What was Charlie Rich thinking when he announced John Denver as the CMA's Entertainer of the Year?
What is Bobbie Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe" really about?
When exactly did Hank Williams die? These classic country mysteries may never be solved.
Jim Sullivan was a country-blues musician with an edge of the psychedelic. He released two
albums over the course of his career, and he had famous friends like actor Dennis Hopper.
Then he disappeared and was never seen again. Sullivan had a family,
but he left them behind to go to Nashville for work, except that he never actually
showed up. His wife Barbara got a call from him on March 5, 1975, the day after he left
California. She asked him to tell her what was wrong, but he refused, as he instead said,
"You wouldn't believe if I told you. Forget it. Just forget I said anything."
That was their last phone call. Sullivan's car was found abandoned three days later in the small
town of Santa Rosa, New Mexico. It contained his ID, a box of his albums, and his beloved guitar.
The police investigation turned up no clues about where Jim was or why he'd disappeared.
One local named Donald Sena thought they didn't do a great job though. As he put it,
"I always thought there was something strange about how that went down,
why they didn't investigate it more."
A search by family members and volunteers was more thorough.
According to newspaper reporter Davy Delgado,
"There was no arroyo left unturned and no trace of him found."
Hank Williams Sr. is one of the most famous country music stars of all time,
despite dying at the age of 29. Weirdly, no one knows exactly when he died. As reported
by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, on New Year's Eve 1952, a 17-year-old Charles Carr was
driving Williams 500 miles to get to a gig the next day. He realized that something was wrong
with his passenger in the back seat in the early morning hours and detoured to a hospital. Williams
was pronounced dead there, with January 1, 1953 appearing as the date on his death certificate.
"Hank Williams' last journey began in Knoxville and ended in tragedy just up the road."
But some people have different ideas about when Williams breathed his last.
Tennessee Highway Patrol Corporal Swan Kitts pulled Carr over at 1:00 AM that morning for
driving erratically and saw Williams in the back seat. He reported that the musician already,
quote, "looked dead" but was reassured by Carr that he was just under the power of a sedative.
Could those injections of morphine, given to him at a Knoxville hotel before getting back on the
road, have been what killed him? The doctor who gave them obviously didn't think so, as he said,
"The shots I gave Williams had absolutely
nothing to do with his death. It is ridiculous to think that they did."
But sometime after receiving the injections, Williams had to be brought to the car in a
wheelchair. Some believe that he was already dead at that point,
and his corpse was put in the car by people who thought that he was just out of it.
After a decade of country music success, Bobbie Gentry decided that performing had lost its
appeal, so she went back to a normal life. She hasn't made a public appearance since 1981,
but she left behind a mystery in a song that's been driving fans crazy ever since.
"Ode To Billie Joe" tells the story of a girl who finds out during a family dinner that a boy named
Billie Joe has killed himself by jumping off the Tallahatchie Bridge. It's implied that she
and Billie Joe were sweet on each other and that they'd been spotted throwing something into the
river below that same bridge shortly before he died. What did they throw? We may never
find out. Gentry once explained her reasoning for keeping this important detail so vague by saying,
"First, it locks up a definite relationship between Billie Joe
and the girl telling the story, the girl at the table. Second,
the fact that Billie Joe was seen throwing something off the bridge — no matter what it
was — provides a possible motivation as to why he jumped off the bridge the next day."
As for the item that they threw, Gentry has never revealed what it was,
although she's been asked all the time by fans and heard many theories, like an engagement ring,
a draft card, or even a baby. Eventually, a TV movie based on the song provided its own
answer of the girl's childhood doll, but that really disappointed fans.
"Don't seem like no good never come to nobody on this bridge."
Country star Jim Reeves had a weird connection to John F. Kennedy's assassination.
The biography Jim Reeves: His Untold Story, written by Larry Jordan, records a Texas radio
station owner's account of what happened as news of the assassination unfolded in November 1963.
As Lee Harvey Oswald's picture was shown on TV, Reeves told everyone who was watching that
he recognized Oswald from seeing him on multiple occasions at the Longhorn Ballroom, where Reeves
and his band often performed. It's also been contended that Reeves knew Oswald's killer Jack
Ruby from the same place. In August the following year, Reeves was killed in a small private plane
crash, and he had something mysterious with him. As songwriter John Loudermilk recounted,
"[Music producer Chet Atkins] called me and he said, 'Jim's down. He crashed last night and we
need to go out and find him.' And I said, 'Why?' And he said, 'He's got a briefcase
that has some important papers in it that are private, and nobody should have those.'"
That briefcase was never found. Then the mystery deepened. While researching his biography,
Larry Jordan got a phone call from someone who claimed to work for American intelligence
and warned him to avoid looking "too deeply" into Reeves' crash.
Charlie Rich had a 35-year career that included 11 number one records on the country charts and an
Entertainer of the Year Award from the Country Music Association of America in 1974. That honor
meant that he would present that same award the following year, but that's when his career went
up in flames, literally. Rich announced that John Denver was the winner, but then he did
something inexplicable, as he took a step back and fished in his pocket for a lighter. Then he
lit the envelope on fire. Denver wasn't there to see this, but the audience was gobsmacked.
