NEWS Merle Haggard (1937-2016) Merle Haggard died at his Palo Cedro ranch in California on his 79th birthday, April 6. His youngest son, Ben Haggard, 23, posted on Facebook at 1:07 pm: “A week ago dad told us he was gonna pass on his birthday, and he wasn’t wrong. An hour ago he took his […]
NEWS The newest member of the Country Music Hall of Fame is RANDY TRAVIS. The Country Music Association hosted a press conference March 29 to present the 2016 inductees for the Country Music Hall of Fame. Brenda Lee introduced the three inductees–Fred Foster in the non-performer division, Charlie Daniels in the veterans’ era artist category, […]
FEATURED ARTIST – BECKY HOBBS I’ve been a fan of Becky Hobbs since hearing her songs on the radio while I lived in Oklahoma City in the late ’70s. We’re the same age, and I identified with her music. I’ve played All Keyed Up many, many times since the album came out in 1988. I […]
NEWS Sonny James 1928-2016 Sonny James, 87, died February 22 in hospice in Nashville, Tennessee. James Hugh “Sonny Boy” Loden, born May 1, 1928, in Hackleburg, Alabama, received his first mandolin at age three. His father made it from a molasses bucket. He also learned to play guitar and fiddle, and became a teenaged fiddle […]
By Barbara Taylor Bradford The Cavendon Women, the thirtieth novel of Barbara Taylor Bradford, takes place in the mid-1920s and is the sequel to Cavendon Hall, which covered the Great War of 1914-18. Bradford, born and raised in England, was inducted by Queen Elizabeth into the Order of the British Empire in 2007 for her […]
FEATURED ARTIST – JOE STAMPLEY Joe Stampley is recovering from unplanned heart bypass surgery. He had just returned from a tour and was carrying a fifty-pound sack of corn out to feed the deer on December 21, when his chest started hurting enough to make him drop the bag off his shoulder. It was a […]
–This is a speech I gave to a veterans’ group at the Center for Active Generations in Sioux Falls on January 27, 2016– Good morning, and thank you for inviting me to be here. It’s so good to be living in South Dakota again. I graduated from Augustana College in 1972 and joined the Navy, […]
NEWS Mel Tillis, 83, underwent emergency colon surgery at Nashville’s Centennial Medical Center on January 8. The Tennessean reported on January 15 that reports indicating Mel was in frail health were overstated. After several weeks of recovery, he plans to be back in action. The surgery prevented him from joining the scheduled Country Music Cruise […]
By Jo Ivester “Many Americans live on the outskirts of hope,” President Lyndon Johnson said in his historic 1964 War on Poverty speech. “Some because of their poverty and some because of their color, and all too many because of both. Our task is to help replace their despair with opportunity.” The Outskirts of Hope: […]
FEATURED ARTIST – RED STEAGALL When I called Red Steagall at his Fort Worth, Texas, office the other day, he told me he’d first visited Sioux Falls at age twelve. Although he grew up in a “little bitty town in Texas,” he spent the five most important summers of his life on his uncle’s farm […]