Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain

by Grand Ole Opry

  “How does it feel to play second fiddle to your wife?” a man asked Henry Cannon backstage one night.

  “I don’t play a musical instrument,” Henry dryly replied.

  In no time, he was flying country stars to shows in his chartered plane. Among those who hired him were Elvis Presley, Roy Acuff, Carl Smith, Webb Pierce, Faron Young, and Hank Williams.

  As for Minnie Pearl, she was in the right place at the right time. In the postwar era, country music boomed, and Nashville became its undisputed capital city. Between 1947 and 1961, she appeared at New York’s Carnegie Hall and Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall, was profiled on This Is Your Life, and costarred with Elvis Presley at a benefit show in Hawaii to raise funds for the battleship Arizona monument.

  By the 1960s, Minnie Pearl was an icon herself. One often-told Opry anecdote is of songwriter Joe Allison mailing a letter in Los Angeles in 1960 with just a drawing of her hat as an address. The post office delivered it to the Grand Ole Opry.

  Minnie Pearl became the country industry’s goodwill ambassador. Her well-bred graciousness and her genuine affection for her less-schooled costars made her their mother confessor, chaperone, and spokesperson. Hank Williams cried on her shoulder. She mentored June Carter as a comic. She gave Roger Miller his first job as a road musician. She encouraged a shy Mel Tillis to use his stutter to humorous advantage. She taught Jimmy Dickens how to deliver jokes. She memorably shared routines with Rod Brasfield, Grandpa Jones, and Roy Acuff. Backstage, she patted scared youngsters on the back, hugged the troubled, consoled the dejected, and cheered the successful.

  The recitation “Giddyup Go—Answer” earned her a top-ten hit in 1966. She recorded both songs and comedy routines for Starday, RCA, Liberty, Decca, King, Bullet, and other labels on Music Row. As a writer, she published cookbooks, Christmas stories, joke books, and a 1980 autobiography.

  Minnie quit doing one-night stands in 1967 in the aftermath of a harrowing emergency landing by Henry. But her star was undimmed. In 1969, she joined the cast of Hee Haw, the longest-running syndicated show in television history. In 1975, she became the first comic inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. In 1977, she began headlining in Las Vegas.

  At home in Nashville, she became renowned for her charity work. Minnie worked with United Way, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, the March of Dimes, the American Cancer Society, Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital, the Nashville Humane Association, the W. O. Smith Nashville Community Music School, the E.A.R. Foundation, the Red Cross, the Veterans Administration, and dozens of other causes.

  “When I got this job and moved to Nashville, people asked me to do what was called ‘public service’ then,” she commented. “I was so indoctrinated by my mother, I just immediately fell into it.”

  Because of her “many years of service and devotion,” she became the first female recipient of Billboard’s Country Man of the Year award in 1966. Twenty years later, she was costarring with Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, George Carlin, Whoopi Goldberg, and others of an entirely new generation of humorists in Comic Relief, the nationally televised fund-raiser for the homeless.

  The Comic Relief telecasts of 1986 and 1987, her weekly “Minnie’s Memories” column in The Nashville Banner, and her many Opry appearances during those years were done despite her undergoing a double mastectomy in 1985. Following her reconstructive surgery, she quipped that she was “an eighteen-year-old from the waist up.” Henry said she looked like a curvaceous Hee Haw “honey.”

  In the operation’s wake, she became a crusader for breast-cancer awareness. Henry Cannon objected to his wife’s publicity campaign. She said that was because he considered her condition a private matter. More than likely, he was simply terrified at the prospect of losing her and couldn’t bear to hear her talk about her disease.

  “I’m fine,” she insisted. “I can’t ‘languish on a bed of pain.’ I’ve gotta get out, and I did. I don’t recommend that every lady in her seventies with two mastectomies do that. I did it, because that’s my way of coping. I did it, but I don’t advocate that much activity.”

  In the 1980s, the new medium of cable television was born. On The Nashville Network (TNN), she became a regular on Nashville Now, doing a popular weekly bit called “Let Minnie Steal Your Joke.” The mailroom boy who sifted through the gags sent to her was future Grand Ole Opry star Alan Jackson.

