COVER STORY
Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain: Tales of Romance and Tragedy
Written by one of country music’s most respected historians, Robert K. Oermann, Behind The Grand Ole Opry® Curtain uncovers the remarkable stories behind some of the Opry’s greatest legends. Interviews with the stars themselves and rare photos help bring the stories to life right before the readers’ eyes. Behind The Grand Ole Opry® Curtain offers a never-before-seen look at the dramatic highs and lows of the people behind the longstanding tradition.
From storybook romances, such as Johnny Cash and June Carter, Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood, and Vince Gill and Amy Grant; to dramatic tragedies which will heavy the heart, such as the loss of some of country music’s best including Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, and Dottie West; to fascinating tales of betrayal and murder; fans can’t help but be mesmerized by the book’s gripping chronicles of true heartache and happiness.
“The Grand Ole Opry® has always had that special something that separates it from every other form of American entertainment: its people,” writes Oermann. “This book is dedicated to the dreamers who, for going on a century, have made their way to the Opry stage, aspiring to lend their voices to the Opry’s song. Country music’s home has been built upon their dreams, their performances, and their undying commitments. This book is dedicated as well to those in the pews, cars, and living rooms around the world who have dropped by or tune in over that same course of time, sharing in the Opry dream while laughing and clapping along. Indeed, the Opry is set apart by its people. Good people.”
Behind The Grand Ole Opry® Curtain is an inspiring example of how country music’s first family has time and again united to face adversity head-on, honor those who have come before them, and keep the tradition alive for those to come in the future. It serves as a living and breathing testament to the bond that forever ties Opry members together in a tight knit circle which simply cannot be broken, even long after the curtain falls.
Please enjoy an excerpt from Behind the Grand Ole Opry Curtain: Tales of Romance and Tragedy, which is now available in stores and at The Opry Shop. The first 100 to purchase the book from The Opry Shop online will receive a copy autographed by the author.
Barbara and Ken
Barbara Mandrell was just fourteen years old when her husband fell for her—in most states, that would have made her “jailbait.”
“No, it’s called ‘San Quentin quail’ in California,” says husband Ken Dudney with a chuckle. “I don’t know what I was thinking. I tell everyone that I must have been emotionally retarded back in those days. I was twenty-one years old, and she’s fourteen years old. I see this pretty little blonde girl come into the room. I had no idea she was fourteen. She looked a lot older than that. She had legs on her that were a lot older than that, I can tell you. And big bouffant hair.”
“Aqua Net hairspray kept it there,” Barbara interjects.
“It was unbelievable,” Ken continues. “And I was engaged to another girl at the time.”
The year was 1963. By then, Barbara was already a semiprofessional country musician. Born December 25, 1948, she was billed at age eleven as “The Princess of the Steel Guitar” when she played Las Vegas with Joe and Rose Lee Maphis, Tex Ritter, Cowboy Copas, and other stars in the summer of 1960. During that summer vacation, she also toured for two weeks in a package show with Johnny Cash, Patsy Cline, George Jones, Don Gibson, Gordon Terry, and June Carter, and made appearances on the Los Angeles country television show Town Hall Party.
Convinced that his daughter could become a full-fledged attraction, papa Irby Mandrell formed the Mandrell Family Band to back her at shows he booked at California military bases. Barbara sang and played steel guitar and saxophone. Irby was the rhythm guitarist and emcee. Mother Mary played bass. Bill Hendricks played sax and clarinet. Brian Lonbeck played lead guitar. College student Ken Dudney was hired to play drums.
Although barely out of childhood, Barbara was wildly jealous of Ken’s fiancée, a beautiful ballet dancer his own age. To this day, she becomes green-eyed when she thinks of her. He explains his wife’s temperament by saying, “Barbara is an extremely creative person. I was engaged to a ballet dancer, a creative person. They’re very high-strung human beings. They’re very self-willed.”
“Are you comparing me to your ex?” she snaps. “That fiancée I took you away from?”
Ken: “See? Forty-four years later!”
Barbara: “I’m still so jealous of that woman.”
Ken: “She was pretty.”
Barbara: “But I got him.”
To disguise the fact that they were falling in love, Barbara and Ken pretended not to like each other in front of her parents. He teased her unmercifully.
“In the clubs when we’d be on break or something, he’d say to me, ‘Would you like to dance?’ ” Barbara recalls. “I’d say, ‘Yes.’ He’d say, ‘Keep sitting there, and maybe somebody will ask you.’ I fell for it every time!
