Happy birthday to Randy Travis. He celebrates his 63^rd birthday today.

NEWS

Naomi Judd (1946-2022)

One day before being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, Naomi Judd, 76, died on April 30. “Today we sisters experienced a tragedy,” daughters Wynonna and Ashley Judd said in a statement. “We lost our beautiful mother to the disease of mental illness. We are shattered. We are navigating profound grief.” Naomi died in the hospital at 2:20 p.m. on Saturday, surrounded by her family. Born Diana Ellen Judd in Ashland, Kentucky, in 1946, Naomi married young, gave birth to Wynonna and Ashley, divorced and was working as a nurse at a hospital in Franklin, Tennessee, when she and 19-year-old Wynonna got their record contract in 1983. Read the rest of this entry »

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – T. GRAHAM BROWN

When the 90s Country Rewind Tour comes to Sioux Falls on June 25, I will be in the front row at the South Dakota Military Heritage Alliance to welcome T. Graham Brown, Doug Stone, and Terry McBride. I recently spoke on the phone with T. Graham Brown. He said he’ll be flying in the day of the show and flying out the next morning, so he couldn’t accept my invitation for a tour of the Battleship South Dakota Memorial while he’s here.

He is writing his autobiography, I Tell It Like It Used To Be, and expects to have it published later this year. Read the rest of this entry »

NEWS

C.W. McCall (1928-2022)

William Dale Fries Jr. (pronounced “freeze”), 93, an advertising executive who became C.W. McCall, died April 1 at his home in Ouray, Colo. He had announced in February that he was in home hospice for cancer. The Washington Post reports he was born Billie Dale Fries on November 15, 1928, in Audubon, Iowa. His parents played musical instruments, and he wanted to be a classical musician. He played the clarinet while at the University of Iowa and later studied art and film production. He joined the Bozell & Jacobs advertising agency in 1961 and became creative director and vice president. When asked to devise an advertising campaign for Old Home bread, he created the characters of trucker C.W. McCall and a waitress named Mavis at the Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep On-a-Truckin’ Cafe. As recording artist C.W. McCall, he had hits with “Convoy,” “Old Home Filler-Up an’ Keep On-a-Truckin’ Café,” and “Wolf Creek Pass.”  He is survived by his wife of 70 years, Rena Bonnema Fries, three children, and their children.

CONCERT REVIEW – REBA McENTIRE

The first time I saw Reba McEntire in concert was in her early cowgirl days, in Oklahoma in the late 1970s. A decade later, when she gave a concert in Virginia, she had gone uptown. Her fancy gowns and choreographed movements made it appear she’d practiced posing on a certain spot of the stage at a certain time. We’ve both traveled a lot of miles since then. I was happy that she came to the Denny Sanford Premier Center in Sioux Falls this January. She told the crowd she’d been waiting two years to do this show, which was the beginning of the tour. They’d worked it up in 2019, and it had been postponed three times due to the pandemic.

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – SCOTTY McCREERY

After reading an article where Scotty McCreery said, “Little Scotty used to sit on the end of his bed with a guitar playing three wooden crosses, forever and ever amen, 1982, diggin’ up bones and so many other Randy Travis songs till 2 in the morning,” I knew I wanted to talk to him. When we connected, he told me he grew up as a kid from North Carolina who loved country music. “That’s all my mom was ever playing in the house was that good ol’ country music,” he said. Scotty, 28, is from Garner, North Carolina, a suburb of Raleigh. He won the 10th season of American Idol, at age 17, in 2011.

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – JANA JAE

When I typed “girl with the blue fiddle” into an internet search engine, it brought up Jana Jae. She had told me in our recent phone conversation how she acquired that title. First, a bit about her background. Born in 1943, Jana started playing violin at age two. Her parents attended New York City’s Juilliard School, a performing arts conservatory with an acceptance rate of eight percent. “I was their first child,” she says, “and they couldn’t wait to get me started. At age five, I played Hungarian Dance # 5 on the Ted Mack Amateur Hour.”

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – GENE WATSON

It’s been almost eight years since I spotlighted Gene Watson in my newsletter (https://dianediekman.com/dianes-country-music-newsletter-2-july-2014). When I arranged a phone interview recently, I asked about his health, as he had cancelled his November show in Sisseton due to illness. “All the illnesses I’ve been through finally culminated in double pneumonia, and I’m trying to get over that,” he told me. He takes a stool onstage so he can sit down and catch his breath between songs. “But we’re doing it,” he says, “and we’ve been playing sell-out houses and the jobs just keep coming in.”

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – DAVID FRIZZELL

When David Frizzell called from Nashville for our scheduled interview, and I told him one of my newsletter readers likes Barnyard Christmas, he said, “That was one of my first children’s albums. I have another one, but I’ve got to record it. I’ll try to do that if we ever get out of this snow. It’s like a foot or two of it out there, and it’s still snowing.”

Barnyard Christmas is about the birth of Christ, told by the animals that were there. The upcoming album is about Sherlock Hound and his deputy, Walrus. Read the rest of this entry »

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – ERIN ENDERLIN

Erin Enderlin made her first trip to Nashville at age 16, when she attended Fan Fair in 1998. She carried a backpack containing a Trapper Keeper full of songs she’d written. “Just in case, y’know, somebody needed a song,” she explains. “I carried it all over the fairgrounds with me.”

She told me that story when I called her last week. I’d been so impressed with seeing her at the Bill Anderson songwriter session at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum that I wanted to introduce her to my Spotlight readers who hadn’t heard much about her.

IN THE SPOTLIGHT – BOBBY TOMBERLIN

After missing the opportunity to meet Bobby Tomberlin during our Nashville trip, I requested a phone conversation–and found the songwriter relaxing in his hometown of Luverne, Alabama, during Christmas break.

My first question was about the song Jeannie Seely recently recorded, “If You Could Call It That,” an unfinished Dottie West song that Bobby Tomberlin and Steve Wariner completed. I asked, “How do you go about finishing somebody’s song?”