  The honors continued to pile up. Tennessee governor Lamar Alexander invited her to the governor’s mansion for a seventieth birthday party in 1982. Minnie and Henry didn’t have far to travel. Their house was next door. A country who’s-who attended, and Roy Acuff led the singing of “Happy Birthday to You.”

  “Minnie Pearl is only forty-five years old, but Sarah is seventy,” said the honoree. “Minnie will never grow old. When I met her, she was in her ‘early flirties’—young enough to flirt with men, but too old to have ’em flirt back! And she has stayed that way.”

  Her career museum opened in 1984; it moved to the Opryland theme park five years later. In 1986, she set up the Minnie Pearl Scholarship Fund to give financial assistance to hearing-impaired students seeking higher education. In 1987, President Reagan gave her the American Cancer Society’s Courage Award, and the annual Minnie Pearl Humanitarian Award was inaugurated the following year.

  Minnie collapsed during a luncheon at the Nashville restaurant Midtown Cafe in March 1990 and was taken to Centennial Hospital. She was operated on and got a heart pacemaker as a result.

  “The doctor must have put it in wrong,” she said with a twinkle in her eye. “Every time my husband kisses me, the garage door goes up.”

  That same year, her cancer returned. She underwent lymph-node removal and radiation treatments. But she sailed onward indomitably. On November 7, 1990, she celebrated her fiftieth anniversary on the Grand Ole Opry.

  On January 22, 1991, the Sarah Cannon Cancer Center was dedicated at Centennial Medical Center in Music City. It remains a monument to her breast-cancer campaign to this day.

  Minnie Pearl played what turned out to be her last Grand Ole Opry show on June 14, 1991. Three days later, she suffered a major stroke. Her left arm was paralyzed, and she was unable to hold her head up thereafter. But her speech, though weakened, was not impaired. After intensive physical therapy at home, she moved to the Richland Place Retirement Center in Nashville, with Henry still by her side. Friends such as Barbara Mandrell, Ralph Emery, and Roy Acuff visited the legend there.

  She was unable to attend when President Bush presented her with the National Medal of Arts in 1992. Later that year, she watched, bedridden, as TNN aired its two-and-a-half-hour television extravaganza Hats Off to Minnie: America Honors Minnie Pearl. It featured more than a hundred performers.

  “The show has affected her,” Henry reported. “It made Minnie cry, because every one of those people came to the show because of their love for her, people from all over the country. I can’t hardly talk about it,” he added, choking with emotion. “I thought it was poignant.”

  At the time, Minnie was unable to sustain long conversations or to concentrate for extended periods of time. Some days, she talked only of the past. At other times, she was more engaged with friends and well-wishers.

  “I don’t want to talk about the future,” Henry said. “I don’t want to speculate. But we had a lot of great years. We’ve had more than our share of good times. We’re way ahead of most people.”

  In 1994, she was announced as the first female inductee into the Comedy Hall of Fame, in Tampa, Florida. This was the last honor she received during her lifetime. In February 1996, Minnie Pearl suffered a stroke from which she never regained consciousness. She died on March 4, 1996, at age eighty-three.

  More than 1,500 people attended her funeral, including many of her fellow Opry stars and four Tennessee governors. At Minnie’s request, Connie Smith sang “In the Garden,” accompanied by a string band featuring Marty Stuart. Amy Grant performed “Fairest Lord Jesus” and “It Is Well with
My Soul,” backed by Gary Chapman and Ruth McGinnis.

  Henry was now battling cancer himself. But he personally cut magnolia boughs in their yard to mingle with the lilies on her casket. He greeted attendees one by one for over an hour. He reportedly offered as much consolation as he received to the grief-stricken throng who loved Minnie Pearl so much.

  That weekend, he attended an Opry tribute show in her honor. Backstage, he said he imagined her walking up to the pearly gates and shouting, “HowDEEE! I’m jest so proud to be hyere!” The female stars of the cast gathered to sing Minnie’s favorite song, “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You,” each holding a yellow rose, Minnie’s favorite flower.

  “She was a ray of sunshine in everybody’s lives,” said Jean Shepard. “This is for the grandest lady of them all.”