“I think the reason we would yell and scream at each other is because we very much tried to mislead people closest to us, like my mother, my father and the other musicians in the group. So we would be kind of not nice to each other, so they would not know that we were in love. Then we got in the habit of it. It stemmed from that.
“I’m really happy the way we are. That’s very much a Mandrell and Dudney way. We don’t clam up. We don’t do the silent treatment. We just yell and scream. Get it over with. Say it.” “We’re both Type A personalities,” adds Ken. “We’re even the same blood type.
“We see couples who are just so bland in their personalities with each other. They never argue about anything. It’s ‘Whatever you want, Dear.’ And we’re going, ‘Man, those are the dumbest boring people I’ve ever seen in my life.’ ”
Barbara and Ken’s courtship was volatile from the start. They bickered and argued, made up, and bickered again.
“When we were dating, everything I would do, I was thinking about him,” Barbara recalls. “I would sit in class when I was supposed to be listening, and I would be practicing writing ‘Mrs. Ken Dudney.’ ‘Mrs. Barbara Dudney.’ I mean, I was possessed.”
“When we were first dating, I had the most horrendous jealous demeanor,” Ken confesses. “Jealousy is a sickness. It was terrible. We would break up because we would fight. I remember she had a date with another guy one time. I stood across the street in the neighbor’s bushes waiting for her to come home. How horrible is that? But I got over that. I have no idea how. Maybe with the help of God.
“It’s a good thing, too, because there’s a lot of hugging in show business.”
When she was sixteen, he bought her an engagement ring: “I wasn’t going to let her have it, but she just begged me for it. I was going off to navy flight school—the superhuman beings of the world: I was going to be a naval aviator. She wanted something to remember me by when I’m gone. So I let her have it. I didn’t know if she’d wear it.”
Barbara kept it in her room in a dresser drawer during the day. At night, she put it on to sleep with it. When she went off to high school, back it went into the drawer. One morning, she forgot and left it out. Her mother found it. When Barbara got home from school that day, her parents lit into her. They insisted she return the ring to Ken’s mother. Irby called Ken at a navy base in Florida and threatened to get him in trouble with the commanding officer. Ken was instructed not to call, write, or have any further contact with Barbara. Both agreed to date others.
“I was on The Dating Game TV show,” Barbara reports. “If you count that date, I had seven different guys that I dated in my life. Six of whom—not The Dating Game guy—proposed. What can I say?”
“Some of them even proposed marriage,” Ken wisecracks.
Just before Barbara turned eighteen, Ken came home on leave. He proposed. She knew the Mandrells were scheduled to return to Vietnam for their second tour entertaining the troops, so she chose May 28, 1967, as their wedding date. It was ten days before her high school graduation and two weeks before she was scheduled to fly to Asia. She spent her honeymoon studying for her science test so she could graduate. Ken tutored her.
She headed for Vietnam. He traveled to his naval assignment in Washington State. Barbara Mandrell made a record that year called “Queen for a Day” that was fairly successful. But when she returned stateside, the eighteen-year-old vowed she was quitting show business to become a navy wife.
Barbara dutifully studied navy protocol and tended to cooking and cleaning while Ken flew jumbo jets off an aircraft carrier. Her housewife days ended in 1968, when Ken was deployed for nine months aboard a carrier in the Mediterranean Sea.
She went to visit her parents, who were in Nashville by then. They took her to the Grand Ole Opry. She saw Dolly Parton there. That was it. Barbara Mandrell decided that she wanted to get back into music. She phoned her husband overseas to tell him of her decision.
“I had no concept of what that was,” Ken says. “That didn’t mean anything to me. I just thought, ‘Okay, she wants to play music again. That’s fine.’ See, we had no concept, or I had not anyway, of what being a star meant.”
“I had done the TV thing, and I had done the tour with Johnny Cash thing, but I didn’t realize,” she agrees. “I just knew that music was fun, and that I enjoyed it. And people were nice to me and would say nice things. So this is what I want to do. When I saw the Opry, I thought, ‘I can do that.’ I didn’t see the hard work and the sacrifice.” Although he loved the navy, Ken resigned. He joined Barbara in Nashville and began to give flying lessons. Then he became a pilot for the State of Tennessee, in charge of transporting its governors in its private Leer jet. For the first few years of his wife’s musical career, Ken Dudney was the family’s chief breadwinner.
Fiddler-singer Louise Mandrell joined her older sister on the road in 1969. That was the same year that Barbara Mandrell debuted on the national country charts with her “blue-eyed soul” version of Otis Redding’s “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.”
The family band was barely making ends meet when Barbara learned that she was pregnant, in 1970. She was taking birth control pills but slipped up one day.
