This Week in Country Music History: October 12–18 — Charlie Rich Sets the CMA Envelope on Fire, and Hank Williams Sr. Marries the Same Woman Three Times in Two Days

On the night of October 13, 1975, the man who held country music’s biggest trophy walked to a microphone at the Grand Ole Opry House, opened the envelope for the next one, and touched a lighter to the winner’s card. Live, on network television. Charlie Rich had been named Entertainer of the Year himself the year before. Now, with a Nashville audience in black tie looking on, he set John Denver’s name on fire and then read it aloud anyway. We’ll get to why, and to the two very different explanations that have survived. But that fire is only one story in a week that turns out to be crowded with them.

October 12 through October 18 holds more than a dozen verifiable moments from the classic era, and the best of them are strangely connected. A Kentucky guitarist cut a divorce song that sat at number one for fourteen non-consecutive weeks. Hank Williams Sr. married a nineteen-year-old in a small Louisiana town and then went through it twice more in front of a sold-out New Orleans auditorium. Two years later, in the same state, a nineteen-year-old from Memphis made his debut on Shreveport’s famous Saturday-night radio show. The Grand Ole Opry went out over network television, a coal miner’s daughter slept in her car outside the Ryman before her first Opry night, and Nashville’s songwriters decided they deserved a hall of fame of their own.

Then there is Texas, where a television pilot with Willie Nelson and a college bar band with a singer named George Strait both got their start in the same stretch of autumn. And there is Dolly Parton, whose songs keep turning up in this week’s calendar, which seems like a good reason to follow them one by one. The week closes with a death, and a coincidence of dates that’s hard to believe until you check it.

One more thing about how this week is built. Seven different Country Music Association Awards nights fall inside these seven days, and rather than stack them back to back, we’ve folded them into a single section so you can see how the show changed over twenty years. We’ve done the same with the Louisiana, Opry, and Texas stories, so each place gets one chapter. Every date here is tied to a source. Where the accounts disagree, and a few do, we’ll say so instead of picking a side the record hasn’t picked.

Merle Travis Hit Number One With a Divorce Song on October 12, 1946, and Jim Reeves Cut “He’ll Have to Go” Thirteen Years Later

Start with the guitar. Merle Travis was born November 29, 1917, in Rosewood, Kentucky, and raised in Muhlenberg County, coal country, where the men who worked the mines also played guitar on the porch after a shift. Two local miners, Ike Everly and Mose Rager, are the names the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame attach to the style he learned there: thumb working the bass strings, index finger picking the melody on the treble strings, all of it rolling at once like two players instead of one. People still call it Travis picking, and they’re not wrong to give him the name. He didn’t invent it, as one reference work is careful to point out, but he made it famous.

By the summer of 1946 he was in Hollywood and recording for the young Capitol label. On July 9, at Radio Recorders, with a band that included his friend Cliffie Stone on bass, he cut a song the two of them had written together. The title borrowed a mail-order phrase, cash on delivery, and turned it into a punch line about what it costs to split up. “Divorce Me C.O.D.” came out on Capitol 290 that September, and by the issue of Billboard dated October 12, 1946, it was number one on the magazine’s Most Played Juke Box Folk Records chart. It was Travis’s first chart-topper.

It stayed a while. Over the next three and a half months it held number one for fourteen weeks in all, though not in a row, trading places at the top with Al Dexter’s “Wine, Women and Song,” which had been number one just before it and took the spot back the very next week. The tally breaks down to eleven weeks at number one in 1946 and three more in 1947, according to the week-by-week listings drawn from Billboard. The Country Music Hall of Fame’s biography places the fourteen weeks in 1947, which is a small disagreement about the calendar and not about the record. By late January 1947 it was trading the top spot with Ernest Tubb’s “Rainbow at Midnight,” and in February Travis’s own “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed” took over for a long run of its own. The jukebox crowd, apparently, could not get enough of Merle Travis.

A month after the “Divorce Me C.O.D.” session, on August 8, Travis was back at Radio Recorders cutting something very different: a song about a coal miner who owes his soul to the company store, made for a Capitol folk album called Folk Songs of the Hills. That album came out in 1947. We’ll come back to it, and to the man who made it a national obsession, at the end of this week’s story.

Travis was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in its first class in 1970, and into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1977. He died October 20, 1983, in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

Thirteen years after “Divorce Me C.O.D.,” the sound of country records had changed completely. In Nashville, on October 15, 1959, Jim Reeves went into RCA Victor’s Studio B with producer Chet Atkins to record a song written by a husband and wife, Joe and Audrey Allison. It had already been cut once by a singer named Billy Brown with little notice. Reeves’s version would do something else entirely.

A caution on this one: the October 15 session date and the list of musicians come from a widely repeated account of the session, and we have not found a session sheet that confirms either. According to that account, the players were Floyd Cramer on piano, Hank Garland on guitar, Bob Moore on bass, Buddy Harman on drums, Marvin Hughes on vibraphone, and the Anita Kerr Singers in the background. It’s the sort of lineup that explains why Nashville in the late 1950s sounded the way it did: spare, polished, and very quiet. Reeves had by then settled into a soft, close-to-the-microphone delivery that gave him the nickname Gentleman Jim, and “He’ll Have to Go” suited that voice like a coat made for it.

The song’s origin has two tellings. In one, Joe Allison could not hear his wife over a bad phone line and asked her to move her mouth closer to the receiver, and the first line of the song followed: “Put your sweet lips a little closer to the phone.” In another, quoted from Allison’s own biography, it was Audrey who couldn’t hear him, and she wrote the line down on a pad. Either way, a bad telephone connection produced one of the most intimate openings in country music.

RCA released it in the fall of 1959 as the B-side of “In a Mansion Stands My Love,” and disc jockeys flipped it. It reached number one on the Billboard country chart on the issue dated February 8, 1960, and stayed there fourteen weeks, through the issue of May 9, the same number of weeks Travis had managed thirteen years earlier. It crossed over to the pop charts and peaked at number two on the Hot 100, held out of the top spot by Percy Faith’s “Theme from A Summer Place,” and Billboard ranked it the number two song of 1960. At the time, that made it the longest-running number one in the history of the country chart, according to American Songwriter.

