chance. The Jimmy Dean Show ran on ABC from 1963 to 1966, and it became more than just a stage for his own songs — it became a launching pad. A young puppeteer named Jim Henson got his first national television exposure on Dean’s show with a lanky piano-playing dog named Rowlf, years before Kermit the Frog and the rest of the Muppets existed. Dean was comfortable enough in his own persona to let a felt dog upstage him on a regular basis, and audiences loved him for it.

Dean’s career kept branching outward from there — a supporting role in the James Bond film Diamonds Are Forever, a recurring part on the Daniel Boone television series, and eventually a food company that put his name on breakfast sausage in nearly every American grocery store. Few country singers of his generation built a public identity so wide, or one that outlived the music itself so thoroughly. Jimmy Dean died in 2010, but you can still find his name and his voice on television, on packaging, and in the story of how a Texas honky-tonk singer became a household name for reasons that had almost nothing to do with honky-tonks.

August 11, 1951: Hank Williams Takes “Hey, Good Lookin'” to #1

By the summer of 1951, Hank Williams was the biggest thing in country music, and “Hey, Good Lookin'” proved it wasn’t close to slowing down. The song hit #1 on Billboard’s country chart on August 11, and it stayed there for weeks — a bright, confident, up-tempo tune that stood in sharp contrast to the aching ballads Williams is often remembered for.

That contrast was the whole trick of Hank Williams. He could write “Cold, Cold Heart” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” — songs that sat in real grief without blinking — and turn around and write something as playful and self-assured as “Hey, Good Lookin’,” a title borrowed loosely from a 1940s pop tune but rebuilt entirely in his own voice. The song’s success reached television a few months later, when Williams performed it on The Perry Como Show that November; the song jumped back to #1 the following week, evidence that his reach went well beyond the country audience he’d started with.

It’s worth sitting with how much was still ahead of him at this exact moment, and how little of it would be good. Williams had less than a year and a half left to live. The Opry firing was coming in 1952. So was the cabin at Lake Martin, and the song he’d write there — you’ll get to that one further down this list. But in August of 1951, none of that had happened yet. Hank Williams was simply, unambiguously, the best there was, and “Hey, Good Lookin'” is one of the clearest snapshots of him at the height of it.

August 1971: The Circle Sessions Begin at Woodland Sound Studios

On paper, it shouldn’t have worked. In August of 1971, a young California country-rock outfit called the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band — longhaired, road-worn, best known at that point for a cover of “Mr. Bojangles” — walked into Nashville’s Woodland Sound Studios and asked some of the most important names in American roots music to record with them. Bill Monroe said no outright. Everyone else, remarkably, said yes.

Mother Maybelle Carter came. So did Roy Acuff, Doc Watson, Merle Travis, Jimmy Martin, and a young fiddler named Vassar Clements who would leave the sessions with a much bigger audience than he’d walked in with. For six days, the musicians sat in a literal circle, facing one another, and recorded almost everything live to two-track tape — most songs captured in one or two takes, no overdubs, no studio trickery. The Nashville Tennessean called it one of the most important recordings in the city’s history before it was even finished being made.

What came out of those six days was Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a triple album released in November 1972 that did something almost nobody had managed before: it got young rock and country-rock listeners who’d never think to buy a Roy Acuff record to sit with three hours of bluegrass, old-time gospel, and Appalachian string band music, performed by the people who’d invented it. Mother Maybelle Carter died in 1978. Doc Watson, Roy Acuff, Earl Scruggs, and Merle Travis are all gone now too. But the record remains one of the great bridge-building achievements in American music — the week two generations of pickers looked at each other across a circle and decided the gap wasn’t as wide as everyone assumed.

August 11, 1946: John Conlee Is Born in Versailles, Kentucky

Some country singers spend their careers reaching for authenticity. John Conlee never had to reach for it, because he never left it behind. Born on a tobacco farm in Versailles, Kentucky, in 1946, Conlee grew up doing the kind of pre-dawn farm labor that shows up as a lyric in other people’s songs. For him, it was just Tuesday.

He didn’t go straight into music. Conlee trained and worked as a licensed mortician in Kentucky before taking a job as an overnight radio DJ — two professions that don’t often appear on the same résumé, let alone the résumé of a future country star. He didn’t move to Nashville to chase a recording career until 1971, and he didn’t have his first hit until 1978, at age thirty-one, well past the age when most singers are told their window has closed.

