We’ve got a picture hanging in our bedroom from the day we met. He was 12 and I was 29. It was me and him and his sister. His mama took the picture. The first picture Marty ever took was me in that station wagon. I certainly had no idea that writing songs with Marty would lead to us getting married. We dated for about three and a half years and we’ve been married about a year now, which is great.
ND: Radio programmers have told you they won’t play anything from your new album. And yet stylistically, half of the songs hark back to the records you made while at RCA, where you had 18 Top 10 singles. What do you make of that?
CS: For one thing, radio don’t know me. They know who they think I am, or who they thought I was, and they have metamorphosed me into something that they think they don’t want to hear.
I just gotta find a way to get to the people. I know the people who come to my shows. The other night I did two shows up in Pennsylvania. Our second show started at 10:30 and everybody who was at the first show was still there at 10:30. They knew almost every song I did, and I’ve got almost 50 albums.
Some of them are kids. I’ve noticed that my audience is getting younger and younger. Now granted, part of my audience is girls that’s hoping I’m bringing my husband. I realize that. But it’s great, because Marty’s fans are also coming to my shows. Some of them have come up to me and said, “I’d never heard you sing before. Where’s your next show?” And that feels good.
ND: You had what sounds like a tough childhood. Did singing help you endure hard times while you were growing up?
CS: Yeah, but when kids are like that, you don’t really know it’s hard times. I mean, how hard can it be to be free after breakfast and run out and play in the woods all day? As long as you’re home by supper nobody’d worry about you. So I’d dig up a sassafras root, and go climb a tree and swing back and forth.
I think maybe the hardest part of it was that I couldn’t hear the Grand Ole Opry all the time ’cause we didn’t have much of a radio. But there again, I got to listen to Sarah Vaughan and Nancy Wilson and Nat King Cole and Brook Benton and Tony Bennett. I’ve made it pretty clear that my favorite singers were George Jones and Loretta Lynn, but much of time growing up I heard the great pop singers as well.
ND: Tell me about your first big break, the time you won the talent contest at the traveling Grand Ole Opry show in Columbus, Ohio.
CS: I had never seen a Grand Ole Opry star. I had seen Doc and Chickie Williams, who were from the WWVA Wheeling Jamboree, at a high school one time. That was the most I’d seen of any professional music. Well, I heard that George Jones was gonna be at this park, Frontier Town, near Columbus, Ohio. But when we got there, we discovered that somebody had given us the wrong schedule. George Jones had been the week prior and that week was a new guy called Bill Anderson. He was known for his songwriting, but on his own he was just starting out.
This park had a talent contest every week, and my husband and some folks talked me into singing in the contest. The hardest part was that you had to accompany yourself. I knew one key on the guitar — I could play a little in C — but I won the contest, I think mainly because for seven weeks running there’d been a seven-year-old boy that had won playing banjo.
My prize was five silver dollars and a chance to sing on the Opry show that night. Bill Anderson was so nice to me. He came out and listened to me when I sang my song on the show. I won with a song that Jean Shepard had had, called “I Thought Of You”, and on the show that night I sang a Jim Reeves song called “Four Walls”.
Six months later we found out that Bill Anderson was gonna be in Canton, Ohio, on a memorial show for Hank Williams, and we went up to see it. Johnny Cash was on the show, and Hank Williams Jr. — he was about 14. That was the night they announced that Columbia had signed the Statler Brothers. I’ll never forget June Carter in this chartreuse green chiffon dress, doing her comedy bit. She’s just the greatest. Her timing is so great.
We didn’t get to meet June and John, but after the show we went up to the autograph line and Bill Anderson saw my husband and I — and recognized us — and said, “Why don’t you come eat with me and the band after the show?” And so we did, and he said, “You like country music so well, why don’t you come to Nashville?” I thought, “Oh yeah, sure. We can’t do that.” I’d said since I was five that it was my dream to sing on the Grand Ole Opry, but it’s one of those dreams that I never thought would come true. It was just a dream.
But he invited me and I came down on March 28, 1964, and sang on the Ernest Tubb Record Shop [the Midnight Jamboree show]. I came back in May and recorded a demo for Bill; his manager, Hubert Long, took it to Chet Atkins and Chet signed me in June and I recorded in July. “Once A Day” was out the first week in August and went to #1 in November and was there for about two and a half months.
