I miss Mother Maybelle's Carter Family, Roy Acuff, Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, Hank Snow, Hank Williams, Cowboy Copass, Patsy Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, George Morgan, Marty Robins, Tex Ritter, Little Jimmy Dickens, Ferlan Husky (and his charictor Simon Crumb), Cousin Jody and Brother Oswald, String Bean, Bill Monroe and The Blue Grass Boys, (Young) June Carter, Johnny Case, Doodle Owens, Bobby Lord, and Doyle Marsh, Billy Walker, Red Fowley, Tennessee Ernie Ford, Skeeter Davis, Tammy Wynette(hated that woman but liked her music)(And yes I and half the town saw George Jones riding the lawn tractor down the road to the liquor store after she poured out all his booze). But most of all my good and dear friend, and neighbor, Roy Orbison. With the exception of Jimmy Dickins they are all dead, and it seems that after they die their music slowly fades away. Oh, we remember them, but as we age the younger ones never heard them or heard very little of them. They like the new artist, and that is the group being targeted. Country music has changed.
I grew up in Hendersonville, Tennessee. My folks started dragging me off to the Opry when I was a toddler. They knew many of the entertainers. I went to school with many of their kids. I saw them at the grocery store where I worked at my first job. Red Fowley used to hang out at the drug store next door, and today he would be charged with Sexual Harressment the way he talked to some of the women that came in, back then they just called him a Dirty Old Man. My Dad played mandoline for a short time with Bill Monroe. I worked as a studio musion for monument records in Nashville, my senior year in high school. And Roy Orbison had the coolest car, a Mercedes Benz Excaliber. He used to take me riding in it, never let me drive it, but I sure liked cruising the Shone's Drive Thru with him in it. Roy used to take me with him a lot, to get me away from my abusive mother. Roy taught me more about life and people than my parents ever did.
