This Week in Country Music History, November 9–15: Hank Williams Sr.’s Lost TV Debut, and 12 More Stories

On a Wednesday night in November 1951, Hank Williams Sr. stood under the hot lights of a CBS television studio in New York and sang “Hey, Good Lookin'” to a national audience for the first time. It was the moment country music’s biggest star stepped out of the radio and into the living room. Not one frame of it survives.

That’s how this week begins, and it’s a fair warning about what kind of week it is. This week in country music history covers November 9 through 15, and a surprising amount of it is about what got kept, what got lost, and who got to decide which was which.

There’s a radio man born in Indiana who gave the Grand Ole Opry its name, and a Hall of Fame that finally honored somebody still alive to hear the applause. There’s an Australian song rewritten from a road atlas, a banjo player’s last night on the Opry stage, and a 20-year-old Oklahoma college student signing the contract that started a 50-year career. Willie Nelson walks into RCA Studio B with short hair and a necktie. About twenty of country’s biggest names crowd into George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s living room to ask what country music even is anymore. Jerry Lee Lewis cuts a Ray Price hit at Sun, a national magazine puts a name on the Nashville Sound, and Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings both top the chart on a November 15, six years apart.

Here are thirteen stories from country music’s November 9 through 15, told in the order the calendar gives them, with the dates and the doubts laid out plainly where the record isn’t settled.

George D. Hay, Born November 9, 1895, Started at WSM on His 30th Birthday and Gave the Grand Ole Opry Its Name

Before there was a Grand Ole Opry, there was a newspaperman who liked the sound of a fiddle on the radio.

George Dewey Hay was born on November 9, 1895, in Attica, Indiana. After World War I he went to work as a reporter for The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, and when the paper put its own radio station, WMC, on the air in January 1923, Hay became its late-night announcer. Radio was brand new, and Hay took to it like he’d been waiting for it.

In May 1924 he moved up to WLS in Chicago, where he announced the program that became the National Barn Dance, one of the first big country shows on the air. That success got him noticed in Nashville. According to his Wikipedia biography, he started work at WSM on November 9, 1925, his 30th birthday. The station belonged to the National Life and Accident Insurance Company.

Hay billed himself as “The Solemn Old Judge,” even though he was 30 years old and no kind of judge at all. It was showmanship, and it worked. Within weeks of his arrival, the station put 78-year-old fiddler Uncle Jimmy Thompson on the air, and the listener response was strong enough that Hay announced WSM would give “an hour or two” of old-time music every Saturday night. The first of those broadcasts is generally dated to November 28, 1925, the date the Opry still celebrates as its birthday.

The name came two years later. In December 1927, the WSM Barn Dance followed NBC’s classical “Music Appreciation Hour” on the schedule. As the story is most often told, after harmonica player DeFord Bailey played, Hay told listeners that they’d been hearing grand opera all evening, and that from now on they would present “the Grand Ole Opry.” The exact wording shifts depending on who’s telling it, and historians have said as much, but the name stuck for good.

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Hay stayed with the show for decades. He announced it through the 1940s, toured with Opry acts, including the September 1947 show at Carnegie Hall, and wrote “A Story of the Grand Ole Opry” in 1945. In 1953 he became an editor of Pickin’ and Singin’ News. He eventually moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia, where he died on May 8, 1968, at 72.

Two years before his death, the Country Music Hall of Fame inducted him as part of its 1966 class, alongside Eddy Arnold, music publisher Jim Denny, and Uncle Dave Macon. It’s fitting that his birthday opens this week. Almost every story that follows ran through the institution he named.

Hank Williams Sr.’s First Album Came Out November 9, 1951, and Five Days Later He Sang on Network TV for the First Time — and No Footage Survives

By the fall of 1951, nobody in country music was bigger than Hank Williams Sr. “Cold, Cold Heart” had topped the country chart in the first half of the year, and by summer “Hey, Good Lookin'” was No. 1 too. On August 11, 1951, it took the top spot from Eddy Arnold, and it went on to spend eight weeks there across a non-consecutive run.

The rest of the year moved fast. In August and September, Hank toured with the Hadacol Caravan, a traveling road show built to sell a patent medicine that was about 12 percent alcohol. The lineup reads like a variety-hour dream: Bob Hope, Minnie Pearl, Milton Berle, Jack Benny, and Jimmy Durante. The tour ended early when the Hadacol company was sold. In September, Hank went to Hollywood for a role in the MGM picture “Small Town Girl,” and was photographed signing a movie deal, though he never appeared in the film.

Then came two firsts in five days.

On November 9, 1951, MGM Records released “Hank Williams Sings,” his debut album. It came out as a ten-inch LP and as boxed sets of 45s and 78s, eight songs in all, recorded between 1946 and 1949. There was “Lost Highway,” written by Leon Payne. There was “I Saw the Light,” the gospel song he often closed his shows with, along with “A Mansion on the Hill,” “Wedding Bells,” “Six More Miles (To the Graveyard),” “Wealth Won’t Save Your Soul,” “I’ve Just Told Mama Goodbye,” and “A House Without Love.”