Once it opened, it stayed open a long time. Between 1978 and 2004, Conlee charted thirty-two singles on Billboard’s country chart, including “Rose Colored Glasses” and the plainly titled “Common Man” — a song that wasn’t a costume for him so much as a mission statement. He still splits his time between the road and a thirty-two acre farm outside Nashville, and by every account, the tobacco-farm kid from Versailles never really stopped being exactly who he started out as.

August 12, 1927: Porter Wagoner Is Born in West Plains, Missouri

Porter Wagoner earned the nickname “Mr. Grand Ole Opry” the honest way — by showing up for decades and never really leaving. Born in West Plains, Missouri, in 1927, Wagoner charted eighty-one singles between 1954 and 1983 and became one of the defining figures of country music’s television era, thanks to a syndicated show that, at its peak, reached an estimated 45 million viewers across more than a hundred markets a week.

The Porter Wagoner Show ran for two decades and made stars of the women who sang alongside him — first Norma Jean, then, starting in 1967, a twenty-one-year-old songwriter grinding through Nashville’s publishing circuit named Dolly Parton. Their partnership produced some of the most enduring duet recordings in country history and gave Parton a national platform she used to build one of the biggest careers the genre has ever seen. When she eventually left the show in 1974, she did it with a song written specifically for the occasion — “I Will Always Love You” — which tells you something about how much that partnership meant to both of them, even at its end.

Wagoner was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2002, five years before his death in 2007. But his real monument was always that stage presence — the flashy Nudie suits, the blond pompadour, and a genuine, unforced talent for making other performers look good next to him, which is a rarer skill in show business than most people realize.

August 12, 1929: Buck Owens Is Born in Sherman, Texas

One day after Porter Wagoner’s birthday, and roughly seventeen hundred miles away in style and spirit, another country icon was born. Alvis Edgar “Buck” Owens Jr. came into the world in Sherman, Texas, in 1929, and by the time he was a teenager he’d already decided a career in music beat a life stuck picking cotton and corn.

Owens eventually landed in Bakersfield, California, and built something Nashville’s polished, string-laden productions weren’t offering: a harder, twangier sound driven by a Fender Telecaster and a tight, road-tested band. The Bakersfield Sound became a direct rebuttal to the countrypolitan style dominating Music City in the early ’60s, and Owens rode it to roughly twenty #1 country hits, including “Act Naturally” — later famously covered by the Beatles — “Together Again,” and “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail.”

Television gave Owens a second act. From 1969 to 1986, he co-hosted Hee Haw alongside Roy Clark, introducing his music and his easy comic timing to an audience many times larger than country radio alone could reach. He returned to the top of the charts one more time in 1988 with a duet of “Streets of Bakersfield” alongside Dwight Yoakam — proof the sound he built in the ’60s still had teeth two decades later. Owens was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1996 and died in Bakersfield, the city that made him, in 2006.

August 14, 1961: Patsy Cline’s Comeback EP Hits Shelves

Two months before this record came out, Patsy Cline was lying in a Nashville hospital bed. A near-fatal car accident that June had left her with injuries serious enough that a full album release wasn’t possible. What Decca put out instead, on August 14, 1961, was a four-song EP — and it happened to contain the song that would define the rest of her career.

“I Fall to Pieces” had actually been released as a single back in January, and its road to success was anything but instant. Written by Hank Cochran and Harlan Howard, the song had already been turned down by Brenda Lee and Roy Drusky before Cline agreed to record it — and even then, she wasn’t sure it fit her. Country radio was slow to embrace it too; the single had been out for more than two months before it even cracked the country chart. But it kept climbing, crossing over to the pop charts by late May, and it would eventually reach #1 on Billboard’s country chart that same August — Cline’s first #1, arriving in the same stretch of weeks as this EP.

The timing gave the release an emotional weight beyond the music itself. Here was a singer who’d nearly died months earlier, releasing her first new music since the crash, and it happened to be the biggest hit of her career to that point. “I Fall to Pieces” would go on to be recognized as one of the defining vocal performances of Cline’s career and one of the songs that helped secure her invitation to join the Grand Ole Opry that September. Two years later, Cline would die in a plane crash — but in August of 1961, on the strength of this record, she was just getting started.

August 15, 1933: Bobby Helms Is Born in Bloomington, Indiana

Not every country singer needs a long catalog to leave a permanent mark on American radio. Bobby Helms, born in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1933, cut two songs in 1957 that never really stopped playing.