  Henry Cannon died in his sleep on November 7, 1997, at age eighty. He and Sarah Ophelia Colley Cannon are buried side-by-side at Mount Hope Cemetery in Franklin, Tennessee.

  “The best thing that ever happened to me was marrying Henry,” she said. “When the lights go down, the applause is stilled, the laughter is a memory, the show is over—you’ve got to go home. And there’s got to be somebody waiting there for you who cares. . . . Henry has been greatly responsible for whatever personal and professional happiness I have attained.”

  “Minnie and Henry were the most beautifully matched pair,” said former neighbor and governor Winfield Dunn. “He lived for her, and she couldn’t have survived a day, probably, without him.”

  “They had a love affair that was almost unheard of,” eulogized Porter Wagoner.

  17

  For the Rest of Mine

  There have been plenty of romances behind the Grand Ole Opry curtain, but only one Opry star has proposed to his wife in front of it.

  While making his Opry singing debut on November 23, 1996, Trace Adkins went down on bended knee in front of his girlfriend Rhonda. He asked her to marry him with the show’s audience and cast as his witnesses. Everyone cheered when she said, “Yes.”

  “Who knew if I’d ever be invited back on that sacred stage?” Trace recalled in his 2007 memoir Trace Adkins: A Personal Stand. “So I decided to ask Rhonda to marry me right there on the Opry stage. I knew I wanted to pop the question somewhere special, but I needed it to be something truly spectacular and memorable. That’s how much playing the Opry meant to me.”

  Trace adds, “There’s no way I’ll ever forget that night. She didn’t have a clue. She had no idea. I had the ring in my little coat pocket, and my coat was hanging in the dressing room, Mr. Acuff’s old dressing room. I went to do makeup, and somebody told me it was time to go on. She said, ‘I’ll go get your jacket,’ and I said, ‘No! No!’ She kind of thought that was weird, but she didn’t know why I acted that way. But that was about the only surprise that I’ve ever pulled on her.”

  At an outdoor ceremony in the garden at Nashville’s historic Belle Meade Plantation, Trace and Rhonda were married on May 11, 1997. After they exchanged rings, he sang “The Rest of Mine” to her with a lump in his throat. Trace had cowritten the ballad with Kenny Beard, who played guitar accompaniment for him at the event. That fall, it became Trace Adkins’s fifth hit single. Listeners loved its memorable tagline: “I can’t swear that I’ll be here for the rest of your life/But I swear I’ll love you for the rest of mine.”

  The performance proved that roughneck Trace Adkins has a softer side, and in the case of Trace, the term “roughneck” applies in the classic definition of the word—oil field worker. He dropped out of Louisiana Tech after his sophomore year studying petroleum engineering to take a job laying pipe in an oil field.

  Next, he signed on for offshore drilling work. During the lonely downtime at night on the rig, Trace played his guitar and wrote and sang country tunes. His fellow roughnecks liked what they heard. One knew a successful country band in Lafayette, Louisiana.

  “On my two weeks off, I went down there and met these guys. They had entered a contest, the Wild Turkey Battle of the Country Bands. They’d won the local competition and were going to the regionals in Dallas. They wanted me to come to the regionals and sing this song I had written called ‘Bayou Sunrise.’”

  Billed as Bayou Speak Easy, the band won the regional contest and came in second at the national competition in Nashville. Despite the loss, Bayou Speak Easy recorded and released “Bayou Sunrise” by “Tracy Adkins” in 1986. A booking agent who’d spotted them in Dallas soon had the band on the road three hundred days a year.

  Performing was not new to Trace. As a teenager, he recorded two albums with gospel group The Commitments but abandoned the genre when Pentecostal preachers objected to his long hair.

  “My mother was just horrified when I wasn’t singing gospel anymore. We did everything else. I had to run the spectrum from George Jones to Kool & The Gang and everything in between. They expected you to be a breathing jukebox.”

  Many of the honky-tonks that hired Bayou Speak Easy were rough joints. Trace’s face is a roadmap of the route he took to stardom. It has faded scars from punches, kicks, and knife wounds. When you’re a 6-foot 6-inch, 245-pound ex–college football player in a redneck roadhouse, you don’t have to look for trouble—it has a way of finding you.