What wasn’t on it is the interesting part. None of the big 1951 hits made the record. Producer Fred Rose built the album mostly out of older singles and B-sides, and biographer Colin Escott called it “a dump site for oddball tracks that hadn’t sold elsewhere.” Billboard suggested MGM held back new material so it wouldn’t spread radio and jukebox plays too thin across a single release. The album didn’t chart, which says less about Hank than about country music in 1951, when the business ran on singles and jukeboxes, not long-playing records.

The song Hank was about to sing had its own story. Little Jimmy Dickens, who toured with Hank and Minnie Pearl in 1951, said Hank wrote both “Hey, Good Lookin'” and “Howlin’ At The Moon” on a flight to Wichita Falls, Texas. By most accounts the song was first meant for Dickens, until Hank decided to keep it for himself. It caught on fast with other singers too: that same year there were covers by Tennessee Ernie Ford with Helen O’Connell, and a rocking version by Piano Red.

MGM had a reason for the timing, though. According to accounts of the release, the label put the album out ahead of a television date, hoping the exposure would sell records.

The biggest star in country music made his network television debut, and the only thing anyone kept was the memory.

On November 14, 1951, a Wednesday, Hank flew to New York with his steel guitar player, Don Helms, to appear on The Perry Como Show on CBS. It was a 15-minute program airing three nights a week at 7:45 p.m. Eastern, and this was its 29th episode of the season. Como was the relaxed, cardigan-wearing crooner who made everything look easy, and the booking was, by uDiscover Music’s account, the show’s first booking of a country act. Hank sang “Hey, Good Lookin’,” and uDiscover reports that Como sang it with him.

It was Hank’s first appearance on national television. Much of live TV in 1951 was never recorded, and no footage of this performance has ever turned up. What survives are photographs, the episode listing, and a story about what happened next. The following week, Como opened his own show by singing his version of “Hey, Good Lookin’,” and then apologized to Hank for doing it. It was a gentle joke between two singers from very different worlds, and it tells you how fast Hank’s song had gotten into the national ear.

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The good times didn’t last. Shortly after the TV trip, Hank fell during a hunting trip with fiddler Jerry Rivers in Franklin, Tennessee. The fall aggravated the chronic back trouble he’d lived with for years, and he began taking painkillers, including morphine, along with alcohol, to manage the pain. He had a little more than a year left.

Footage of Hank on network television does exist from his final months. His appearance on The Kate Smith Evening Hour in April 1952 survives, and it’s the closest anyone can come now to seeing what Perry Como’s audience saw that November night.

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Roy Acuff Became the Country Music Hall of Fame’s First Living Member in November 1962

If this one sounds familiar, it’s because we covered it last week. The date is honestly disputed: last week’s edition dated Roy Acuff’s election to November 8, 1962, while RolandNote’s country database and the Possum’s calendar put it on November 9. Since the record can’t settle it, it belongs to both weeks.

What isn’t in dispute is the honor. The Country Music Hall of Fame names Acuff as its first living member, elected in 1962. The year before, the Hall’s first class, Jimmie Rodgers, Fred Rose, and Hank Williams, had gone in posthumously. In 1962, Acuff went in alone. The Hall elected nobody at all in 1963.

The connection to this week’s lead story runs deep. Acuff and Fred Rose founded Acuff-Rose Music in 1942, the first major Nashville-based country publisher, and in 1946 Acuff-Rose signed Hank Williams. Hank never forgot who’d been there first. In 1952 he told the writer Ralph Gleason that for drawing power in the South, “it was Roy Acuff, then God.”

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Acuff remained the Opry’s leading personality until his death on November 23, 1992, and the Hall of Fame still credits him with helping build both the star system on the Opry and the publishing business that made Nashville an industry town. Being the first living member meant he got to watch the rest of the Hall fill in around him for 30 years.

Hank Snow’s “I’ve Been Everywhere” Hit No. 1 on November 10, 1962, After an Australian Rewrote It With a Road Atlas

Some songs are written. This one was mapped.

Australian country singer Geoff Mack wrote “I’ve Been Everywhere” in 1959 as an opener for his cabaret act. The original version was a rapid-fire list of Australian towns, many of them Aboriginal place names that happened to rhyme. Singer Lucky Starr took it to the top of the charts in Australia in 1962, and Mack’s publisher started thinking bigger.

They offered the song to Hank Snow, the Canadian-born Opry star known as the Singing Ranger. Snow liked it but saw the problem right away: American and Canadian listeners weren’t going to sing along to a list of towns in New South Wales. The song needed North American place names. So, at the publisher’s urging, Mack rewrote the lyrics using a North American atlas the publisher supplied. He later told NPR the original song took him about two hours to write, and it ended up paying him for more than 50 years.

Snow recorded the new version on June 27, 1962, with Chet Atkins producing, and RCA Victor released it in September as single 47-8072, with “Ancient History” on the flip side. It debuted on Billboard’s country chart at No. 13 on September 15, 1962.

The chart itself was in the middle of a change. On November 3, 1962, Billboard renamed its “Hot C&W Sides” chart “Hot Country Singles.” A week later, in the issue dated November 10, 1962, “I’ve Been Everywhere” was No. 1. It traded the top spot back and forth with Bill Anderson’s “Mama Sang a Song” and returned to No. 1 on December 15, for two weeks in all. It also crossed to No. 68 on the Hot 100.