“My Special Angel” was the bigger hit at the time — a smooth, aching ballad that crossed easily between country and pop radio and became one of the defining sounds of the era’s country-pop crossover moment. But it’s the other 1957 recording that gave Helms a kind of permanence few singers ever achieve. “Jingle Bell Rock” wasn’t a massive hit on release, but it found its true audience over decades of holiday radio rotation, eventually becoming one of the most recognizable Christmas recordings in American history — the kind of song that gets a fresh generation of listeners every single December without any additional promotion at all.

Helms occupies a specific and useful place in country history: an artist who helped stake out the stylistic middle ground between rock and roll and country music at a moment when the two genres were still figuring out how much room they had to share. He never became a household name in the way some of his 1957 peers did, but turn on the radio between Thanksgiving and New Year’s almost anywhere in the country, and you’ll still hear him.

August 1952: Hank Williams Writes “Kaw-Liga” at Lake Martin

By mid-August 1952, Hank Williams needed to disappear for a while, and everyone around him knew it. He’d just been fired from the Grand Ole Opry for habitual drunkenness and missed shows, and his mother arranged for him to spend a few days at a friend’s cabin on Lake Martin in Alabama, in an area then still known by its old name: Kowaliga.

What Williams did with that quiet time was write. Sitting at the cabin, watching the water and hearing stories about the Kowaliga Indian tribe that had once lived along the lake, he began sketching out a song about a wooden cigar-store Indian who falls in love with a wooden maiden across the room and never works up the nerve to say so — a novelty song on its surface, with something sadder underneath it if you listen closely. Fred Rose, his longtime producer and co-writer, helped shape the song into its final form and changed the spelling from “Kowaliga” to “Kaw-Liga.”

Williams recorded it that September at Castle Studio in Nashville, during what turned out to be his final recording session. He died on New Year’s Day, 1953, months before “Kaw-Liga” was even released as a single. When it finally came out, backed with “Your Cheatin’ Heart,” it shot to #1 and stayed there for fourteen weeks — a posthumous hit born out of a few borrowed days at a lake cabin, during one of the lowest stretches of a life that didn’t have many stretches left.

August 15, 1941: Don Rich Is Born in Olympia, Washington

If Buck Owens was the face of the Bakersfield Sound, Don Rich was very often its engine. Born Don Ulich in Olympia, Washington, in 1941, Rich became Owens’ lead guitarist and harmony vocalist in the Buckaroos, and the tight, high-lonesome blend the two of them created on record — Rich’s voice sitting just above Owens’, his Telecaster cutting through the mix with a sting nobody else in Nashville or Bakersfield was quite matching — became as central to the Bakersfield Sound as anything Owens did on his own.

Rich started out as a fiddler before shifting his focus toward electric lead guitar, and by the time the Buckaroos were touring behind hits like “Act Naturally” and “I’ve Got a Tiger by the Tail,” his playing had become one of the identifying textures of the whole sound. He and Owens worked together for nearly two decades, through the Hee Haw years and beyond, in a partnership close enough that when Rich died suddenly in a 1974 motorcycle accident, Owens’ commercial fortunes noticeably declined in the years that followed — as if a genuinely essential piece of the sound had gone with him.

Rich isn’t a household name the way Owens is, but anyone who spends real time with the Buckaroos’ catalog hears exactly how much he mattered. The Bakersfield Sound had two architects, not one, and the quieter of the two was born on this date in 1941.

August 15, 1990: Lew DeWitt, Founding Statler Brother, Dies

The Statler Brothers built one of country music’s most beloved catalogs on close harmony and warm, nostalgic songwriting — and a lot of that foundation traces back to Lew DeWitt, a founding member of the group who died on August 15, 1990, of complications from Crohn’s disease, at his home in Waynesboro, Virginia.

DeWitt had been with the group since its earliest days performing in churches around Staunton, Virginia, back when they were still calling themselves the Kingsmen, before a hotel box of facial tissue gave four singers — only two of whom were actual brothers — their permanent name. He’s credited as the writer of “Flowers on the Wall,” the group’s breakout 1965 hit and, to this day, one of the most recognizable songs in the Statlers’ catalog — a wry, deceptively sad song about loneliness dressed up in an upbeat, almost novelty arrangement.