“I forgot to take it. So I took two the next day. It doesn’t work that way.
“We knew we couldn’t afford to have a baby, but God knew differently. It was mixed emotions, because I was so grateful and so excited and yet so scared, because this was at a very critical time for us. If we could get three [show] dates a month, minimum, we could hang on and pay the bills.”
“We didn’t make any money from her career for quite a while,” Ken explains. “Every dime she made went back into the business, back into the show. That’s why I went to work as a pilot for the State of Tennessee.”
“We didn’t have any maternity insurance, because we weren’t going to get pregnant,” Barbara continues. “We found out that, back then, babies cost around $800 if you shared a room with somebody. We managed to save $800. But then I had to have a Caesarian section, $1,300. We had to pay for Matthew on time!”
“Several times, we tried to give him back,” Ken quips. “We’ve not paid. You take him back.”
Not long after son Matt’s birth in 1970, Barbara Mandrell had her first big solo hits, “Tonight My Baby’s Coming Home” (1971) and “Show Me” (1972). She was invited to join the Grand Ole Opry cast and became a member in July 1972.
“When I first started doing the Opry, Roy Acuff didn’t know who I was any more than the man in the moon,” she recalls. “But I was very fortunate, because Tex Ritter was still with us. I had known Mr. Ritter since I was eleven. He gave me probably by far the most incredible introductions I’ve ever received in my life. “Because of their scheduling, they began putting me on Roy Acuff ’s portion of the show. As we got to know each other, we became so close. When he and Bud Wendell inducted me, I thought, literally, ‘It doesn’t get any better than this.’
“I remember, one night [in 1982] the song I had out was ‘Till You’re Gone.’ It had a saxophone part in it. But I wasn’t going to sing it on the Opry, because I didn’t want to do it without playing my sax.”
At the time, the Opry frowned on bringing “non-country” instruments onto its stage. And of the show’s cast members, no one was more traditional than Roy Acuff.
“All of a sudden, there was a knock on the dressing-room door. Daddy says, ‘Mr. Acuff wants to see you.’ I’m paraphrasing here, but what he said to me was precious. He said, ‘I want you to go get that saxophone, and I want you to do that hit song of yours right now.’ I said, ‘Mr. Acuff, I don’t need to. I can do other songs.’ He said, ‘No, you got that hit record, and you go play it.’ He totally made me [take the sax onto the Opry stage]. I couldn’t believe it. Mr. Acuff introduced me, and I did the song. If somebody else would have told me that story, or if I hadn’t lived it, I wouldn’t believe it.” Barbara scored a major breakthrough with the sexually frank “The Midnight Oil” in 1973. To this day, it is considered a landmark recording in the annals of female country music. “This Time I Almost Made It” (1974) and “Standing Room Only” (1975) continued her momentum.
After daughter Jaime’s birth in 1976, Barbara’s career went into overdrive. “Married But Not to Each Other” (1977), “Woman to Woman” (1977), “Sleeping Single in a Double Bed” (1978), “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right” (1979), “Years” (1980), and a flurry of other hits led to 1981’s “I Was Country When Country Wasn’t Cool,” another of her signature songs. She was named the Country Music Association’s (CMA) Female Vocalist of the Year in 1979 and 1981 and hosted her own NBC network variety series, Barbara Mandrell & The Mandrell Sisters, costarring Louise and her youngest sibling Irlene, in 1980–1982. Barbara became the only woman in history to win back-to-back Country Music Association (CMA) Entertainer of the Year awards (in 1980 and 1981). She developed one of country music’s flashiest stage shows, spotlighting her multi-instrumental abilities on steel guitar, sax, banjo, drums, bass, and mandolin. By 1983, she had added dazzling choreography and was a triumph in Las Vegas, billed as “The Lady Is a Champ.”
But it all came to a crashing halt for country music’s “golden girl” on September 11, 1984. While out on a shopping trip with Matt and Jaime in her silver Jaguar, Barbara was hit head-on by a Subaru driven by a teenager. He was killed. Barbara and her children were spared by their seat belts, but she suffered a broken right femur, a shattered right ankle, a nearly destroyed right knee, and a severe concussion that affected her personality for months. Her subsequent 1990 best-selling autobiography Get to the Heart went into extensive detail about how wild her mood swings became during her recovery. Ken’s patience and love were put to the test. Her head injury caused her temper to rage out of control, and she snarled, screamed, and cursed at him while he tried to nurse her back to health. Opry star Bill Anderson shared his stories about caring for his brain-injured wife, Becky, and that helped Ken to understand what his wife was going through.