There’s a small date conflict worth flagging. Songfacts and at least one Canadian record site say the song reached No. 1 in late October 1962, which likely reflects the difference between a chart’s tracking week and the date printed on the Billboard issue. The Billboard issue date of November 10 is the one most chart histories use.

For Snow, the record was a late-career milestone. He’d ruled the early 1950s, when “I’m Movin’ On” spent 21 weeks at No. 1 in 1950, back when Billboard ran separate charts for sales, jukebox, and radio play. “I’ve Been Everywhere” gave him his first chart-topper after Billboard consolidated those charts.

The song kept traveling after him. Lynn Anderson cut it in 1970, Asleep at the Wheel in 1973, and Johnny Cash recorded it in 1996 for his second American Recordings album, “Unchained.” Cash’s version ended up in commercials for years. Snow even answered his own hit in 1970 with “I Ain’t Been Anywhere,” to the same tune. The song kept getting new maps, too: Rolf Harris cut a British version in 1963, John Grenell a New Zealand one in 1966, and Kris Kristofferson sang a stretch of it in the 1973 film “Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid.” Sixty years after Snow’s record, the Johnny Cash version was still turning up in U.S. Postal Service ads.

David “Stringbean” Akeman Played His Last Grand Ole Opry Show on November 10, 1973

Some stories in this series are celebrations. This one is a remembrance, and it deserves to be told plainly and with care.

David Akeman was born on June 17, 1915, in Annville, Kentucky. He was tall and thin, with a long body on short legs, so everybody called him Stringbean. He was a semi-pro baseball player when he met Bill Monroe, and from 1943 to 1945 he played banjo in Monroe’s band, the chair Earl Scruggs filled after him. He became a protégé of Uncle Dave Macon, the Opry’s great banjo-playing showman, and he carried that old-time clawhammer style the rest of his life.

Akeman came to the Opry in 1945 as part of a comedy duo, and by the 1950s he was one of its major stars, a comedian and a banjo player who looked like nobody else. In 1969 he joined the cast of “Hee Haw” with his close friend and neighbor Grandpa Jones. On that show he played the scarecrow in the cornfield.

He and his wife, Estelle, lived the way people who’d come through the Depression often lived. They had a small cabin on Baker Road near Ridgetop, Tennessee, north of Nashville. They spent little, kept cash rather than trust banks, and allowed themselves one luxury, a new Cadillac. Estelle did the driving.

On Saturday night, November 10, 1973, Stringbean worked the Grand Ole Opry at the Ryman Auditorium as he always did. According to The Tennessean’s later reporting, Tex Ritter introduced him, and he sang “Y’all Come” and “Hillbilly Fever.” Afterward, he and Estelle sat backstage with Grandpa Jones and his family, talking over a hunting trip the two men had planned.

When the Akemans got home that night, two men who had broken into the cabin were waiting for them. Both David and Estelle were killed. Grandpa Jones found them the next morning, Sunday, November 11, when he arrived to pick his friend up for the trip.

Police arrested two cousins, John A. Brown and Marvin Douglas Brown, both 23, and both were convicted. Grandpa Jones testified at the trial. Marvin Brown died in prison in 2003; John Brown was paroled in 2014 after serving 41 years. Billboard reported at the time that Akeman, who had never learned to read or write, and his wife had about $5,700 in cash on them that the killers never found.

Nashville changed after that. Stars who had never thought twice about it started locking their doors. “Hee Haw” kept airing the segments Stringbean had already taped, through his final episode on March 23, 1974, and the show left the scarecrow standing in the cornfield as a memorial.

He’s remembered now the way he’d have wanted, mostly through the music. There’s a Stringbean memorial bluegrass festival, and Sam Bush’s song “The Ballad of Stringbean and Estelle” was nominated for IBMA Song of the Year in 2011. The banjo style he learned from Uncle Dave Macon still gets played by people who never saw him on the Opry stage.

Reba McEntire Signed Her First Record Deal on November 11, 1975, at 20 — and Waited Eight Years for Her First No. 1

Every career has an origin story, and Reba McEntire’s begins with the national anthem.

She grew up on a ranch near Chockie, Oklahoma, and sang with her brother Pake and her sister Susie as the Singing McEntires. The trio worked rodeos and put out one single, “The Ballad of John McEntire.” Reba enrolled at Southeastern Oklahoma State University with plans to become an elementary school teacher.

Then she sang the national anthem at the National Finals Rodeo in Oklahoma City. Country singer Red Steagall was there, heard her, and offered to help her get a deal in Nashville. According to her Wikipedia biography, Steagall later told the family he couldn’t take all three siblings, but he could take Reba. In March 1975, she traveled to Nashville with her mother to cut a demo. Steagall carried the tape around Music Row, and Glenn Keener at Mercury Records wanted her.

On November 11, 1975, Reba McEntire, 20 years old, signed her first recording contract with Mercury. She cut her first single, “I Don’t Want to Be a One Night Stand,” on January 22, 1976.

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What came next was not overnight success. Her self-titled debut album came out on August 15, 1977, and failed to chart. Keener was let go during a round of downsizing at Mercury, and producer Jerry Kennedy took over. The singles kept missing too. By Wikipedia’s account, McEntire didn’t see her first royalty payment from that debut album until 1988, years after she’d left the label.