Reeves was 40 when he died on July 31, 1964, in a plane crash near Nashville while flying home from Arkansas in a thunderstorm. He went into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1967. What he left behind was a way of singing that made a whisper sound like the biggest thing in the room.

Hank Williams Sr. Married the Same Woman Three Times in Two Days, and Elvis Presley Made His Louisiana Hayride Debut Two Years Later

In October 1952, Hank Williams Sr. was twenty-nine years old and one of the biggest names in country music. He was also a man whose life had come apart in public. His marriage to Audrey Williams was over, and the divorce had come through in mid-1952. Sources date it variously, from May 26 and May 29 to as late as July 10, but all of them put it months before the wedding at the center of this story.

The bride was Billie Jean Jones, a nineteen-year-old from Bossier City, Louisiana, across the Red River from Shreveport. According to accounts drawn from Hank’s biographers, she was the daughter of a police chief, she had been seeing the singer Faron Young, and she was introduced to Hank through him. She had already been married once, to a man named Harrison Eshliman (the surname is spelled several different ways in print), and, according to Roger Williams’s biography as cited by Wikipedia, that divorce was not yet final on the day she married Hank.

That day was Saturday, October 18, 1952. Hank and Billie Jean were married in Minden, Louisiana, a small town east of Shreveport, by a justice of the peace. The PBS American Masters timeline describes it as a midnight ceremony. A strict midnight wedding would technically fall on October 19, but every source dates the marriage to the 18th, so we do too. What came next is the part that makes this week’s calendar entry unusual. The next day, Sunday, October 19, the couple married again, publicly, twice, at the Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans.

The New Orleans shows were public spectacle. Billie Jean wore a bridal gown, there was a wedding cake, and the audience paid to watch. New Orleans Magazine reports that vows were exchanged at each of two performances, and a local history site puts them at three in the afternoon and seven at night, though we found that timing in only one place. Wikipedia, citing the biographer Koon, says 14,000 seats were sold for each performance. The auditorium’s listed capacity is about 7,800, so treat that number as what was reported at the time, not as a head count. A program cost fifty cents.

Count them up: a ceremony in Minden, an afternoon ceremony in New Orleans, an evening one. Three weddings, one bride, two days. The legal picture was messier than any of the ceremonies. The marriage was treated as legally doubtful at first, because Billie Jean’s divorce was not final, and Hank’s mother and Audrey contested it after his death. Billie Jean signed an agreement on August 19, 1953, to accept $30,000 and to stop billing herself as Mrs. Hank Williams. Years later, the courts came around. A judge held in 1971 that her marriage was entitled to a presumption of validity because she had entered it in good faith, and on October 22, 1975, a federal judge in Atlanta ruled she was Hank’s common-law wife, with a share in his copyright renewals. All of this comes from secondary accounts of the rulings, not from the rulings themselves.

Hank Williams Sr. died on January 1, 1953, at 29, in the back seat of a car on the way to a show. Billie Jean married Johnny Horton, another Louisiana Hayride star, on September 26, 1953. Horton died in a car crash on November 5, 1960.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The last night of Hank’s life, told with the timeline and the disputed details laid out.

The Night Hank Williams Died: What Really Happened in the Back Seat of That Cadillac

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Two years later, almost to the day, the same Louisiana airwaves carried a very different arrival. On Saturday, October 16, 1954, Elvis Presley, nineteen, made his first appearance on the Louisiana Hayride, broadcast on KWKH from the Municipal Auditorium in Shreveport. Graceland, Louisiana’s 64 Parishes encyclopedia, and local TV station KTBS all date it to October 16.

The date is easy to remember because it comes exactly two weeks after his first and only Grand Ole Opry night. On October 2, 1954, Elvis stood on the Ryman stage and sang “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” The reception was polite, by Scotty Moore’s account, and the Ryman’s own history of the night notes that he never played the Opry stage again, although he visited backstage in 1957. The story that Opry manager Jim Denny told him to go back to driving a truck is one the Ryman calls disputed: Presley said Denny told him, Denny and others denied it, and Sam Phillips has denied Denny said anything of the kind. Shreveport took to him quicker. Sam Phillips arranged the Hayride booking about a week after the Opry night, and Elvis arrived that Saturday afternoon with Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass. Frank Page, the Hayride announcer, introduced him.

Accounts of how that first night went agree on shape and disagree on volume. The first set was muted, even tepid, according to Page’s recollection; Moore remembered polite applause at first and then an audience that erupted. The 64 Parishes entry says the first attempt fell flat and the second electrified the room. He sang “That’s All Right” and “Blue Moon of Kentucky.” Whatever happened in between, the Hayride signed him. On November 6, 1954, with his parents Vernon and Gladys signing as well because Elvis was a minor, he put his name to a one-year contract for 52 Saturday-night appearances.

What he was paid depends on which source you trust. Graceland reports $18 a night for Elvis and $12 each for Moore and Black. An auction house that sold the physical four-page contract quotes it at $30 a show for Elvis and $15 for each of the others, at union scale. We couldn’t read the contract itself, so we’re giving you both numbers and the caveat. By October 1955, according to Graceland, the Hayride had renewed him at $200 a show, and his last regular appearance came March 31, 1956.

Watch on Classic Country TV: A look back at the week Patsy recorded “Crazy,” Elvis debuted on the Hayride, and Johnny Cash signed his first deal.

The Hayride gave rock and roll one more line before it let go of him. At the end of Elvis’s last Hayride appearance, a special show on December 15, 1956, program director Horace Logan told the crowd the thing that became a catchphrase. That show was held at the Louisiana State Fair grounds, not the Municipal Auditorium, and Logan’s own wording is hard to pin down, since the quotes vary between sources. The line itself, that Elvis had left the building, started with the Hayride.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The full story of Elvis’s single night at the Ryman, two weeks before his Hayride debut.

The Night Elvis Played the Grand Ole Opry — And Nashville Told Him to Go Home

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Put the two Louisiana stories side by side and you’re looking at a short stretch of one state’s history: the last full season of a singer who would be gone by New Year’s Day 1953, and the opening act of a career that would change the music before the decade ended. Same state, same kind of Saturday-night crowd, two years apart.

The Grand Ole Opry Went on ABC-TV on October 15, 1955, and Five Years Later Loretta Lynn Walked Onto That Stage After Sleeping in Her Car

Radio had been the Opry’s home since the 1920s, which meant that for most of its life you had to be in the Ryman or near a radio to catch a Saturday night. On October 15, 1955, that changed a little. According to the Opry’s own history as summarized on Wikipedia, which cites Billboard’s October 8, 1955, headline “ABC-TV to Air ‘Ole Opry’ Live Once Monthly,” ABC began carrying a live, hour-long version of the show on Saturday nights, once a month. A Cleveland edition of TV Guide dated September 24, 1955, announced the plan too, saying the network would show a live hour of the Opry every fourth Saturday beginning October 15.

We checked the schedule against the calendar. Counting forward in four-week steps from October 15, 1955, you get November 12, December 10, January 7, February 4, and so on, and the episode dates in a fan-compiled episode guide fall right on that cycle. The run lasted until September 1956, and one source puts the last telecast at September 15. Sponsorship went to Ralston-Purina, according to Wikipedia, though we found no second source for the Ralston half of the name; a Patsy Cline discography calls one of the January 1956 telecasts “Purina Grand Ole Opry.”

The slot was borrowed. The Opry hour replaced an hour of ABC’s Saturday-night schedule that had belonged to Ozark Jubilee, the network’s Springfield, Missouri, country showcase, which was cut back to a half hour on the nights the Opry came on. For one Saturday a month, in other words, a program from the Ryman crowded out a program from the Ozarks, and a good part of America got a look at what the Opry looked like with cameras in the pews.

What we can’t tell you is who played that first night. We searched for the lineup and the host for October 15 and came up empty, and no source we could verify names a host for the whole series. One later episode, in January 1956, is documented with Ernest Tubb as host and guests that included Patsy Cline, Tony Bennett, Little Jimmy Dickens, Bill Carlisle, and Slim Whitman, but the Patsy Cline discography that lists it says the episode was filmed a month earlier, so we won’t claim it as a live telecast. For the debut, we’re leaving the lineup blank rather than guess.

Five years later, to the day, according to the Opry itself, a twenty-eight-year-old woman from Butcher Hollow, Kentucky, walked onto the stage of the same Ryman Auditorium. October 15, 1960, was a Saturday, and Loretta Lynn sang “I’m a Honky Tonk Girl” on the Opry for the first time. The song was her own record, on a tiny independent label called Zero Records, and by that summer it had climbed to number fourteen on the Billboard country chart. That date is what the Opry’s site, Rolling Stone, PBS, and Wikipedia use. The Country Music Hall of Fame’s pages give September 17, 1960, instead, and an Opry historian’s blog says only that October 15 is likely, adding that “a few different dates have been given over the years.” We’re going with October 15 and telling you why.

The age depends on which birth year you use. Loretta spent years claiming 1935, but official documents show she was born April 14, 1932, and by that count she was twenty-eight when she walked out. She had no band behind her. According to an Opry historian’s account, the Wilburn Brothers helped arrange the spot, with Tex Wilburn on bass and Lester Wilburn on rhythm guitar backing her, and she appeared on a segment Ernest Tubb hosted. No source we could find names who introduced her.

The part everyone remembers is the car. She and her husband, Oliver “Doolittle” Lynn, slept in their car parked in front of the Opry house the night before, which is about as plain a picture of a country music beginning as you’ll find. In a 2016 interview quoted by Whiskey Riff, she said she could barely remember the performance itself, only patting her foot. For a woman who would become one of the most decorated women in the genre, that was the whole show: a few minutes of nerves and a parking spot.

Loretta didn’t become an Opry member until September 25, 1962, when the invitation finally came. She died on October 4, 2022, at ninety, at her ranch in Hurricane Mills, Tennessee, in her sleep. And we’ll be seeing her again later this week, in a very different room.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The woman from Butcher Hollow who walked into the Opry in 1960 and spent the next sixty years refusing to be told what a country singer should sing.

Loretta Lynn: The Voice That Challenged Nashville

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Nashville Inducted Its First Songwriters Hall of Fame Class on October 12, 1970, and Hank Williams Sr. Was on the List

Songwriters in Nashville had a problem in the 1960s. They wrote the songs that built Music Row, and almost nobody outside the building knew their names. In November 1967, according to the history page of the Nashville Songwriters Association International, a songwriter named Eddie Miller sat down to lunch at Ireland’s Restaurant with two colleagues, Buddy Mize and Bill Brock, and encouraged them to start an association. At the time, the group says, about eighty songwriters were working in town. Within a month, roughly forty of them crowded into a meeting at the Old Professional’s Club on Music Row, and the organization that became NSAI was under way.

Three years later, that fledgling association took on its first big project. According to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame’s own history, the Hall of Fame began in 1970 as an enterprise of the new Nashville Songwriters Association, and a credentials committee unanimously selected a charter class of twenty-one writers. They were inducted on Monday, October 12, 1970, at the first Hall of Fame banquet and ceremony, held at the Holiday Inn-Vanderbilt in Nashville. The official history puts the crowd at about fifty guests and names radio personality Biff Collie as emcee.

Fifty people in a hotel banquet room doesn’t sound like a history-making crowd. The list of names they were honoring is another matter. The official charter class of twenty-one, in the Foundation’s order:

Gene Autry, Johnny Bond, Albert E. Brumley, A.P. Carter, Ted Daffan, Vernon Dalhart, Rex Griffin, Stuart Hamblen, Pee Wee King, Vic McAlpin, Bob Miller, Leon Payne, Jimmie Rodgers, Fred Rose, Redd Stewart, Floyd Tillman, Merle Travis, Ernest Tubb, Cindy Walker, Hank Williams Sr., and Bob Wills.

One widely shared country-music calendar gives the number as twenty. The Foundation’s history says twenty-one, and the names above add up to twenty-one, so that’s the figure we’re using.