Son Nathaniel was born in 1985, and the following year Barbara staged her comeback concert. Friend and fellow Opry star Dolly Parton opened for her at the Universal Amphitheater in Los Angeles. Barbara had a pin in her leg and a brace in her boot, but she danced anyway. Even today, she limps at home when she’s having a bad day. But Barbara Mandrell has never done so onstage. By the 1990s, she was playing Vegas and touring steadily again. Through it all, father Irby Mandrell remained firmly in control as his daughter’s manager. Ken says he never felt in competition with his powerful father-in-law.
“He was the boss at what he did, and I did what I did,” Ken states. “He handled all the road things, and I didn’t. I didn’t book the hotel rooms and all that kind of stuff. I had nothing to do with it. When they bought the tour bus, Barbara and her dad designed that bus, and I had nothing to do with it.”
But as Irby’s health declined in the early 1990s, Barbara asked Ken to step into his management shoes. It was not, he notes, an easy transition for him.
“Her dad had open-heart surgery, and he was off the road for five months, to start with. I went on the road for five months. I quit my job at the State of Tennessee to do that. And I absolutely hated the road. That bus is so tiny to me. Of course, it was a huge world to Barbara. That is where her world was. She lived there. I hated every moment of it on that bus.”
Barbara remembers, “When Daddy retired and Ken moved in the last few years of my career to replace him, what was neat was he asked me if it would bother me if he went back to college. I said, ‘No, it doesn’t bother me.’ So even though he was a busy man, he went back to get a degree in business management. Yet he had already become my manager.”
Ken enrolled in Belmont University in Nashville in 1992–1993. He was, needless to say, the oldest student in his class. But he was also the best.
“It was coming up on the time for him to graduate,” Barbara recalls. “But he had to go to New York with me for something concerning my career. So he wasn’t there when he won the school’s highest honor, Business Management Student of the Year. Why? Because he was managing! I loved it. I did tease him when I saw his graduation picture. I said, ‘You look like one of the professors!’
“You can imagine that there have been many times when he’s been introduced as ‘Mr. Mandrell.’ Or people will say, ‘How does it feel to be Mr. Mandrell?’ Now, there aren’t a lot of men, believe me, who wouldn’t be bothered by that. And there are some that would really crush.”
Secure, steady, and good-humored, Ken Dudney is not one of them. During the height of her fame, he presided over her massive fan-club gatherings of three thousand or more with the aplomb of a circus ringmaster. His charm and wit have endeared him to everyone in her orbit.
Barbara Mandrell retired in late 1997. But she’s just as driven as ever, seeking perfection as a gardener, interior designer, and craftsperson.
She and Ken still bicker with one another. And they’re still in love.
“You not only forgive, you forget,” says Barbara of their spats. “There have been times when I absolutely wanted to walk out or leave him or kick him out or get him to leave me. It’s over. That’s it. I mean, that mad.
“But when it got right down to it, there was no way. I couldn’t imagine life without him. To me, it’s because God is with us. He helps us to see what’s important. We keep our word. We promised ’til death do us part.
“It is so deep that there are no words for it. I’ve told him this over and over again. And it hasn’t been too long ago that I told him again: I really hope I die first, because I cannot imagine my life without him. We are One.
“He is very witty and very funny, and I love to watch him make people laugh a lot. Sometimes he doesn’t make me laugh when he’s trying to make me laugh. It makes me mad sometimes, because I’m usually the thing he’s joking about. But that’s one of the things I fell in love with, his sense of humor.
“But most important, truly in my mind, is that God is a part of this. Ken loves our Lord Jesus Christ. He got saved and found the Lord when he was twenty-one years old. I also love it that he is such an exceptional, great father.
“When we were falling in love, ‘I Left My Heart in San Francisco’ by Tony Bennett was a hit,” Barbara recalls. “We both worked in Daddy’s band. On breaks, we’d dance, and when that song played, we just loved it.
“The deal we made is—and he’s kept to it—no matter where we are, and no matter what’s going on, if we hear that song, he is to turn to me and ask me to dance. No matter what. I don’t care if it’s in an elevator or where it is.”
For their twenty-second wedding anniversary, she gave him a tiny cable car that was a music box. It plays, of course, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” Sure enough, the first time they played it in their candlelit screened porch, he asked her to dance. When the music box wound down, Barbara and Ken woke from their private reverie to find that Matt, Jaime, and Nathan had all slipped from the room to give them their romantic privacy.
Barbara and Ken rededicated their vows on their tenth anniversary and again on their twenty-fifth.
“What are you doing on the fiftieth?” asks Ken. “I will do it then, too.”
“I’ll race ya,” Barbara replies.