International Country Music Conference

10/12/2026

You can find Country Music most everywhere including Walgreens.

10/12/2026

GatorRock shares Ernie Ashworth 1963.

10/12/2026

Jim Hilmar & Frettin' Fingers shares hard to find records.

It's always fun to talk with fellow 'record nuts' and see which records took them more than a few years to add to their collection. I had a chance to do a bit of that this weekend. Here are 4 EP's from my stash - each one took more than a little while for me to find. In my photo the two EP's that took the me the most hunting / searching are the Jimmy Bryant Country Cabin Jazz EP and the Johnny Horton Requestfully Yours EP. Keep in mind that much of my searching was done before the widespread evolution of the Internet.

10/12/2026

Timeless Country Music shares Waylon and Willie writing a classic.

In 1969 at a Fort Worth motel, Waylon Jennings spotted a newspaper ad for Ike and Tina Turner that called her a “good-hearted woman loving good-timing men.” He walked into the middle of a poker game where Willie Nelson was sitting and said the phrase would make a perfect country song.
The two of them started trading lines right there at the table while Willie’s wife Connie wrote everything down. Willie later said they were thinking about the women who put up with them—Connie and Waylon’s wife Jessi Colter. Even though Willie only added a couple of lines, including the one about teardrops and laughter, the two friends split the songwriting credit evenly.
Waylon recorded the first version in 1971. Willie cut his own solo take the same year. A few years later, for the landmark Wanted! The Outlaws album, Waylon took a live recording of the song, removed some of his own vocal, and overdubbed Willie’s voice to create the duet that the whole country would know. That 1976 version went to Number One and helped carry the outlaw sound into the mainstream.
Full story and track below 👇

10/12/2026

Alan Lomax Archive at the Association for Cultural Equity shares an important 5 November event.

10/12/2026

International Western Music Association shares Male Vocalist of the Year nominees.

10/12/2026

Country Music Paradise shares Eddie Rabbitt and his father.

In 1978, inside a professional recording studio in Nashville, Eddie Rabbitt prepared to cut a track for his fourth studio album, Variations. By then, he had already established himself as a rising force in country music, surrounded by the finest session players and commercial polish money could buy.

Yet for one specific song titled "Song of Ireland," the polished studio sound was not what he wanted.

Instead of hiring a seasoned Nashville session musician, Eddie looked toward an elderly Irish immigrant who had spent his adult life working hard, honest labor: his own father, Thomas Michael Rabbitt.

Decades earlier, Thomas had left Ireland, carrying across the Atlantic ocean the traditional tunes and the fiddle playing he had learned in his homeland. Throughout Eddie’s childhood in New Jersey, that rustic fiddle was the background rhythm of their home, echoing the haunting heritage of an ancestry left behind. Now, his son was at the peak of American country music, working in state-of-the-art facilities that seemed an ocean away from the impoverished soil of the Old World.

Eddie invited his aging father to step into the recording booth.

Standing before the sensitive studio microphones, Thomas lifted his fiddle to his chin. His weathered hands drew the bow across the strings, producing the plaintive, unmistakable lilt of traditional Irish music. In that room, there was no commercial posturing. Every note resonated with the sacrifices of an immigrant father and the profound gratitude of a son who had never forgotten where his bloodline began.

The recording became a sacred bridge. Through that single acoustic performance, an elderly immigrant’s memories of Ireland were permanently pressed into vinyl alongside his son’s voice, binding their shared lineage forever.

Variations went on to solidify Eddie’s standing, but for both men, "Song of Ireland" stood entirely apart from charts and royalties. Long after the album cycles ended, the recording remained the ultimate heirloom of their relationship—a father’s living voice captured in the strings of a fiddle, preserved forever by the son he raised.

That quiet recording preserved a bond deeper than any chart success. For those who treasure the family roots behind classic country, many more stories of artists honoring the parents who gave them their music are still being preserved here on this page.