Read that list slowly and you can see how the founders drew the map. Two men whose work belonged to the 1920s and early 1930s, Jimmie Rodgers and A.P. Carter, stood next to a cowboy singer, Gene Autry, and a gospel songwriter, Albert E. Brumley. Fred Rose, the Acuff-Rose co-founder who had worked with Hank Williams Sr., was there. So was Hank himself, who had been dead seventeen years. So were Bob Wills, the bandleader who took western swing across the country, and Cindy Walker, who wrote for him and for a good many others. And so was the Kentucky guitarist who had topped the jukebox charts on this very date twenty-four years earlier: Merle Travis.

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Also on Classic Country TV: One of the 1970 charter inductees and the Texas songwriter who wrote hits for Bob Wills and Bing Crosby.

The Woman Who Walked Into Bing Crosby’s Office With Nothing But a Song: The Cindy Walker Story

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Watch on Classic Country TV: How Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys carried western swing across America.

The Hall kept filling in over the years. The Foundation’s inductee pages list Hank Cochran in 1974, Bob McDill and Carl Perkins in 1985, and Otis Blackwell and Dolly Parton in 1986. We can confirm each of those induction years from the Foundation’s own pages, but we couldn’t find a source for the exact ceremony dates. A few calendar sites put the 1974, 1985, and 1986 ceremonies on October 13, October 13, and October 12. Those dates all fall on a Sunday, which is an odd day for a banquet, and the only place we found October 12, 1986, was a news-archive stamp on Dolly Parton’s own website, which says only that she was inducted in 1986. So we’re keeping to the years and leaving the days out.

The institution itself grew up, too. The Hall of Fame split from the association, and the Foundation says an International Songwriters Foundation was chartered in 1986, renamed the Nashville Songwriters Foundation in 1992, and renamed again as the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame Foundation in 2006. In 2013 the Hall of Fame Gallery opened in Nashville’s Music City Center.

That October evening in 1970 was an early draft of something Nashville has done ever since: decide, in a room, who gets remembered. The people who wrote the songs have always had to fight for that. The charter class suggests the founders knew it.

Seven CMA Award Nights in One Week: From Loretta Lynn’s Historic 1972 Win to the Night Charlie Rich Set a Card on Fire

The Country Music Association Awards have wandered all over the autumn calendar, and seven of their ceremonies landed inside this one week. That is a lot of trophies for seven days, and each night caught the genre at a different moment. Here they are in order, with the winners we could confirm and the disagreements we couldn’t settle.

1968: The Ryman, with Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. The ceremony was taped at the Ryman Auditorium on October 18, 1968, and NBC broadcast it on Kraft Music Hall on November 20, which is why Wikipedia and American Songwriter list November 20 as the date. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans hosted. Glen Campbell won Entertainer of the Year and Male Vocalist, Tammy Wynette took Female Vocalist, and Johnny Cash’s At Folsom Prison was Album of the Year. Jeannie C. Riley’s “Harper Valley PTA” won Single, “Honey” won Song, and Bob Wills went into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Porter Wagoner and Dolly Parton took Vocal Group, which is Dolly’s first CMA trophy on record. She’ll be back in this story.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The 1968 Single of the Year and the small-town scandal behind it.

The Story Behind “Harper Valley PTA”: The Real Woman Tom T. Hall Never Forgot

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1972: Loretta Lynn makes history. On October 16, 1972, the CMA Awards returned to the Ryman with Glen Campbell hosting on CBS. Loretta Lynn became the first woman to win Entertainer of the Year, and she also took Female Vocalist. Charley Pride won Male Vocalist, the Statler Brothers took Vocal Group, and Conway Twitty and Loretta won Vocal Duo. Merle Haggard’s Let Me Tell You About a Song was Album of the Year, Donna Fargo won Single for “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.,” and Freddie Hart’s “Easy Loving” won Song. Jimmie Davis, the singing governor of Louisiana, went into the Hall of Fame. Accounts of the night say Loretta’s husband, Doolittle, was away hunting and missed her big moment; we’re passing along the paraphrase and leaving the quotes to others.

Watch on Classic Country TV: Loretta Lynn’s road from Butcher Hollow to the biggest award in country music.

1974: The first CMA Awards at the Opry House. On October 14, 1974, the show moved into the brand-new Grand Ole Opry House, with Johnny Cash hosting on CBS. Charlie Rich won Entertainer of the Year, Ronnie Milsap took Male Vocalist, and the Statler Brothers won Vocal Group. Conway Twitty and Loretta Lynn won Vocal Duo, Cal Smith’s “Country Bumpkin” won Single, and Don Wayne, who wrote it, won Song. Rich’s Very Special Love Songs took Album. Owen Bradley and Pee Wee King were elected to the Hall of Fame.

The category that made news was Female Vocalist, which went to Olivia Newton-John, a pop singer born in England and raised in Australia. She and Rich led the nominations with four apiece. The reaction inside Nashville was loud enough to produce a new organization. The Association of Country Entertainers was formed in mid-November 1974, with two related sources giving November 12, at the home of George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Bill Anderson is named as chairman or spokesman, depending on which account you read, and Dolly Parton was a charter member. We found nothing that ties Loretta Lynn to the group, so we’re leaving her out of it. The association closed on September 25, 1981.

Watch on Classic Country TV: The 1974 Female Vocalist win that split Nashville.

1975: The envelope. Now to the night that opened this story. On October 13, 1975, the CMA Awards again filled the Opry House, with Glen Campbell hosting; Wikipedia and TVDB both list Charley Pride as co-host. Wikipedia names the network as CBS while TVDB says ABC, so we’re not naming it. John Denver won Entertainer of the Year and Song of the Year for “Back Home Again.” Waylon Jennings won Male Vocalist, Dolly Parton won Female Vocalist, the Statler Brothers won Vocal Group, and Conway and Loretta won Vocal Duo again. Freddy Fender’s “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” was Single, Ronnie Milsap’s A Legend in My Time was Album, and Minnie Pearl went into the Hall of Fame.

