This Week in Country Music History: August 31–September 6 — Elvis Cuts Six Songs in Three Days, Hank Williams’ Last Nashville Session, and Fifteen Moments That Shaped the Genre

Some weeks in country music history hand you one story. This one hands you fifteen.

Between August 31 and September 6, across a span of decades, a dying Hank Williams cut two more classics in a Nashville studio he wouldn’t live to see many more times. George Jones turned a divorce into one of the saddest, most perfect records ever made. Elvis Presley spent three straight days in a Hollywood studio recording an entire album’s worth of material, including a song he’d once sung in a Tupelo talent show and lost. Waylon Jennings and Dolly Parton — on the very same day, a year apart — each walked into RCA Studio B in Nashville and recorded songs that would define them. A songwriter from Arkansas gave Ray Price his first #1. A steel guitarist from North Carolina invented the instrument half of Nashville would come to rely on. And a Grand Ole Opry star from Alabama spent part of the 1930s moonlighting as the voice of a yodeling Disney dwarf.

This week doesn’t have a single throughline. It has fifteen of them. Here’s what happened.

The Afternoon Hank Williams Turned Heartbreak Into Two More Classics

August 31, 1950. By the summer of 1950, Hank Williams was already the biggest thing in country music, and Castle Studio in downtown Nashville — a converted room inside the Tulane Hotel — had become one of the rooms where that stardom got built, one afternoon session at a time. On August 31, Williams walked in and recorded two songs that would become staples of his catalog: “Moanin’ the Blues” and “Nobody’s Lonesome for Me.”

Neither song needed much dressing up. That was the whole point of a Hank Williams session by 1950 — his band, the Drifting Cowboys, knew exactly how much space to leave around that voice, and producer Fred Rose knew exactly when a take was done. “Moanin’ the Blues” would go on to hit #1 on the Billboard country chart the following spring. It’s easy, in hindsight, to treat every Hank Williams recording date as sacred — he had less than two and a half years left to live when this session happened — but at the time it was simply Tuesday. A working songwriter, cutting more songs, because that’s what the job required.

Also on Classic Country TV: The Night Hank Williams Died: What Really Happened in the Back Seat of That Cadillac and Was Hank Williams Truly the Greatest — Or Is It the Myth?

How a Song About a Prison Sentence Became a #1 Hit

August 31, 1968. Merle Haggard had spent three years in San Quentin State Prison on a robbery conviction before he ever cut a record. When “Mama Tried” hit #1 on the Billboard country chart on August 31, 1968, it wasn’t a persona he was performing — it was closer to a confession, even if the details weren’t literally autobiographical. The opening line, “The first thing I remember knowing was a lonesome whistle blowing,” is still considered one of the best opening lines country music has ever produced.

What made “Mama Tried” land the way it did wasn’t shock value — it was restraint. Haggard doesn’t ask for sympathy in the song, and he doesn’t excuse himself. He simply states what happened: a mother who did everything right, and a son who went wrong anyway. The song would go on to win the Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1999 and be selected for the National Recording Registry in 2016, just weeks before Haggard’s death.

Also on Classic Country TV: Merle Haggard: The Hard Road, the Honest Songs, the Sound That Wouldn’t Bend

The Divorce Song So Devastating It Nearly Crossed Over to Pop Radio

August 31, 1974. George Jones had already been a country star for two decades by the time “The Grand Tour” hit #1 on Billboard’s country chart on August 31, 1974. But nothing before it — and arguably little that came after, aside from “He Stopped Loving Her Today” — matched what he did with this one. Written by Norro Wilson, Carmol Taylor, and George Richey, “The Grand Tour” takes the listener on a walk through an empty house, room by room, as the narrator points out everything his wife left behind when she walked out.

Country music historian Bill C. Malone called it “a perfect matching of lyrics and performance” — one of the great modern songs of divorce.

The record was so devastating, and so precisely performed, that it crossed over onto some adult pop stations alongside Sinatra and Dionne Warwick — a rare feat for a honky-tonk singer in 1974. It was Jones’s fourth solo #1, and to this day it’s regularly cited as one of the saddest — and best — country records ever made.