  “I never picked a fight in my life,” says Trace. “There’d be a little bitty guy in a club who would get really drunk [and] they’d want to fight the biggest guy there. And sometimes that would be me.”

  No wonder Trace Adkins calls his style “combat country.” He lived on “the wild side of life” for four years on the road, boozing and brawling when he wasn’t evolving into one of the greatest country entertainers of his generation. The long separations destroyed his marriage to his high school sweetheart. But Trace won custody of their daughters Tarah, born in 1985, and Sarah, born in 1989.

  Disillusioned with the music business, Trace returned to oil-rig work in 1989. A couple of years later, the Texas booking agent telephoned to ask how he was doing.

  “He said, ‘Do you sing anymore?’ I said, ‘I don’t even sing in the shower.’ He said, ‘One of these days you’re gonna look in the mirror and are gonna go, “I wonder what would have happened if I had really applied myself to music and gone to Nashville.” Son, don’t ever ask yourself that question. Take it from someone who knows.’ I thought about that. And the thought of being sixty years old and asking myself that question scared me a lot worse than selling my house and moving to Nashville and giving it a shot.”

  Trace arrived in Music City in August of 1992. He worked construction jobs and began performing on weekends at a bar outside Nashville called Tillie’s.

  A second marriage proved even stormier than his first. It ended during a heated argument in 1994, when his wife shot him through the lungs and heart. Incredibly, he survived. Even more incredibly, this was not Trace’s first brush with death. He was in a nearly fatal car crash when he was a junior in high school, and there were at least two accidents on the oil derricks that could have ended his life.

  On the mend from the shooting, Trace returned to Tillie’s. One night in 1995, he took a job entertaining at a real estate convention in a Nashville hotel. Rhonda happened to be there.

  “She was back in the back of the room with [music producer] Blake and Jan Mevis,” Trace recalls. “I knew Blake and Jan. So I just walked back there to see who those two hot chicks were, standing there with Blake. I went back there and introduced myself.”

  Rhonda not only liked what she saw, she liked what she heard. At the time, she was working for producer and record-label executive Tim DuBois. Rhonda brought Tim to Tillie’s. Tim agreed to finance some recording sessions but wound up not signing Trace to his label. Undeterred, Rhonda next brought producer and record-label executive Scott Hendricks to Tillie’s. That night, Trace finished his set, put his guitar down, and turned to find Scott standing right in front of him. On the spot, the producer offered him a Capitol Records contract.

  “That’s how it wen
t down,” relates Trace. “I was floored. I had to call him the next day to reassure myself that it wasn’t a dream.”

  Trace Adkins signed with Capitol on March 29, 1996. After that, things moved quickly. On April 13, the gently rhythmic, self-penned “There’s a Girl in Texas” debuted on the charts as his first single for the label. His last performance at Tillie’s was on June 22. Dreamin’ Out Loud was released as his debut album on June 25. “Every Light in the House” became his first top-ten hit that fall. Then came his proposal to Rhonda on the Opry stage. While “No Thinkin’ Thing” was en route to becoming his first number-one hit in early 1997, Trace was hard at work on another song.

  “I had been commissioned by Rhonda to write something to sing at the wedding,” he recalls. “It was a daunting task. Kenny Beard and I were just trying to come up with something. ‘The Rest of Mine’ just kind of fell in our lap.

  “I proposed in November, and I think I wrote that in January. I just put pressure on myself to write a positive love song. I had never written one before that I thought was any good. I’ve always been in a better frame of mind to sink my teeth into a painful song rather than one that was really happy. So I really set about trying to write a good, positive love song that was serious without being mushy and trivial. I’m glad I was watching that movie Phenomenon, because that’s where it came from.

  “That was one of those ‘Eureka!’ moments, one of those epiphanies. I mean, as soon as we heard that line, we both knew it was a song. I remember when we played it for Scott Hendricks. He said, ‘It only has one verse! Can’t you guys write two verses?’ I told him, ‘Scott, we have already said, “I will love you ’til I die.” I can’t go any farther than that. Another verse would be redundant. We said all that we needed to say.’ So then he let us get by without another verse.”