Charlie Rich, the reigning Entertainer of the Year, was the presenter for the top award. He opened the envelope, lit the card with a lighter, and announced the winner: John Denver. Denver was not in the building. He accepted by satellite, and two secondary sources put him in Australia at the time. Rich never won another CMA award, and some accounts say Nashville shunned him afterward.

Nobody agrees on why he did it. The version in the Country Music Hall of Fame’s own book, as relayed by Saving Country Music, treats it as a protest. His son tells a different story. In that account, Rich had a broken foot, was on pain medication, and had had a few gin and tonics. “He used bad judgment. He was human after all,” the son said. We looked for a 1975 newspaper account of the moment and couldn’t find one, so everything above comes from later retellings. Both versions agree on the lighter and the card.

1980: A new Entertainer and an old heartbreaker. On October 13, 1980, Mac Davis and Barbara Mandrell hosted. Mandrell won Entertainer of the Year, the third woman to do it after Loretta Lynn and Dolly Parton. George Jones won Male Vocalist and Single, and Emmylou Harris won Female Vocalist. The Coal Miner’s Daughter soundtrack took Album, the Statler Brothers won Vocal Group for the eighth time in nine years, and Moe Bandy and Joe Stampley won Vocal Duo. Johnny Cash, Connie B. Gay, and the Sons of the Pioneers went into the Hall of Fame.

One caution if you consult a calendar site: “He Stopped Loving Her Today” won Single for Jones, but the Song of the Year award goes to the writers, Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman. Billy Sherrill produced the record, and it came out on April 14, 1980.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The recording sessions, the doubts, and the record that rescued a career.

George Jones Called It Too Morbid to Sell and Walked Out — The Real Story Behind “He Stopped Loving Her Today”

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1981: Barbara Mandrell, twice. The following year, on October 12, 1981, with Davis and Mandrell hosting again, CBS aired the show at 9:30 p.m. Eastern. Mandrell became the first artist to win Entertainer of the Year twice, and she also took Female Vocalist. Alabama won both Vocal Group and Instrumental Group. Jones won Male Vocalist, the Oak Ridge Boys’ “Elvira” won Single, and “He Stopped Loving Her Today” won Song of the Year again. That repeat was allowed because the album it appeared on shipped within the new eligibility period, according to the notes we found. David Frizzell and Shelly West won Vocal Duo, Don Williams won Album, Terri Gibbs was the first Horizon Award winner, and Chet Atkins won Instrumentalist. Vernon Dalhart and Grant Turner went into the Hall of Fame. Gilley and Milsap closed the show with a tribute to Jerry Lee Lewis.

1987: Hank Williams Jr. takes the top prize. On October 12, 1987, the show was at the Opry House again, with Kenny Rogers hosting. Rogers died on March 20, 2020, at 81. Hank Williams Jr. won his first Entertainer of the Year trophy. Randy Travis had the biggest night of anyone, with three wins: Male Vocalist, Album for Always and Forever, and Single for “Forever and Ever, Amen.” The Song award for that record didn’t go to Travis, though. It went to the writers, Paul Overstreet and Don Schlitz. Reba McEntire won Female Vocalist for the fourth year running, the Judds won for the third year in a row, and Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White took Vocal Duo. Holly Dunn was Horizon Award winner, Johnny Gimble won Instrumentalist, Rod Brasfield went into the Hall of Fame, and Frances Preston received the Irving Waugh Award.

Some of that cast is still working. Hank Williams Jr. was on the road this summer, including a stop in Bangor, Maine, in August. Randy Travis has an album and a More Life Tour that runs through November 8, 2026. Reba took part in the September 2026 Emmys tribute to Dolly Parton. And Ricky Skaggs and Sharon White marked their 45th anniversary on August 4, 2026.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The story of the song that launched Randy Travis’s breakthrough year.

On the Other Hand: The Song Keith Whitley Recorded First, Randy Travis Made Famous, and George Jones Went Back and Claimed

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Put the seven nights in a row and you can watch the show change. In 1968 it was a Ryman event that NBC broadcast weeks later. By 1974 it had a new building, and by 1975 it had a lighter and a story people are still arguing about. By 1987 a new generation of stars was collecting the trophies.

Willie Nelson Taped the “Austin City Limits” Pilot on October 17, 1974, and a Year Later George Strait Played His First Show With the Ace in the Hole Band

Two of the most durable pieces of Texas country music have their roots in the same stretch of autumn, a year apart, and neither started with much of a crowd.

The first is a television show. On October 17, 1974, Willie Nelson walked into Studio 6A on the University of Texas campus in Austin and taped the pilot for what became Austin City Limits. The station was KLRN at the time. It is KLRU now. Willie played with his Family band, which included harmonica player Mickey Raphael, and he opened with “Whiskey River” and closed with “The Party’s Over.” The pilot has an odd footnote: the producers also taped the singer B.W. Stevenson the day before, on October 16, and that footage turned out to be unusable. Willie’s tape is the one that survived.

The show had three creators, Bill Arhos, Bruce Scafe, and Paul Bosner, and Bosner is credited with coming up with the title. PopMatters says the Armadillo World Headquarters, the Austin music hall, was an inspiration for the project. As for the air date, you’ll see March 22, 1975 floating around, and we couldn’t find a source for it, so we’re not repeating it. What we can say is that the pilot was pitched during a March 1975 pledge drive and, according to ACL’s history, 34 stations ran it. Regular taping began in September 1975 with Asleep at the Wheel, and the first season aired in 1976. Wikipedia gives January 3, 1976, as the premiere.

The numbers since then are hard to argue with. Willie has appeared on the show eighteen times. ACL inducted him in its Hall of Fame in 2014. The program moved from Studio 6A to the Moody Theater in downtown Austin on February 26, 2011, and celebrated its 50th anniversary with a special on February 15, 2025. And Willie, who turned 93 in April, performed at Farm Aid on September 26, 2026.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The full career story of the artist who starred in the Austin City Limits pilot.

Willie Nelson: The Outlaw Who Rewrote Country Music

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Watch on Classic Country TV: Billy Joe Shaver’s “Georgia on a Fast Train,” as filmed at Austin City Limits in 1985.