The Rock and Roller Who Became Country’s High Priest

September 1, 1933. Harold Lloyd Jenkins was born in Friars Point, Mississippi, on September 1, 1933 — long before anyone called him Conway Twitty. He spent the back half of the 1950s chasing rockabilly stardom, and had a genuine hit in 1958 with “It’s Only Make Believe.” But it was his pivot to country in the mid-1960s that made him one of the genre’s most dominant chart forces ever: 40 #1 country singles as a solo artist, plus a run of Country Music Association awards for his duets with Loretta Lynn.

Comedian Jerry Clower gave Twitty his nickname — “The High Priest of Country Music” — a nod to the near-religious devotion of his fan base, later borrowed as the title of his 33rd studio album.

Also on Classic Country TV: Conway Twitty’s Twitty City: The Country Music Landmark

The Voice That Rewired How Country Singers Sing

September 1, 1951. “Always Late (With Your Kisses)” reached #1 on Billboard’s country chart on September 1, 1951 — Lefty Frizzell’s fourth chart-topper in barely a year. Frizzell had exploded onto the scene in 1950 with the two-sided smash “If You’ve Got the Money (I’ve Got the Time)” backed with “I Love You a Thousand Ways,” and by 1951 he was, for a stretch, the first artist ever to hold four spots in the Billboard country top 10 simultaneously.

Frizzell isn’t a household name the way Hank Williams is, but almost every country singer who came after him owes him something. George Jones, Merle Haggard, Roy Orbison, and Willie Nelson have all cited him directly as an influence on the way they bend and stretch a vocal line — a phrasing style Frizzell more or less invented.

Also on Classic Country TV: Lefty Frizzell’s story behind “Long Black Veil” — search the Journal for the full piece.

Eight Weeks at #1 for a Woman Who Never Existed

September 1, 1962. “Devil Woman” began an eight-week run at #1 on the Billboard country chart on September 1, 1962 — one of the longest #1 stays of Marty Robbins’s career. It’s a different kind of story song than the one that made Robbins famous three years earlier with “El Paso”: no gunfight, no border town, just a fisherman torn between the woman waiting at home and the temptress luring him back out to sea.

By 1962, Robbins had already proven with “El Paso” that country audiences would sit through a full narrative arc if the storytelling was good enough. “Devil Woman” confirmed it wasn’t a fluke.

Also on Classic Country TV: Marty Robbins’ El Paso Trilogy: The Full Story Behind All 3 Songs and Marty Robbins: The Story Behind a Country Music Legend

Before It Was a Duet, “Good Hearted Woman” Was Waylon Alone

September 1, 1971. Most fans know “Good Hearted Woman” as the Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson duet that helped define the Outlaw movement. But the song started years earlier, as a solo Waylon record. On September 1, 1971, Jennings recorded the original solo version — along with “Sweet Dream Woman” — at RCA Studio B in Nashville, the same room where Elvis, the Everly Brothers, and dozens of other RCA artists had cut classics for over a decade.

This was Jennings still working within the Nashville studio system — before the full break toward creative control that would define the rest of the decade. The song itself, co-written with Willie Nelson, was reportedly sparked by a hand of poker and a magazine article, and it would eventually become one of the most recognizable Outlaw-era records in the genre, in its later duet form.

Also on Classic Country TV: Waylon Jennings: The Outlaw Who Changed Country Music Forever, Waylon Jennings at the Grand Ole Opry: The Outlaw in the Temple, and The Night Waylon Jennings Gave Up His Seat on That Plane

The Morning Dolly Parton Recorded Her Own Childhood

September 1, 1972. One year to the day after Waylon Jennings recorded “Good Hearted Woman,” Dolly Parton walked into that same RCA Studio B for a 10 a.m. session and recorded “My Tennessee Mountain Home.” Unlike a lot of the songs she was writing and recording in this period, this one wasn’t fiction dressed up as feeling — it was closer to a photograph. Parton was writing directly about the cabin in the Great Smoky Mountains where she grew up the fourth of twelve children, and the song became one of the clearest windows into her own biography that she ever put on record.