She kept going. Taste of Country counts her first No. 1, “Can’t Even Get the Blues,” as her 14th single, and it arrived in 1983, nearly eight years after the signing. There’s a small coincidence in this week’s calendar: the Possum’s country calendar has her recording “Can’t Even Get the Blues” in Nashville on November 10, 1981, one day short of six years after she signed with Mercury. In 1984 she moved to MCA, and the run that made her one of the biggest stars in country music began.

The anniversary still matters to her. On November 11, 2025, MCA marked 50 years since that first contract with a surprise plaque on the set of her NBC sitcom, “Happy’s Place.” Through 2026 she has been marking the half-century with monthly “music capsules” pairing older songs with new recordings, and her 1990 album “Rumor Has It” entered the Library of Congress’s National Recording Registry this year.

Willie Nelson Cut His First RCA Session in November 1964 — Clean-Shaven, Short-Haired, and Singing “Pretty Paper”

The man who’d become the face of outlaw country started his RCA years in a suit.

By 1964, Willie Nelson was one of Nashville’s best songwriters and one of its least successful singers. Other artists had turned his songs into hits: Patsy Cline with “Crazy,” Faron Young with “Hello Walls.” He’d put out two albums on Liberty, “…And Then I Wrote” in 1962 and “Here’s Willie Nelson” in 1963, and he’d had a Top 10 hit singing “Willingly” with Shirley Collie. When Liberty dropped its country division, Nelson spent a stretch as a pig farmer in Ridgetop, Tennessee. Then Chet Atkins signed him to RCA.

The Possum’s country calendar dates his first RCA session to November 12, 1964, at RCA Studio B, with Atkins producing. Other accounts don’t give the exact day, saying only that it was in November and less than two weeks before his Opry debut on November 28, so treat the 12th as the most commonly cited date rather than a settled one.

The first song he cut was “Pretty Paper,” a Christmas song he’d written the year before. As Nelson told it, the song came from a memory of a man he used to see outside Leonard’s Department Store in Fort Worth, selling paper and pencils from the sidewalk and calling out “Pretty paper!” to holiday shoppers. In 2013 the Fort Worth Star-Telegram identified him as Frankie Brierton of Santo, Texas.

Roy Orbison had already made the song a hit. Producer Fred Foster at Monument Records, who had Nelson under contract in 1963, sent the demo to Orbison in London, and Orbison’s version reached No. 15 on the Hot 100 in late 1963. By one account, Orbison cut it in London with a 102-degree fever. Nelson’s own recording for RCA had a first-rate Nashville band behind it: Hargus “Pig” Robbins on piano, Pete Drake on pedal steel, Jerry Reed and Velma Smith on guitars, Henry Strzelecki on bass, and Kenneth Buttrey on drums.

Two weeks later, a clean-shaven, short-haired Nelson made his Grand Ole Opry debut. He became a regular, playing up to 26 Opry shows a year. Loretta Lynn later remembered how stylish he was then, saying he was “working in suits.”

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The RCA years were not kind to his record sales. Over eight years, Nelson went into RCA’s Nashville studios for 44 solo sessions, and Bear Family counts only two of his RCA singles, “One in a Row” in 1965 and “Bring Me Sunshine” in 1968, that broke into Billboard’s country Top 20. Atkins himself said Nelson was ahead of his time. In his memoir, Nelson remembered following Atkins’ lead, including the sweeteners: heavy strings and choirs layered over songs that didn’t really need them.

Nelson never let the song go. He recorded it again as the title track of his 1979 Christmas album, “Pretty Paper,” and once more with his sister, Bobbie, on their 1997 album “Hill Country Christmas.”

It took leaving Nashville for Texas to make Willie Nelson a star. But it started here, with a Christmas song about a man on a Fort Worth sidewalk. At 93, he hasn’t slowed down much. His new book, “The Last Leaf: Reflections on Late-Life Creativity and My Longest Love Affair,” written in honor of his wife, Annie, is due from Penguin Press on November 10, 2026, the same week he first stepped into RCA Studio B 62 years ago.

On November 12, 1974, Country’s Biggest Stars Met at George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s House to Ask What “Country” Still Meant

Arguing about whether country music is still country is about as old as country music. On November 12, 1974, a group of the genre’s biggest names decided to organize around the argument.

The trigger came that fall at the 1974 CMA Awards, hosted by Johnny Cash. Olivia Newton-John, the Australian pop singer whose soft, folk-flavored records were all over country radio, won Female Vocalist of the Year. Saving Country Music points out that in the seven years before, only three women had won it: Loretta Lynn and Tammy Wynette, three times each, and Lynn Anderson in 1971. Country DJs, who were the genre’s gatekeepers then, were warming to pop-leaning acts like Newton-John and John Denver, and a lot of working Nashville artists felt the ground shifting under them.

So they met at the home of George Jones and Tammy Wynette, then country music’s reigning married couple. The result was the Association of Country Entertainers, or ACE, with about 20 charter members, including Dolly Parton, Barbara Mandrell, Bill Anderson, Porter Wagoner, Conway Twitty, Jim Ed Brown, Dottie West, Brenda Lee, Faron Young, Cal Smith, Hank Snow, and Mel Tillis. George Morgan served as president for a time, and Barbara Mandrell, Grandpa Jones, and Vic Willis also held leadership roles.