The second story is smaller and, in its way, just as Texan. About thirty miles southwest of Austin, in San Marcos, a songwriter named Kent Finlay ran a beer joint called Cheatham Street Warehouse, and the evening of October 13, 1975, is the date the accounts we found give for the first performance by a band that would come to be known as the Ace in the Hole Band. It was the same night, as it happens, that Charlie Rich’s lighter went to work in Nashville.

The band had grown out of a group called Stoney Ridge. The members the accounts name are Ron Cabal, Mike Daily, Terry Hale, and Tommy Foote. In July 1975, the lead singer, Jay Dominguez, left, and the band put out the word that they needed a replacement. A college agriculture student named George Strait answered the ad. His first song with them, according to the telling we found, was Ronnie Milsap’s “Daydreams About Night Things.”

A few details deserve a caution. The drummer at that first show is named differently depending on who’s telling it, with Stubblefield in some versions and Foote in others, and we couldn’t settle it. Some retellings call it a Monday night, which we also couldn’t confirm, so we left the weekday out. And Gene Elders, the fiddler who is part of the group’s later story, was not a founder.

What the band did next is on the record. Strait Country, his first album, came out on September 4, 1981, on MCA, produced by Blake Mevis, and reached No. 26. Strait went into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2006. Kent Finlay, the man who gave him the stage, died on March 2, 2015, at 77. And the Ace in the Hole story isn’t over: Strait is booked for Boots in the Park on May 16, 2027.

Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” Came Out on October 15, 1973, and Nine Years Later She Took “I Will Always Love You” Back to Number One

Dolly Parton’s name already turned up twice in this week’s story, at the CMA Awards in 1968 and 1975. Her own calendar has three more entries inside the same seven days, and they trace most of her career.

“Jolene,” October 15, 1973. Dolly recorded “Jolene” on May 22, 1973, at RCA Studio B in Nashville, with Bob Ferguson producing. RCA released the single on October 15, 1973. We rate that date as medium-high confidence: the song’s Wikipedia page puts the release in January 1974 instead, so if you’re citing it, you should know the sources differ. The album Jolene followed on February 4, 1974. The single went to number one on the country chart in early February 1974. It also crossed over to the Billboard Hot 100, though only to about number 60, by the figures we saw. Songfacts reports that the song re-entered a chart at number 16 after her death, but the entry doesn’t say which chart, so treat that one as a loose end.

The record is as plain as a song can be: a woman asks another woman not to take her man, over a guitar figure that circles back every few bars. The full story of who Jolene was lives in a separate article.

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Also on Classic Country TV: Who Jolene really was, and how the song came together.

Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”: The True Story Behind the Song

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“Here You Come Again,” October 15, 1977. Four years later to the day, “Here You Come Again” made its debut on the country chart. The album of the same name had come out on October 3, 1977. You’ll see October 17 in some places, and it’s wrong. The song was written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, the husband-and-wife team behind a long run of pop standards, and Gary Klein produced it. It spent five weeks at number one on the country chart and reached number three on the Hot 100. It won her the Grammy for Best Female Country Vocal Performance. In 1978 she was named the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year, the second woman to win it after Loretta Lynn.

“I Will Always Love You,” October 16, 1982. Dolly wrote “I Will Always Love You” herself and first took it to number one the week of June 8, 1974. In 1982 she recorded it again for the film The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, and that version was number one on the country chart dated October 16, 1982. We can say it returned the song to the top. We’re not calling that a record, because we couldn’t verify a “first ever” claim.

Watch on Classic Country TV: The full story of Dolly Parton’s life, music, and legacy.

The honors. She went into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1986, in the same class as Otis Blackwell, and into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1999. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted her in 2022.

What happened this year. Dolly Parton died on August 25, 2026, in Nashville, at 80. Obituaries described a brief battle with cancer and didn’t name the type. The funeral was private and was held on August 28. Her husband, Carl Dean, had died on March 3, 2025, at 82.

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Also on Classic Country TV: How the world learned of her death, and what she left behind.

The Death of Dolly Parton: Inside the Life, Career, and Legacy of Country Music’s Queen

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One more item belongs on this list and doesn’t. Some calendars show a Dolly Parton recording session on October 17, 1988, for the song “Why’d You Come In Here Lookin’ Like That.” We couldn’t verify that date, and the song appears to have been recorded around February 1989, earning a nomination but not a win. We left it out.

Tennessee Ernie Ford Died on October 17, 1991, Thirty-Six Years to the Day After “Sixteen Tons” Hit the Shops

Go back to the first story in this week’s calendar and pick up the thread we left hanging. Merle Travis recorded a song about a coal miner on August 8, 1946, for the Capitol album Folk Songs of the Hills. It came out in 1947. The song was “Sixteen Tons.” Then another Capitol artist recorded it.

Tennessee Ernie Ford recorded “Sixteen Tons” on September 20, 1955, according to the Library of Congress and Sing Out! The Birthplace of Country Music site gives September 17, so the date varies by source. Capitol released it on October 17, 1955, as the B-side of “You Don’t Have to Be a Baby to Cry.”

The sales numbers are the part people repeat, and they’re worth getting right. By most accounts the record sold about 400,000 copies in roughly its first eleven days and passed a million in about twenty-four days. You’ll see “a million copies in 11 days” in a lot of places, and that’s too fast; the eleven-day figure is the 400,000. It reached two million by December 15, and it is described as the fastest-selling record in Capitol’s history up to that time. The record spent ten weeks at number one on the country chart and eight on the pop chart, though one Wikipedia page says seven for the pop side.

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Also on Classic Country TV: The recording session and the sales race that followed.

The Day Tennessee Ernie Ford Recorded “Sixteen Tons” — And Sold a Million Copies in 24 Days

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Thirty-six years later, on Thursday, October 17, 1991, Ford died at HCA Reston Hospital in Virginia. He was 72, and the cause was liver disease. He had fallen ill on September 28, 1991, after a White House state dinner. One account says he was stricken at Dulles airport on the way home; the Country Music Hall of Fame says he had a fall. He died less than three weeks later.

He had been elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1990, and he had received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1984. Merle Travis, who wrote “Sixteen Tons” and went into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in that 1970 charter class, had died on October 20, 1983, eight years earlier.

