In case you haven’t heard, Porter Wagoner died Monday not long after the news that he was suffering from lung cancer was released. Dolly Parton announced earlier this week that she was able to sing for Porter and prayed with him during a visit. “It felt good that I had the opportunity to say goodbye properly,” she said.
Wagoner, a three-time Grammy winner, died as three more country legends were being inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Vince Gill, Mel Tillis, and Ralph Emery were being inducted Sunday night, not knowing that at 8:25 p.m. Wagoner, inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2002, had passed on. Cell phones are not allowed at the ceremony, so it was not until the show was over at 10 p.m. that the sad news was known.
Ralph Emery, a country music broadcaster, hosted his first television show, Opry Almanac, in 1963. He also served as the host of the successful Nashville Now on the Nashville Network. He has written four books about his life in country music and those he has met along the way. In 2007, he returned to hosting and he now appears on the Ralph Emery LIVE show on RFD-TV.
Vince Gill, married to songstress Amy Grant, worked in country music for ten years before his breakthrough album, When I Call Your Name, won him his first country music awards. Since then, he has won 18 Country Music Awards, 18 Grammy awards and sold over 22 million albums.
Mel Tillis first performed professionally in 1951. He moved to Nashville in 1957 and never looked back. He wrote a number of hits for artists in the 1950s and 1960s before having his first #1 with 1972’s I Ain’t Never. He was named the CMA Entertainer of the Year in 1976.
In other country music news, singers Lorrie Morgan and Sammy Kershaw have announced they are divorcing. The pair married in 2001. The divorce comes just after Kershaw lost the bid for lieutenant governor of Louisiana.
Neither is a strange to divorce. Morgan has been married five times before and she is Kershaw’s fourth wife.