ACE was built differently from the CMA. The CMA let in label reps, radio people, promoters, and merchandisers; ACE admitted only entertainers. Its stated goal was to “preserve the identity of country music.” It argued that awards should go only to performers who considered themselves country, pushed radio to broaden narrow playlists, staged concerts to showcase artists who weren’t getting airplay, and released a compilation album, “Proud Country,” featuring Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe, Jean Shepard, Grandpa Jones, Speck Rhodes, and Del Wood. Justin Tubb’s song “What’s Wrong With the Way We’re Doing It Now” became something of a rallying cry.

A few colorful quotes about the controversy have floated around for 50 years. Some of them may be more legend than record, so we’re leaving them out.

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Historian Bill C. Malone, in “Country Music USA,” took ACE seriously but not uncritically. He wrote that the group was “genuinely concerned about country music’s growing fusion with pop,” but timid about confronting it, partly out of fear of alienating the Nashville establishment and partly because so many members liked pop sounds themselves. He also pointed out that it was hard to call ACE a traditionalist group when Tammy Wynette was a charter member and Barbara Mandrell would serve as an officer. And fans, he noted, had no seat at the table in either ACE or the CMA.

ACE never really found its footing. It lacked stable money, and Saving Country Music blames infighting and conflicting agendas among its members as well. On September 25, 1981, it closed its offices, citing funding. George Jones and Tammy Wynette divorced the year after they hosted that first meeting.

Still, the question they asked in that living room never went away. A year later, it was the subject of a No. 1 record, and the song that knocked John Denver off the top of the chart to get there is the last story of this week.

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Marty Robbins Cut His First Columbia Records Session on November 14, 1951 — the Same Day Hank Sang on Network TV

While Hank Williams Sr. was getting ready for his television debut in New York on the evening of November 14, 1951, a 26-year-old singer from Phoenix was making his first records at the other end of the country.

The Discography of American Historical Recordings, the University of California, Santa Barbara’s database of master recordings, logs four Columbia sides by Marty Robbins made that Wednesday at Radio Recorders in Los Angeles: “Tomorrow You’ll Be Gone,” “Love Me or Leave Me Alone,” “I Wish Somebody Loved Me,” and “Crying ‘Cause I Love You.” All four were Robbins’ own songs.

That date isn’t universal. The British writer Alan Cackett, in older profiles, placed Robbins’ first Columbia session in Hollywood in the summer of 1952, and acknowledged that some of his details might be wrong. The DAHR session log, built from Columbia’s own matrix records, is the stronger evidence, and the Possum’s calendar and RolandNote’s database both agree with November 14, 1951.

Robbins had come up through Phoenix radio and television, and accounts of his signing credit Little Jimmy Dickens, who appeared on his local TV show, with helping open the door at Columbia. Once he was in, Robbins showed some backbone early. One profile says he turned down the songs label executives suggested and insisted on his own.

The first records didn’t do much. According to RolandNote, Columbia released “Love Me or Leave Me Alone” in March 1952, and it didn’t catch on. Then, on June 3, 1952, at Jim Beck’s studio in Dallas, Robbins cut “I’ll Go On Alone,” another song he’d written. Columbia released it in October 1952, and it gave him his first No. 1.

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It’s worth pausing on how much country music happened on that one Wednesday in 1951. The DAHR’s log for November 14 also shows Red Foley and Ernest Tubb cutting duets for Decca that same day, including “Too Old to Cut the Mustard.” In New York, Hank was on CBS. And in Los Angeles, the man who’d later give the world “El Paso” was cutting his first four sides. He went on to win a Grammy for “El Paso,” race in NASCAR, and enter the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1982, the year he died.

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Jerry Lee Lewis Walked Into Sun Studio on November 14, 1956, and Cut a Ray Price Hit at His First Session

Jerry Lee Lewis is filed under rock and roll, but his first record was a country song, and a big one.

Before he ever got to Memphis, Lewis had been turned down by the Grand Ole Opry, the Louisiana Hayride, and the Nashville record labels. Some of the advice he got was that he ought to switch to guitar. In November 1956, he went to Sun Records at 706 Union Avenue to try his luck there instead.

Sam Phillips was away in Florida, so engineer Jack Clement ran the session. Session listings and the Glide Magazine account date it to November 14, 1956. Roland Janes played guitar and Jimmy Van Eaton played drums, the two men who’d back Lewis on a large share of his Sun records. The tape caught his own song, “End of the Road,” and his version of “Crazy Arms.” Session data also lists a take of “Born to Lose” from the same day.

“Crazy Arms” was the hit of the year in country music. It was written by Ralph Mooney and Chuck Seals, and Ray Price recorded it on March 1, 1956, at Bradley Studios in Nashville, setting it to a Texas shuffle with a swinging 4/4 beat, fiddle, pedal steel, and a walking electric bass. It reached No. 1 in June and stayed there for 20 weeks. Billboard named it the top country single of 1956, and Price’s record went into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1999. Even Price’s version had a history behind it: he reworked the music and some of the lyrics from an earlier recording by Kenny Brown and the Arkansas Ramblers, featuring Marilyn Kaye, on a small label called Pep.

