CMT Blog: Porter Wagoner

If you're a Dolly Parton follower like me, you know she is planning to take some time off these next couple of months. However, in usual Dolly fashion, she never really takes time off and despite her absence from the road, she will spending her free time writing more music, working on the 9 to 5 musical, helping Kenny Rogers with his television special, getting her nails done, etc. But there's good news for eager fans. On May 4, Legacy Recordings will be releasing a vintage inspirational album, Letter to Heaven: Songs of Faith and Inspiration.

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A hit record can launch or propel a career. On occasion, a great debut single can grab the nation's attention. More often than not, though, it takes a few tries to break through. For instance, Jamey Johnson had already released an album for another record label before he gained traction with "In Color," one of the songs featured on his Mercury Nashville album, That Lonesome Song. In Dolly Parton's case, she had enjoyed hits as a solo artist and with Porter Wagoner before she became a superstar in the mid '70s. In fact, she'd even scored a No. 1 solo hit in 1970 with "Joshua." Her second one to top the chart was her 1973 single, "Jolene," which paved the way for her third -- "I Will Always Love You" in 1974. In a playlist titled "Breakout Hits," CMT.com compiled several performances from the Studio 330 Sessions series. While these songs may or may not be an artist's first or biggest singles, they're among the hits that captured our interest and helped their career.

With a little bit of downtime at the office this week, I finally had a chance to read Beautiful Mess, an autobiography by Diamond Rio that was released a few months ago. It's a quick read and an insightful look at all six guys in the award-winning band, famous for hits like "Meet in the Middle," "How Your Love Makes Me Feel," "I Believe" and "One More Day." I was lucky enough to see them play a county fair in the early 1990s when they were just getting started, and it might even have been my first country concert. However, much of the storyline of the book involves their live performances over the last seven or eight years when Marty Roe just wasn't cutting it vocally. It got so bad that their longtime sound engineer quit the job after repeatedly getting jeered by nearby audience members.

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Famed songwriter Jerry Chesnut shared a fascinating story over the weekend about writing George Jones' enduring hit, "A Good Year for the Roses." During an interview at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum on Saturday afternoon (Sept. 26), Chesnut said he had eliminated the landscaping budget on a new property and decided to do the work himself. But the roses he bought didn't grow. When he called the garden shop, he was told that the soil was too damp from all the rain -- specifically, "It's just not a good year for the roses." Chesnut thought to himself, "Now, what if it was a good year for the roses but everything else was falling to pieces?" Ta-da! A country classic was born.

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Over the last few days, I've been happily reacquainting myself with Dolly Parton's music. You know how so many people sing about how they are country? Dolly could always convey that sentiment in her lyrics without clobbering you over the head. Instead, the rural imagery she offers is unmistakable -- strolling up to Joshua's cabin, taking pride in a patched-up coat of many colors and listening to the crickets at her Tennessee mountain home. In other words, she doesn't have to spell it out for you. She's showing you that she's country.

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That's a young George Jones staring back at you from the cover of Pure Country: The Leon Kagarise Archives: 1961-1971. The singer sure looks friendly in that photo, but according to Kagarise, he had stormed offstage drunk the day before, angry that his pickup band from Baltimore wasn't living up to his expectations. When he sobered up the next day to perform a second show, Jones agreed to pose for Kagarise, a hi-fi systems installer who photographed and recorded countless festivals in the Baltimore area.

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There are really three kinds of stories in my new book Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain, and that meant three different styles of writing.

The first group was driven by the quotes that the current cast members gave me about their great romances and tragedies. Those stories were built around their first-hand recollections. So what you read in the chapters devoted to folks like Marty Stuart, Martina McBride, Dolly Parton, Bill Anderson, Trace Adkins and many of the other Opry stars of today is "straight-from-the-horses' mouths."

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How dumb am I?

How long have I been around the music business? Thirty years? You would think I'd know a thing or two about artists' schedules by now. When I began writing the chapters for Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain in January 2007, I decided to write about the deceased stars first. So through the winter, I was telling the stories of Johnny Cash, Dottie West, Patsy Cline, Minnie Pearl, Johnny Paycheck and the like.

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It took me a while to dig further into The Imus Ranch Record because I couldn't stop myself from playing the first track over and over and over - Patty Loveless' exquisite rendition of Fleetwood Mac's "Silver Springs." However, now that I've overcome that minor hurdle, I find myself hung up on several other tracks by the likes of Vince Gill, Willie Nelson, Randy Travis and even Little Richard! (Sorry, I can't help it. I always have to put an exclamation point after Little Richard!)

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The CMA Music Festival gets under way officially tomorrow (June 5) in Nashville, and it's pretty much guaranteed that some memories will be made for many of the 30,000-plus fans who'll be visiting for the event, whether it means seeing a once-in-a-lifetime onstage collaboration by two favorite stars or meeting a favorite artist for the first time.

People who've never attended the festival -- or Fan Fair, as it was previously known -- might not realize the heft of the event. But one way to understand how significant it is would be to simply look back at some of the highlights of Fan Fairs past.

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