Also on Classic Country TV: Dolly Parton: The Story, Songs, and Legacy of a Country Icon

The Recording Session Held Together With Mattresses

September 1, 1983. Long before she was a Grammy-winning star, Trisha Yearwood held her very first recording session in a trailer in Monticello, Georgia — with mattresses propped against the walls as makeshift sound baffling. The material she cut that day included several Linda Ronstadt songs and “Leaving Louisiana in the Broad Daylight.”

No studio, no budget, no guarantee — just mattresses against the walls and a voice that would eventually fill arenas.

It’s a small, homemade beginning for an artist who’d go on to become one of the defining voices of 1990s country. Sessions like this one rarely get remembered — they’re not the platinum records or the awards-show moments — but they’re where almost every career actually starts.

Remembering the Guitar Player Who Could Also Make You Laugh

September 1, 2008. Jerry Reed died of emphysema at his home in Brentwood, Tennessee, on September 1, 2008. He’d spent nearly two decades as one of Nashville’s most respected session guitarists and songwriters — writing “Guitar Man” and “U.S. Male” for Elvis Presley, sharing a Grammy with Chet Atkins — before a second career found him almost by accident.

In 1974, a film crew shooting a low-budget comedy in Nashville cast Reed, with no acting experience, in his first movie role. Three years later, director Hal Needham asked Reed to write a theme song for a new picture about a good-natured bootlegger. Reed wrote “East Bound and Down” in a matter of hours. That picture was Smokey and the Bandit, and it turned a Nashville session picker most of America had never heard of into a movie star playing “Cledus ‘The Snowman’ Snow” opposite Burt Reynolds.

Also on Classic Country TV: Jerry Reed and Burt Reynolds: How a Georgia Guitar Picker and a Florida-Born Movie Star Became Genuine Friends

The Three Days Elvis Presley Recorded Half an Album

September 2, 1956. Between September 1 and 3, 1956, Elvis Presley spent three days at Radio Recorders in Hollywood cutting the bulk of what would become his second RCA album, simply titled “Elvis.” On the middle day, September 2, he recorded “Too Much,” “Paralyzed,” “When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Anyplace Is Paradise,” and “Old Shep.”

“Old Shep” is the one worth lingering on. Elvis had performed the song as a boy in a talent show back in Tupelo, Mississippi, and had only won fifth place. Nearly a decade later, in a professional studio with a band behind him, he reportedly nailed the master recording in a single take — though he cut four more anyway, just to be sure. “Too Much,” recorded that same day, would go on to hit #1 on both the Cashbox and Billboard sales charts the following January.

A brand-fit note for this one: Elvis sits at the edge of CCTV’s usual classic-country lane, but his catalog is tangled up with country music at nearly every turn — session players, songwriters, and studios shared with the genre’s core artists. Include or cut at your discretion.

The Harmonica Man Who Became a Hee Haw Legend

September 3, 1918. Jimmie Riddle was born in Dyersburg, Tennessee, on September 3, 1918. He got into show business at 16, passing the hat in a Memphis beer joint, and by 1943 he’d joined Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys, where he spent nearly four decades playing harmonica, piano, and accordion.

Riddle found a second act late in life on Hee Haw, where he and guitarist Jackie Phelps became “The Hambone Brothers” — Phelps slapping out rhythm on his knees while Riddle performed the old Southern vocal-percussion technique known as eefing. It’s a strange, wonderful footnote: a serious sideman for one of country music’s founding fathers, remembered by millions more people for a comedy bit he stumbled into backstage.

The Sideman Who Invented the Sound Under Nashville’s Biggest Hits

September 4, 1920. Harold “Shot” Jackson was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, on September 4, 1920. He earned the nickname “Buckshot” — later shortened to “Shot” — as a child, and grew up idolizing Roy Acuff’s Smoky Mountain Boys and their dobro player, Bashful Brother Oswald.

Jackson spent his career as a first-call steel guitar and dobro player, backing Kitty Wells on her earliest hits, playing Dobro for Johnnie & Jack’s Tennessee Mountain Boys, and eventually joining Roy Acuff’s own band. But his most lasting contribution wasn’t a performance — it was an invention. Working alongside steel guitarist Buddy Emmons, Jackson helped design an early electric pedal steel guitar and co-founded the company that built it: Sho-Bud, a name that would become foundational to the entire modern pedal steel sound in country music.