Lewis took that shuffle and put it on a piano that sounded like it was trying to get out of the room. Sun released the two songs in December 1956 as its single 259, credited to “Jerry Lee Lewis and His Pumping Piano.” It didn’t chart nationally, but it sold around 300,000 copies across the South, enough to keep him around.

The Killer’s first record wasn’t rock and roll. It was a Ray Price shuffle played on a pumping piano by a kid the Opry had already turned away.

Keeping him around paid off fast. On December 4, 1956, three weeks after his first session, Lewis was the hired piano player on a Carl Perkins session when Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley dropped by the studio, and the jam that followed is remembered as the Million Dollar Quartet. In 1957, “Whole Lot of Shakin’ Going On” went to No. 1 on the country and R&B charts and No. 3 on pop, and “Great Balls of Fire” followed that November.

He spent the rest of his career returning to country music, and country music kept claiming him. It started with a Ray Price song on November 14, 1956.

Time Magazine Put a Name on the “Nashville Sound” on November 14, 1960

Sometimes history gets made in a studio. Sometimes it gets made when a national magazine notices what the studios have been doing.

In its issue dated November 14, 1960, Time ran a music story under the headline “Hoedown on a Harpsichord.” It was written around the ninth annual National Country Music Festival, the disc jockey gathering that brought radio people to Nashville every fall, and its news was that country music, which the magazine called “C. & W.,” was booming. Nashville, Time reported, had nosed out Hollywood as the second-biggest record-producing center in the country, behind New York.

The article’s numbers were striking. About one in five popular hits of the previous year, it said, had been written and recorded in Nashville, and it pointed to records like Jim Reeves’ “He’ll Have to Go,” Elvis Presley’s “Stuck On You,” the Everly Brothers’ “Cathy’s Clown,” and Hank Locklin’s “Please Help Me, I’m Falling.” It noticed what was changing in the studios, too: fiddles and steel guitars were now sharing space with saxophones, drums, violins, and even harpsichords, which worried traditionalists. It noted that the Grand Ole Opry itself still held to fiddles and guitars on its stage.

Producers credited the success to a loose, improvised way of working that they called the “Nashville Sound.” Songwriters worked tunes out on guitar and cut demos for the A&R men, and Columbia’s Don Law took a shot at New York and Los Angeles producers for leaning on written arrangements.

There’s a question of credit here. RolandNote’s database says Time coined the term “the Nashville Sound” in this story and that it became standard Music City jargon. Wikipedia’s account says the phrase first showed up in print in 1958, in an article about Jim Reeves in the trade paper Music Reporter. The fair reading is that Time didn’t invent the name, but it put it in front of the whole country. By November 1965, The New York Times’ Robert Shelton was filing a feature from Nashville under the plain headline “The Nashville Sound,” and nobody needed it explained.

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Also on Classic Country TV: Did the Nashville Sound save country music or water it down? We took the question head-on.

Did the Nashville Sound Ruin Traditional Country Music?

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The sound itself had been building for years. Country historian Rich Kienzle has pointed to Ferlin Husky’s “Gone,” recorded in November 1956, as an early record that pointed the way. Producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley refined it into smooth vocals, background choruses, and strings, a style that made stars of Reeves, Patsy Cline, and Don Gibson. Atkins was blunt about its purpose, once describing it as a way to sell records and make money.

The argument Time’s story set off never really ended. Fifteen years later, Waylon Jennings put it into a No. 1 song.

Watch on Classic Country TV:

Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Muskogee” Hit No. 1 on November 15, 1969 — a Month After He Recorded It Live in Muskogee

“Okie From Muskogee” started out, by Merle Haggard’s own account, as something of a joke, and turned into one of the most argued-over records in country music.

Haggard wrote it with Roy Edward Burris, the drummer in his band, the Strangers, at the height of the Vietnam War. The song grew out of the two of them trading one-liners about small-town life. Capitol released it on September 29, 1969, and it caught on almost at once. It entered Billboard’s country chart on October 11.

The day before that, on October 10, 1969, Haggard and the Strangers played the Civic Center in Muskogee, Oklahoma, to a packed house, and Capitol recorded the show. Saving Country Music reports it was meant to be one of several concerts taped for a live album tentatively called “Six Nights on the Road.” Instead, as the single shot up the charts, the Muskogee show was rushed to press on its own under the song’s title, and the album was in stores by December.

A note on dates: some country calendars list that live recording on November 10, 1969. That’s wrong. The concert was October 10, the night before the single’s chart debut.

By the Billboard chart dated November 15, 1969, “Okie From Muskogee” was No. 1, and it stayed there for four weeks. It crossed to No. 41 on the Hot 100, Haggard’s biggest hit up to then. In 1970 the Country Music Association named it Single of the Year and named the live album Album of the Year. The Academy of Country Music gave the album its Album of the Year award as well. Capitol went back to the live-album idea quickly: Haggard and the Strangers recorded their next one at the Civic Center in Philadelphia on February 14, 1970, and “The Fightin’ Side of Me” became another No. 1. In 2015, Capitol Nashville reissued “Okie From Muskogee” in a 45th anniversary edition paired with that Philadelphia show, and Muskogee has since planned a statue of Haggard outside the Civic Center where he recorded it.