What exactly was Rich trying to say? He never explained himself,
so it's been left to others to theorize about his mysterious action, which incidentally got
him banned from all future CMA award shows. Many people think he was mad about Denver's win,
possibly because he didn't think he was really a country musician. There's also the fact that
Rich has admitted that at the time he was on prescription pain medication that he
washed down with multiple gin-and-tonics. His son Charlie Jr. had his own theory:
"He used bad judgment. He was human after all. I know the last thing my father would
have wanted to do was set himself up as judge of another musician."
Bobby MacKey's Music World is a popular honky-tonk in Kentucky,
owned by the country singer of the same name. There's a sign on the door that reads:
"Warning to our Patrons: This establishment is purported to be haunted. Management is
NOT responsible and cannot be held liable for any actions of any ghosts/spirits on these premises."
The bar has appeared on many ghost hunting shows, and it's purported to be the site of many grisly
crimes over the years. Almost all of it is legend, but one horrific crime did take place nearby,
and the victim is said to be one of the ghosts that haunts the building today.
In 1896, 5-months-pregnant Pearl Bryan arrived in Cincinnati, Ohio in order to procure an abortion.
The father of her child and his roommate were waiting for her at the train station.
What happened next is a mystery, but somehow Bryan ended up dead. When her body was found,
it was missing its head. Despite extensive searches, the head was never found. One legend
says that it was thrown into the already-bloody well of a nearby slaughterhouse, across the river
in Kentucky. And the building that housed the slaughterhouse is now the home of Bobby MacKey's.
"I don't know if I would be adamant about Bobby's Mackey's closing its doors."
"But I think something will do it for them."
There's only one known photo of the Weems String Band, as they appeared literally out
of nowhere and disappeared right after. During the 1920s, hillbilly string band
music was all the rage, and the Weems String Band recorded a single record for Columbia.
Their playing style made the band even more mysterious. Despite living in the
backcountry of Perry County, Tennessee, they held and played their instruments in
distinctive ways that indicated they almost certainly had professional violin training,
which seems impossible for people who came from somewhere so remote.
Plus, one of the members played the cello, which you normally wouldn't find in a string band.
And they didn't play in the normal style either, instead producing what was essentially
an experimental record at a time when no one in the genre was doing anything like that.
The record they produced had an A-side called "Greenback Dollar," as well as a B-side. That
was all these virtuosos ever recorded. There are six people in the photo, but we only know who four
of them were: Dick, Frank, and Jesse Weems, and their brother-in-law Alvin Condor. The other
two are thought to be younger Weems brothers, but their names were lost to history. That is, until a
member of the online forum Banjo Hangout contended that the other two were Atlas "Dodge" Conder and
Ray Hinson. The explanation was anecdotal, so whether or not it's true is up to folk tradition.
William "Curley" Shelton was a member of the band Dixie Six, stars of the 1950s TV program Hillside
Hoedown. He was also a confirmed ladies' man. The mysterious story of his death was recounted
in 2019 by the Evansville Courier & Press. According to local bar owner Oswald Coomes,
"[Curley] was something else. He sang those old love ballads,
and women just went crazy. He had no trouble getting all the women he wanted."
But this would become a problem. Shelton once told Henderson, Kentucky County Sheriff Lee Williams
that a man wanted to kill him. When Williams asked why that was, Shelton admitted that
he'd been with his wife multiple times, so the sheriff told him to leave that man's wife alone.
Three years after that conversation, on December 5, 1957, Shelton was found in his
car outside a VFW hall. He'd been beaten to death, pummeled so badly that the cops
who arrived on the scene mistakenly thought he'd been shot in the head.
Despite an extensive investigation in which over 100 people were questioned,
nobody was ever arrested, let alone convicted for the murder. But Sheriff Williams claimed
to know what the motive would've been, as he told the Evansville Courier at the time,
"Shelton was caught with a woman by a man – maybe the woman's husband – and the man
simply beat him to death. That's my theory, and I'm sticking to it."
In 1978, "First Lady of Country Music" Tammy Wynette told People magazine about the terrifying
carjacking and kidnapping she'd been the victim of a few weeks earlier. As she recounted,
"I felt a poke in my side and heard a man’s voice say, 'Drive!' All I could
see was a brown glove, a lot of hair on his arm and two inches of gun barrel."
Wynette was finally released 80 miles from Nashville, as she then fled for help.
She had visible injuries on her face and neck where the kidnapper had punched, slapped,
and strangled her. But there's a lot of reason to doubt Wynette's story. Her children contend
that she was in an abusive marriage and the injuries were caused by her husband, their
stepfather George Richey. Her daughter, Georgette Jones, wrote in her memoir The Three of Us,
"She did admit to my sister that when all that stuff came out about her being
kidnapped in 1978 that she and Richey had had a fight and he had beaten her.
He threatened to destroy her life and write a tell-all book so she
decided to stay with him [...] so he concocted the kidnapping story for PR."
Richey has called the abuse accusations "preposterous,"
and Wynette never publicly recanted her kidnapping story.
If you or someone you know is dealing with domestic abuse,
you can call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1−800−799−7233.
You can also find more information, resources, and support at their website.