That is how this week closes: one man’s recording from 1946 and another man’s from 1955, on the same record shelf.

Why This Week Still Matters

Look at what this week actually contains. A divorce song that held the top of the jukebox chart for fourteen weeks. A wedding sold by the ticket. A television show recorded in a campus studio and a band that began in a San Marcos beer joint. A burned envelope, a coal miner’s daughter in a parked car, a song about a bad telephone line. Most of it happened because people were doing their jobs.

It is remembered because somebody wrote it down. The Country Music Hall of Fame keeps its biographies, the Nashville Songwriters Foundation keeps its inductee pages, the Library of Congress keeps the recordings, and newspapers and trade magazines kept the weekly charts. When two of those sources disagree, as they did more than once while we put this week together, the honest thing is to say so and let the reader see the gap. That’s part of preserving history, and it’s the part that usually gets skipped.

Classic country music gets saved the same way: by people who keep the records, check the dates, and tell the story straight. Next week has its own calendar, and we’ll go through it the same way.

Gear Inspired by the Story

Dolly Parton, in Print and on Record

Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics
Dolly Parton walks through her songs in her own words, a natural companion to this week’s “Jolene,” “Here You Come Again,” and “I Will Always Love You” entries.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1797205099?tag=classiccoun08-20

Dolly Parton: Jolene (Vinyl LP)
The 1974 album that carries the title song, which reached number one on the country chart as a single in early February 1974. If this week’s Dolly entries sent you back to the record, this is the way to hear it start to finish.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B010RM01QI?tag=classiccoun08-20

For the Whiskey Shelf

Glencairn Whisky Glass, Set of 2
The tulip-shaped tasting glass many whiskey drinkers reach for, sold as a pair. A good companion for an evening of reading about the 1975 CMA Awards.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005LR3P1I?tag=classiccoun08-20

Jillmo Whiskey Stones Gift Set
Reusable stones that chill a pour without watering it down, packaged as a gift set. Pair them with the glasses above.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07F1S5XP9?tag=classiccoun08-20

For the Record Room

Mowoodwork Vinyl Record Storage Crate
A wooden crate for keeping an LP collection together, the kind of piece that suits a shelf of Dolly, Hank Williams Sr., and Merle Travis records.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00V2JM2S6?tag=classiccoun08-20

upsimples 12.5-Inch Vinyl Record Frames, 4-Pack
Frames made to show off album covers on the wall, for the records you would rather look at than file away.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DJT3HHNW?tag=classiccoun08-20

As an Amazon Associate, Classic Country TV earns from qualifying purchases.