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Also on Classic Country TV: Merle Haggard turned 21 inside San Quentin. Here’s the complete story of how he sang his way to 38 No. 1 hits and a governor’s pardon.

Merle Haggard Turned 21 Inside San Quentin — Then Sang His Way to 38 No. 1 Hits and a Governor’s Pardon

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What the song meant depended on who was listening, and on when you asked Haggard. He told The Boot he wrote it to support the troops. Critic Kurt Wolff has written that Haggard always considered it something of a spoof, and on the Muskogee live album you can hear him having a little fun with it. In a 2010 interview with American Songwriter he called it a “character study,” with his 1969 self as the character, and said he sang it differently now because, in his words, “I’ve become educated.” Counterculture acts, the Grateful Dead among them, ended up covering it.

His father, Haggard often said, was an Okie from Muskogee back when “Okie” was close to an insult. Whatever else the song is, it’s a record about pride, and on the chart dated November 15, 1969, it was the No. 1 country record in America.

Watch on Classic Country TV:

Waylon Jennings’ “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” Hit No. 1 on November 15, 1975

The week opened with Hank Williams Sr. on network television. It closes with Waylon Jennings asking whether anybody in Nashville still remembered how Hank did it.

Jennings wrote “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” on the back of an envelope. It’s a song about frustration: with the record label’s control over his music, with the polished Nashville Sound that had dominated country for two decades, and with the glitz that had come to define top-selling country acts, down to the rhinestone suits and shiny cars. Jennings and Jack Clement produced it, and RCA released it in August 1975 as the first single from “Dreaming My Dreams,” an album that topped the country chart. On the flip side was “Bob Wills Is Still the King,” his tribute to another man who did things his own way.

On the Billboard Hot Country Singles chart dated November 15, 1975, “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” was No. 1. It held the top spot for one week and spent 16 weeks on the chart, and it crossed to No. 60 on the Hot 100. Sources disagree on whether it was Jennings’ third or fourth solo No. 1; Wikipedia’s current entry says third, and older versions of the same entry say fourth.

The record it replaced at No. 1 is a small, perfect irony. It was John Denver’s “I’m Sorry,” by one of the very pop-crossover singers whose success had sent Nashville’s old guard to George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s living room a year earlier. ACE had organized to protect country music’s identity, and while it never found its footing, here was Waylon making the same argument from the top of the chart.

The song has had a long life since. Hank Williams Jr., Alabama, the Mavericks, Clint Black, Pat Green, and Jack Ingram have all recorded it, which tells you how many later artists heard it as their own argument too. “Dreaming My Dreams” itself reached No. 49 on Billboard’s all-genre album chart, a strong showing for a record that was openly arguing with Nashville.

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Also on Classic Country TV: Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings didn’t just share a stage. Here’s the friendship that changed country music forever.

Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings: The Friendship That Changed Country Music Forever

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Rolling Stone has called the song the closest thing outlaw country has to a mission statement, and that’s about right. It doesn’t reject country tradition. It argues that Nashville’s establishment had wandered away from it, and that the real tradition was Hank Williams, Bob Wills, and the road. Twenty-four years after Hank sang to Perry Como’s audience, Waylon was holding Nashville to Hank’s standard.

Watch on Classic Country TV:

Why This Week Still Matters

Put this week together and it reads almost like an argument with itself, one that country music has been having for a century.

It starts with a newspaperman who named the Grand Ole Opry on the fly and a Hall of Fame that needed a second year to honor someone still alive to stand on a stage. It runs through Hank Williams Sr. bringing honky-tonk into America’s living rooms on a crooner’s TV show, on a night nobody thought to film. It moves to Australia and back by way of a road atlas, then into a studio in Nashville where Chet Atkins tried to dress Willie Nelson up for the pop charts.

Then the argument gets louder. Time magazine names the Nashville Sound in 1960. Fourteen years later, a living room full of country stars tries to define what “country” even means. A year after that, Waylon answers from the top of the chart with a simple question: are you sure Hank done it this way?

And under all of it are the people. Stringbean, who played the old way to the end and is still remembered for it. A 20-year-old Reba McEntire, signing a contract whose first album wouldn’t pay her a royalty until 1988, and sticking with it anyway. A kid from Louisiana that Nashville turned away, cutting a Ray Price song in Memphis. Merle Haggard, singing for the people who didn’t usually get a song written about them.

Some of this week survives in recordings, chart pages, and session logs. Some of it, like Hank’s night on CBS, survives only because people wrote it down and kept telling it. Classic country music was never just entertainment. It was a living record of American life. These stories deserve to be remembered, and that’s exactly why we’re here.

Keep the stories behind the songs alive.