The Songwriter Behind Ray Price’s Career-Making Hit

September 5, 1923. Charles “Chuck” Seals was born in Arkansas on September 5, 1923. He’s not a household name, but one song he co-wrote is: “Crazy Arms.” Written in 1949 with pedal steel player Ralph Mooney, the song was first recorded in 1955, but it was Ray Price’s 1956 version — his first-ever #1 country hit — that made it a standard, and helped establish the driving 4/4 “shuffle beat” that would come to define an entire style of honky-tonk.

Note: sources differ slightly on Seals’s exact birth year — most give 1923, at least one gives 1922. The September 5 date is consistent across every source checked.

The Grand Ole Opry Star Who Was Also a Disney Dwarf

September 6, 1911. Zeke Clements was born near Empire, Alabama, on September 6, 1911, and by the early 1930s he was a fixture on the Grand Ole Opry, known as “The Dixie Yodeler.” In 1937, while working the Hollywood Barn Dance, Clements answered a Walt Disney Studios casting call for a cowboy singer who could both read music and yodel. The job: providing the singing voice for Bashful, one of the seven dwarfs in Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

His yodeling sequence in the “Silly Song” drew favorable notices from critics at the time — a Grand Ole Opry regular, hiding in plain sight inside an animated classic.

Clements went on to appear in more than 100 films, mostly B-grade Westerns, before returning to the Opry as a solo artist in 1939. His biggest songwriting success came in 1944 with “Smoke on the Water,” a wartime hit for Red Foley that spent 13 weeks at #1 — proof that Clements’s career had at least two entirely separate second acts, decades before that became a common country music story.

Fifteen events, seven decades, one calendar week that keeps repeating itself every year without anyone noticing. That’s the whole case for a series like this one. Nobody sets out to make history on a Tuesday afternoon in a rented studio — Hank Williams didn’t, Elvis didn’t, a nineteen-year-old Trisha Yearwood recording next to a stack of mattresses certainly didn’t. They just showed up and did the work. The history gets sorted out later, by people like us, going back through the calendar one week at a time to make sure none of it gets lost.

That’s the job at Classic Country TV — not just replaying the hits, but keeping the dates, the sessions, and the names like Shot Jackson and Chuck Seals in circulation alongside the Hank Williamses and Dolly Partons. The music doesn’t survive by accident. It survives because people keep telling the stories.

Gear for the Golden Age Fan

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Vinyl & Audio

• The Complete Hank Williams (Vinyl Box Set) — a comprehensive collection spanning his full recording career, including the Castle Studio sessions.
• Waylon Jennings, Dreaming My Dreams (Vinyl Reissue) — the album that captures Jennings mid-transition from Nashville sideman to Outlaw pioneer.

Books & Biographies

• Lovesick Blues: The Life of Hank Williams — Paul Hemphill’s biography of the man behind this week’s August 31 session.
• Waylon: An Autobiography — Waylon Jennings’s own account, co-written with Lenny Kaye, covering the RCA Studio B years and beyond.

Wall Art & Collectibles

• Grand Ole Opry Vintage Poster Reproduction — a nod to the stage Zeke Clements, Roy Acuff, and generations of Opry stars performed on.
• Elvis Presley 1956 Session Photo Print — a period-appropriate print capturing the era of the Radio Recorders sessions.

Sources

96.3 The Possum, Country Music History – August 31 — https://www.963thepossum.com/country-music-calendar/august31/
96.3 The Possum, Country Music History – September 1 — https://www.963thepossum.com/country-music-calendar/september1/
Wikipedia — The Grand Tour (song)
Wikipedia — Elvis (1956 album)
Wikipedia — Crazy Arms
Wikipedia — Zeke Clements
Wikipedia — Shot Jackson
Wikipedia — Jimmy Riddle
Wikipedia — Always Late with Your Kisses
Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum — oral history entry for Shot Jackson — https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/about/collections/oral-history/shot-jackson
Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame — inductee entry for Zeke Clements — https://nashvillesongwritersfoundation.com/Site/inductee?entry_id=1750

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