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From the CCTV Shop

Sources

• Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum – Biographies and induction years for Merle Travis, Jim Reeves, Tennessee Ernie Ford, and Loretta Lynn, including the 1947 and September 17, 1960 dates that differ from other sources. https://countrymusichalloffame.org/artist/merle-travis/ https://countrymusichalloffame.org/artist/jim-reeves/ https://countrymusichalloffame.org/artist/tennessee-ernie-ford/ https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/artist/loretta-lynn
• Wikipedia: “Divorce Me C.O.D.” and “He’ll Have to Go” – Chart runs, recording dates, and weeks at number one, drawn from Billboard chart listings. Also drawn on: the Merle Travis and Jim Reeves pages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divorce_Me_C.O.D. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/He%27ll_Have_to_Go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merle_Travis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Reeves
• 3 Chords a Day – A blog account of the “He’ll Have to Go” session; the October 15, 1959 date and the musician list rest on this account and widely repeated retellings. https://3chordsaday.wordpress.com/2009/10/15/hell-have-to-go-jim-reeves/
• New Orleans Magazine – “Hank Williams and Billie Jean Say I Do” — the Minden ceremony and the two New Orleans Municipal Auditorium weddings on October 19, 1952. https://www.myneworleans.com/hank-williams-and-billie-jean-say-i-do/
• Wikipedia: Billie Jean Jones and Hank Williams – Billie Jean Jones’s background, the unfinished prior divorce, the 1953 settlement, and the later court rulings, relayed from biographers. Treated as secondary. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billie_Jean_Jones https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hank_Williams
• Graceland – “Elvis Presley and the Louisiana Hayride” — the October 16, 1954 debut, the November 6, 1954 contract, and the $18 pay figure. https://www.graceland.com/blog/elvis-presley-and-the-louisiana-hayride/
• 64 Parishes – Louisiana encyclopedia entry on the Hayride and Elvis’s first night. Also drawn on: KTBS’s 70th-anniversary report and Wikipedia’s Louisiana Hayride page. https://64parishes.org/?p=41998 https://www.ktbs.com/entertainment/celebrating-the-70th-anniversary-of-elvis-presleys-debut-on-the-louisiana-hayride/article_b237e78e-8b8c-11ef-bbd9-1b01804ba137.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Hayride
• Ryman Auditorium – The Ryman’s account of Elvis’s October 2, 1954, Opry appearance and the disputed Jim Denny story. https://ryman.com/story/new-exhibit-at-the-ryman-showcases-elvis-infamous-opry-debut
• Michael Corcoran, Substack – Background on Hank Williams Sr. in Shreveport and on how George Strait’s band started in San Marcos. https://michaelcorcoran.substack.com/p/north-to-shreveport-the-death-of https://michaelcorcoran.substack.com/p/strait-outta-san-marcos
• TV Guide (Cleveland edition), September 24, 1955 – The announcement of ABC’s live Opry hour every fourth Saturday beginning October 15, 1955. Also drawn on: Wikipedia’s Grand Ole Opry and Ozark Jubilee pages and the CTVA Ozark Jubilee page. https://lantern.mediahist.org/catalog/tvguide-cleveland-1955-09-24_0076 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ole_Opry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozark_Jubilee http://ctva.biz/US/MusicVariety/OzarkJubilee_CountryMusicJubilee_JubileeUSA.htm
• Loretta Lynn’s Opry debut – Opry.com, PBS American Masters, Rolling Stone, and Whiskey Riff on the October 15, 1960 debut, the Wilburn Brothers, and sleeping in the car. Also drawn on: the Fay Fare blog’s October Opry highlights. https://www.opry.com/story/your-favorite-stars-first-opry-memories https://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/loretta-lynn-loretta-lynn-timeline-photos/5805 https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/loretta-lynn-grand-ole-opry-debut-899530/ https://www.whiskeyriff.com/2024/10/15/i-dont-even-remember-singing-loretta-lynn-slept-in-her-car-the-night-before-her-grand-ole-opry-debut/ https://fayfare.blogspot.com/2020/08/october-opry-highlights.html
• Nashville Songwriters Foundation and NSAI – The Songwriters Hall of Fame’s history, the 1970 charter class of twenty-one, and NSAI’s 1967 founding. Also drawn on: Wikipedia’s Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame page and Dolly Parton’s own site. https://www.nashvillesongwritersfoundation.com/Site/about-us https://www.nashvillesongwriters.com/history-nsai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_Songwriters_Hall_of_Fame https://www.dollyparton.com/news/nashville-songwriters-hall-of-fame
• Wikipedia: CMA Awards ceremony pages – Dates, hosts, winners, and nominees for the 1968, 1972, 1974, 1975, 1980, 1981, and 1987 ceremonies. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Country_Music_Association_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1972_Country_Music_Association_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1974_Country_Music_Association_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Country_Music_Association_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Country_Music_Association_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Country_Music_Association_Awards https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1987_Country_Music_Association_Awards
• CMA Close-Up, Cash Box, and Record World (World Radio History) – Period trade coverage of the 1968, 1980, 1981, and 1987 ceremonies. https://www.worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Record-World/60s/68/RW-1968-10-26.pdf https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/Cash-Box/80s/1980/CB-1980-10-25.pdf https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/CMA-Close-Up/CMA-AWARDS/CMA-Awards-15th-1981.pdf https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-All-Music/CMA-Close-Up/80s/Close-Up-1987-10.pdf
• TheTVDB and American Songwriter – The 1968 broadcast on Kraft Music Hall and the 1968 winners; TheTVDB’s CMA Awards guide is also the source of the 1975 co-host listing. https://thetvdb.com/series/cma-awards/allseasons/official https://thetvdb.com/series/kraft-music-hall/episodes/16290 https://americansongwriter.com/3-cma-winners-from-1968-we-still-cant-get-enough-of-today
• Charlie Rich and John Denver, 1975 – History.com, Rolling Stone, and Saving Country Music on the envelope, the two explanations, and the aftermath. https://history.com/this-day-in-history/singer-charlie-rich-protests-john-denvers-big-win-at-the-cma-awards https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/flashback-charlie-rich-sets-fire-to-john-denvers-cma-slip-81481 https://savingcountrymusic.com/charlie-rich-burns-john-denver-at-the-1975-cma-awards
• Association of Country Entertainers – Saving Country Music, RolandNote, and The New Inquiry on the formation of ACE in November 1974. https://savingcountrymusic.com/50-years-ago-in-protest-traditional-country-entertainers-form-ace/ https://rolandnote.com/people/btimelines/Association+of+Country+Entertainers https://thenewinquiry.com/rank-and-file-countrypolitan/
• Hank Williams Jr., Randy Travis, and Ricky Skaggs – Current touring and anniversary items for the 1987 winners. https://bangordailynews.com/2026/08/02/bangor/bangor-culture/hank-williams-jr-maine-savings-amphitheater https://www.opry.com/artists/ricky-skaggs-sharon-white
• Austin City Limits – ACL’s own history and pilot page, PBS’s pilot episode, the Handbook of Texas entry, and PopMatters’ history of the show. https://acltv.com/history-of-acl/ https://acltv.com/tag/pilot/ https://www.pbs.org/video/austin-city-limits-pilot-episode-willie-nelson https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/austin-city-limits https://www.popmatters.com/186529-austin-city-limits-a-history-2495607632.html
• Ace in the Hole Band and George Strait – The Handbook of Texas, KUTX, Michael Corcoran’s Substack, Saving Country Music, and Wikipedia on the October 13, 1975 first show, the lineup, and Strait Country. Also drawn on: the Country Music Hall of Fame’s George Strait page. https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/ace-in-the-hole-band https://kutx.org/this-week-in-texas-music-history/this-week-in-texas-music-history-a-texas-legend-plays-his-ace-in-the-hole-at-cheatham-street-warehouse https://michaelcorcoran.substack.com/p/strait-outta-san-marcos-12a https://savingcountrymusic.com/50-year-ago-george-strait-plays-first-professional-gig/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strait_Country https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/hall-of-fame/george-strait
• Songfacts, History.com, and Wikipedia: “Jolene” – Release and recording details and chart performance. The song’s Wikipedia page gives a different release month than the October 15, 1973 date used here. https://www.songfacts.com/facts/dolly-parton/jolene https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/dolly-parton-jolene-single-released https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jolene_(song)
• Wikipedia and dollyparton.com: “Here You Come Again” and “I Will Always Love You” – Release dates, writers, producer, chart runs, and the 1982 re-recording’s return to number one. Also drawn on: Wikipedia’s list of 1982 country number-one singles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Here_You_Come_Again_(song) https://www.dollyparton.com/album/here-you-come-again https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Will_Always_Love_You https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Hot_Country_Singles_number_ones_of_1982
• The Philadelphia Inquirer – Obituary of Dolly Parton, who died August 25, 2026, at 80. https://www.inquirer.com/obituaries/obit-dolly-parton-20260825.html
• Library of Congress, Birthplace of Country Music, and The Seattle Times – The recording and release dates of “Sixteen Tons,” the sales figures, and Tennessee Ernie Ford’s 1991 obituary. Also drawn on: Wikipedia’s “Sixteen Tons” page. https://blogs.loc.gov/now-see-hear/2021/07/from-the-national-recording-registry-16-tons-by-tennessee-ernie-ford-1955/ https://birthplaceofcountrymusic.org/sixteen-tons-merle-travis-tennessee-ernie-ford-beyond/ https://archive.seattletimes.com/archive/19911017/1311437/tennessee-ernie-ford-72-famous-for-sixteen-tons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sixteen_Tons

Frequently Asked Questions