Gear Inspired by the Story

Hank Williams Sr. in Print and on Record

Hank Williams: The Biography by Colin Escott
Escott is the biographer who called Hank’s first album a dump site for oddball tracks, and he’s also the writer who went back for the files on Hank’s last hours. If you want one book on the man, this is the one most people start with.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0316734977?tag=classiccoun08-20

Hank Williams: 40 Greatest Hits (2-CD)
Everything “Hank Williams Sings” left off is here, from “Cold, Cold Heart” to “Hey, Good Lookin’,” in order, mastered from the original mono sources.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000001F76?tag=classiccoun08-20

For the Mirror Before Showtime

Layrite Original Pomade
Every man in this week’s stories, from Hank in his white hat to Willie with his short 1964 haircut, combed his hair back before he faced a camera or a crowd. This water-based pomade holds like the old stuff and washes out with water.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01MA55K6I?tag=classiccoun08-20

Kent Handmade Pocket Comb (A FOT)
A hand-sawn English comb small enough for a shirt pocket. Hank carried his to New York; you can carry this one to the next Saturday night show.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B002IJ7X1A?tag=classiccoun08-20

For the Stovetop and the Cabin Porch

COLETTI Bozeman 9-Cup Stainless Percolator
A plain stainless percolator with a glass knob on top, the kind of coffee pot that belonged on the stove of a cabin like Stringbean’s. It works on gas or electric burners and over a campfire.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01HZYPQVG?tag=classiccoun08-20

Coleman 12 oz Enamel Coffee Mug
The speckled enamel camp mug that’s been on porches and tailgates for generations. It isn’t fancy, and that’s the point.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0009PUR72?tag=classiccoun08-20

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From the CCTV Shop

Sources

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• 96.3 The Possum, Country Music History – November 11 – Calendar entry for Reba McEntire’s Mercury Records signing. https://www.963thepossum.com/?p=97078
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• 96.3 The Possum, Country Music History – November 15 – Calendar entries for “Okie From Muskogee” and “Are You Sure Hank Done It This Way” reaching No. 1. https://www.963thepossum.com/?p=97085
• Wikipedia, George D. Hay – Hay’s birth, WMC and WLS years, his WSM start date, the naming of the Opry, and his later career. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_D._Hay
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• The Classic TV Archive, The Perry Como Show Season 4 (1951–52) – Episode listing for November 14, 1951, the show’s schedule, and Como’s apology the next week. https://ctva.biz/US/MusicVariety/PerryComoShow_04_(1951-52).htm
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• The Paul McCartney Project, Hey Good Lookin’ – Quotes the Wikipedia account of Hank keeping the song Little Jimmy Dickens hoped to cut. https://the-paulmccartney-project.com/song/hey-good-lookin
• Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, Roy Acuff – Acuff’s 1962 election as the Hall’s first living member and his role at the Opry and Acuff-Rose. https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/artist/roy-acuff
• RolandNote, Country Music Hall of Fame timeline – Dates Roy Acuff’s election to November 9, 1962, and George D. Hay’s 1966 class. https://www.rolandnote.com/people/timelines/101
• MusicRow, Country Music Hall of Fame Launches Rite of Remembrance – Hall of Fame class list showing no one was elected in 1963. https://musicrow.com/2018/10/country-music-hall-of-fame-launches-rite-of-remembrance-and-member-salute/
• Wikipedia, Roy Acuff – Acuff-Rose’s founding, its 1946 signing of Hank Williams, and Hank’s 1952 remark to Ralph Gleason. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roy_Acuff
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• Billboard, Hot Country Songs, week of January 19, 1963 – Chart page showing “I’ve Been Everywhere” debuting at No. 13 on September 15, 1962. https://www.billboard.com/charts/country-songs/1963-01-19/
• NPR, ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’ Turns 2 Hours Into 50 Years Of Pay – Geoff Mack on writing the song. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/162031062
• Songfacts, I’ve Been Everywhere by Hank Snow – Source of the conflicting late-October 1962 No. 1 date. https://www.songfacts.com/facts/hank-snow/ive-been-everywhere
• Canuckistan Music, Hank Snow – I’ve Been Everywhere / Ancient History – A Canadian record site giving the week of October 28, 1962 for the song’s No. 1. https://canuckistanmusic.com/index.php?maid=493
• Wikipedia, David “Stringbean” Akeman – Akeman’s life, his years with Bill Monroe and on Hee Haw, the 1973 murders, the trial, and his legacy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_%22Stringbean%22_Akeman
• The Tennessean via Yahoo, How the 1973 Tennessee murder of David ‘Stringbean’ Akeman brought fear to Nashville – Stringbean’s final Opry night, Tex Ritter’s introduction, and his last songs. https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/1973-tennessee-murder-david-stringbean-232753289.html
• Please Kill Me, Who Was Killing the Country Stars? – The Akemans’ frugal life, Estelle driving, and Nashville’s reaction. https://pleasekillme.com/?p=57176
• Taste of Country, Remember When Reba McEntire Signed Her First Record Deal? – The Singing McEntires, Red Steagall, the November 11, 1975 signing, and her first No. 1. https://tasteofcountry.com/reba-mcentire-first-recording-contract-mercury-records/
• Wikipedia, Reba McEntire (album) – Her debut album, Glenn Keener and Jerry Kennedy, and her first royalty payment in 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reba_McEntire_(album)
• Wikipedia, Reba McEntire – Her ranch upbringing, the Nashville demo trip, and the move to MCA. https://wikipedia.com/wiki/Reba_Mcentire
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• Wikipedia, Pretty Paper (song) – The song’s Fort Worth origin, Roy Orbison’s hit, and Nelson’s RCA recording and session players. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretty_Paper_(song)
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Frequently Asked Questions