Health problems related to Crohn’s disease forced DeWitt to leave the touring lineup in 1982, and he was replaced by Jimmy Fortune — but his contribution to the group’s sound and songbook was never in question. The Statler Brothers were inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2008, eighteen years after DeWitt’s death, a recognition that reached back to include the writer of the song that first put the group on the map.

August 16, 1977: Elvis Presley Dies at Graceland

Elvis Presley wasn’t a country artist in the strict, formal sense — but no honest account of country music’s story leaves him out of it, and no week in country history quite compares to closing out with the week he died. On August 16, 1977, Presley was found unresponsive at Graceland, his Memphis home, and died at age forty-two.

His connection to country music runs deeper than his rock and roll reputation suggests. Presley recorded extensively in Nashville throughout his career, working with RCA’s Nashville session players — the so-called Nashville A-Team — on records that regularly crossed onto the country charts alongside his pop and rock hits. His early sound, forged out of Sun Records sessions in Memphis, drew as much from country and gospel as it did from R&B, and Music City’s studios and musicians were part of his career from beginning to end.

The news of his death traveled fast and hit hard everywhere, Nashville included. Thousands gathered at the Graceland gates in the days that followed, and President Jimmy Carter issued a statement crediting Presley with permanently changing the face of American popular culture. Whatever genre box history eventually put him in, the week of August 10–16 doesn’t feel complete without acknowledging that it’s also the week American music lost one of the handful of artists who reshaped what all of it — country included — was allowed to sound like.

Why It Still Matters

This week’s twelve stories run from a jukebox in a Texas honky-tonk to the gates of Graceland, and they’re a reminder of why Classic Country TV exists in the first place: to keep this history from being reduced to a Wikipedia infobox. These weren’t just chart positions and release dates — they were mortician-turned-DJs finding their calling late, a Telecaster-driven sound built by two men instead of one, and a songwriter who never lived to hear his last hit on the radio. Preservation means telling it right, not just telling it fast. That’s the whole job here, every single week.

The Week in Amazon Picks

Whether it’s Hank Williams’ final recordings, Patsy Cline’s comeback year, or the Bakersfield Sound Buck Owens and Don Rich built together, this week’s stories are best experienced with the actual records playing. Here’s where to start.

Vinyl & Music

Buck Owens — Bakersfield Gold: Top 10 Hits 1959–1974 (triple-LP, 46 tracks including 19 #1s)

Patsy Cline’s Greatest Hits [LP] (2016 MCA Nashville vinyl reissue)

Books

Hank Williams: The Biography by Colin Escott (paperback, the definitive Hank Williams biography)

Country Music: An Illustrated History by Dayton Duncan & Ken Burns (hardcover)

Turntable & Care

All-in-One Vintage Record Player (belt-drive turntable with built-in speakers)

Big Fudge Vinyl Record Cleaning Kit (4-in-1 cleaning kit)

As an Amazon Associate, Classic Country TV earns from qualifying purchases. Some links on this page are affiliate links — if you purchase through them, Classic Country TV may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.

Sources

• Wikipedia — Jimmy Dean
• 96.3 The Possum, “Country Music History – August 11” — Hank Williams “Hey, Good Lookin'” #1
• Rolling Stone / American Songwriter (via AOL) — Hank Williams “Hey, Good Lookin'” on The Perry Como Show
• Wikipedia — Will the Circle Be Unbroken (album)
• Best Classic Bands — “Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken” album rewind
• Country Music Hall of Fame — “Conversation: The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Unbroken Circle”
• Wikipedia — John Conlee
• Classic Country TV Journal — “John Conlee: The Mortician Turned Common Man of Country Music”
• Wikipedia — Porter Wagoner
• Britannica (Kids) — Buck Owens biography
• Wikipedia — Patsy Cline (1961 EP)
• Rolling Stone — “Flashback: Patsy Cline’s ‘I Fall to Pieces’ Hits Number One”
• uDiscoverMusic — “‘I Fall To Pieces’: The Patsy Cline Classic That Took Six Months To Hit No.1”
• 96.3 The Possum, “August 15” country music calendar — Bobby Helms, Don Rich, Lew DeWitt entries
• Alabama Historical Association historical marker (via HMDB.org) — Hank Williams Kowaliga Cabin
• Wikipedia — Kaw-Liga
• Alabama News Center — “Hint of Hank Williams on Lake Martin”
• Wikipedia — The Statler Brothers
• This Day in Music — “What Happened on August 16th in Music” (Elvis Presley death)

Frequently Asked Questions