How Did Conway Twitty Die

Marie Wilson's Life Is Like a Country Song

Marie Wilson lives alone in a small apartment in a quiet cul-de-sac in Powell. Some days are better than others, but she gets around pretty well for a lady going on 86. She spends some mornings out sunning herself on her concrete stoop. If you sit down and talk with her for a while, she’s likely to stand up more often than you do. You might gather she still has a restless streak.

She doesn’t think of herself as presentable these days. She wears clashing colors just because she can. She’ll pour you a cup of coffee and make you a sandwich, but she prefers not to be photographed because she’s lost most of her hair. Still, some women half a century younger might envy her luminescent blue eyes. They might also envy her memories of certain old pals like Elvis Presley and Hank Williams. Her photo albums are like none others in the world.

Her home decor features a few artifacts that might bewilder a curious burglar. A private detective’s badge, for example. She was once a shamus. On her wall is a plaque that says, “To Miss Wilson, World’s Greatest Bus Driver.”

There’s her security clearance to work for the Atomic Energy Commission. “I worked on the atom bomb,” she says in the same tone you might expect a lady to say she’d strung a mess of beans. That was after she did some welding for Navy battleships.

There’s a twinkle in her eye, and you might think she’s an old lady pulling your leg. Nobody’s done all the things she says she has. “I wouldn’t believe it, myself,” she says. But her apartment is a museum of evidence. The most startling bit of it, hanging on her wall near her efficiency kitchen, not far from the Greatest Bus Driver plaque, is a gold record.

The Country-Music Pantheon: See if you can find Willie Nelson at this 1959 awards gala, held at Nashville’s Belle Meade Country Club, which drew many of the songwriters and performers who dominated country music from the 1940s through the 1970s. A selective sample includes Bill Anderson (upper left), who was later a familiar TV figure; Harlan Howard (smiling, at top); Mel Tillis (just above center, looking to left); Buck Owens (to the right of Mel Tillis); Pee Wee King, composer of the “Tennessee Waltz,” among other things (at left, looking up at camera); Cindy Walker, former Hollywood professional who became perhaps Nashville’s first female country songwriter (“You Don’t Know Me,” “Dream Baby”) (in foreground in white); Jim Reeves, (to the right of Walker, in white jacket with black lapel), the popular singer/songwriter killed in a 1964 plane crash; Skeeter Davis (excited-looking woman standing right behind Reeves), who had hits with several of Marie Wilson’s songs; Boudleaux Bryant (in glasses, looking toward Reeves), with his wife Felice (not pictured), wrote most of the Everly Brothers hits, and later a song called “Rocky Top”; 23-year-old Roger Miller (just behind Bryant, with prominent forehead); and Lorene Mann (woman standing by the sofa). Marie Wilson is in lower center, looking directly at the camera. The 26-year-old Willie Nelson is at top, right of center, looking grim and nervous. He was then known and respected by other songwriters, but would not be famous as a performer until about 15 years later, after reinventing himself as an “outlaw.” He and Harlan Howard, standing near him, wrote Patsy Cline’s two biggest hits, “Crazy” and “I Fall to Pieces,” respectively.

How to Win Friends and Influence People

How to Cook Everything, 2,000 Simple Recipes for Great Food

The road from Coorain

Uncle Tom's Cabin

How to Live, Or a Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer