By Randy Travis with Ken Abraham Randy Travis, singer, songwriter, and Country Music Hall of Fame member, worked for ten years to become an overnight success. The son of an abusive alcoholic father and “a saint” of a mother, Travis was a teenager headed to jail when Lib Hatcher took him under her wing in […]
IN THE SPOTLIGHT – LLOYD GREEN I hadn’t heard anything about Lloyd Green in quite a while, so I called him Sunday evening to find out how he’s doing. He answered the phone on the second ring. “Life’s different for me these days,” he told me. “Dot passed away about three years ago. I’m still […]
IN THE SPOTLIGHT – LISA SUTTON “I am kind of phasing out Lisa Sutton Music Services after fifteen years,” Lisa Sutton told me during our telephone conversation last week. Lisa is the daughter of the late singer Lynn Anderson and songwriter Glenn Sutton. Her grandparents were songwriters Liz Anderson and Casey Anderson. How’s that for […]
IN THE SPOTLIGHT – LACY J. DALTON The most incredible project Lacy J. Dalton, 72, has ever done in her life came from the recent three-and-a-half years she spent with an arts program at High Desert State Prison in Susanville, California. “It was a life-changing experience,” she told me during our telephone conversation last week. […]
NEWS Mastering engineer John Eberle, 79, died April 12 at Dickson Health and Rehab in Dickson, Tennessee. For more than 30 years, he mastered recordings at Nashville Record Productions (NRP), before launching his own company, Americana Mastering. His credits appear on nearly 450 recordings. “Mastering is the final process in audio recording, after the music […]
NEWS Jim Glaser (1937-2019) Jim Glaser, the originator of the Marty Robbins harmony sound, died April 6 at his Nashville home at age 81. While on tour near Spalding, Nebraska, in 1957, Marty hired the Glaser Brothers (Tom, Chuck, and Jim) after their father brought them to his dressing room. The trio toured and recorded […]
CONCERT REVIEW – DWIGHT YOAKAM Saturday night brought my first opportunity to see Dwight Yoakam in concert. He came to the Washington Pavilion in Sioux Falls for a sold-out show in a wonderful venue. I enjoyed the intermission more than the opening act. The recorded music gave promise of a show that respected classic country. […]
IN THE SPOTLIGHT – GARRY ROBBLE Willful Shadows: The Account of SONNY JAMES and the Southern Gentlemen is the title of a book being released May 1. Gary Robble, who cowrote the book with Barb Day, told me about it in a recent phone conversation. “Our book on Sonny is not about all the artists […]
IN THE SPOTLIGHT – GEORGETTE JONESLife changed for Georgette Jones in 2009, as the result of two men she met on a trip to Ireland. The daughter of Tammy Wynette and George Jones had been a registered nurse in Alabama for seventeen years. “I loved my job,” she told me when we talked on the […]
By Debra Gwartney Debra Gwartney’s memoir, I Am A Stranger Here Myself, opens with her driving away from her hometown of Salmon, Idaho, at age 55, after the funeral of her last remaining grandparent. She writes, “For reasons I have yet to decipher, I can’t seem to make peace with the place I’ve loved best […]