Many casual country listeners treat the ’80s like a mysterious black hole floating through the middle of the genre. You have your early honky tonk classics, then your golden outlaw masterpieces of the ‘60s and ‘70s, then…something or other happened…and suddenly you end up in the ’90s with multi-platinum mega-pop crossovers like Garth Brooks and Shania Twain.
Explore its depths, however, and the ‘80s reveals a portrait of country music locked in an existential battle for its place in the world. After the ’70s saw Nashville dipping into smoother pop sounds to find chart success, and crossover phenomena like Urban Cowboy suddenly dominated the mainstream perception of country with its soft-rock spin on the style, the genre had found itself in an identity crisis. New tendrils were sprouting everywhere: Rosanne Cash introducing punk and new-wave seasonings into her songs, Lucinda Williams signing to Rough Trade and forging the embers of Americana, Steve Earle setting the template for alt-country with his Bruce Springsteen-esque anthems. Even k.d. lang managed to break onto the country charts with her silvery, sapphic songs before anyone knew she was a lesbian. Amid all this evolution, a growing crop of artists like George Strait and Randy Travis were aching to take the genre back to its roots. This newly dubbed “neotraditionalist” movement sought to remind people of what drew them to country music in the first place: “three chords and the truth,” and all that.
Keith Whitley almost had his chance to end up on the neotraditionalist Mount Rushmore. A tender-voiced baritone with a golden mullet, the Kentucky native’s slick yet rootsy music embodied the sound at its peak. Born in Ashland, and raised in Sandy Hook, he spent his youth working in coal mines, singing bluegrass and worshipping Lefty Frizzell before eventually breaking out as a country star in his own right. In interviews, the Kentucky Democrat was as approachable, bashful, and handsome a man as you’d ever find.
But beneath his friendly exterior, there lurked a darker side. Whitley nursed a crippling dependency on the bottle, and he lived his life dangerously on the edge. One of his old pastimes included getting loaded and racing his friends up and down mountain roads, a hobby that would eventually claim the life of one of his friends. In another instance, Whitley went careening off a 120-foot drop into a river, leaving him with a broken collarbone. He’d picked up his extreme drinking habit in his teens, and it clouded his adult life; his wife, fellow country singer Lorrie Morgan, detailed in her memoir of having to follow him to the bathroom so he wouldn’t raid any beauty products for their alcohol contents.
His lifestyle eventually caught up with him. At 34, Whitley was found dead in his Nashville home. His autopsy showed a blood alcohol level that would’ve taken at least 20 shots of whiskey in two hours to reach, and he was found surrounded by empty bottles of mouthwash and half-drank hair spray cans. It was a devastating end to a career that had only just begun taking off.
A Triumphant Epic of Redemption
In that short time, however, he left us with one song that recast his lifelong struggles into a breathtaking, triumphant epic. “I’m No Stranger to the Rain,” the last single he released just months before his death, encapsulates Whitley’s abilities as an artist, rising above the tragedy surrounding it to find a deeper strength. It might as well be the sound of the search for the will to live.
It starts with just a trickle; glistening pitter-patters of steel-string and a hi-hat that make a clearing for Whitley’s deep, gentle voice. “I’m a friend of thunder/Friend, is it any wonder lightning strikes me?” he asks, twirling each syllable, world-weary but ready to face the dawn. His demons are abstract but ever-present. “I’ve fought with the devil/Got down on his level/But I never gave in, so he gave up on me,” he reassures. Over a minute passes before the full drum beat arrives. From there it just keeps gaining power, pedal steel and backing harmonies whipping up momentum like Chinook winds barrelling across the plains. By the time he reaches the end of the third verse and declares, “I’ll put this cloud behind me/That’s how the man designed me,” the big man might as well be in the room with us.
There’s nothing resembling a chorus, just a series of subtly interlocking verses that swell until the whole thing drifts away into the clouds. Written by Ron Hellard and Sonny Curtis (the latter a former member of Buddy Holly’s band), Whitley immediately resonated with the song’s sense of pain and resilience upon hearing it played for him. Hellard himself didn’t quite know what to make of the song upon first writing it. It was only upon hearing it again later in life after a number of hardships (including the death of his father) that he realized what he was trying to express. “You’re talking to yourself, really,” he said about hearing it on the radio. “It’s a song about a kind of redemption… It’s like yourself coming back 20, 10 years later, patting yourself on the back and saying, ‘It’s gonna be okay.’”
The song went to No. 1 on the country charts, and it remains transcendent in Whitley’s body of work. While he had plenty of other great hits, on “I’m No Stranger to the Rain,” he cut through the cheese and captured a glimpse at the elemental. Like his neotraditional contemporaries, Whitley’s sound exists in a nostalgic nexus between times, his old school arrangements imbued with a lush studio sheen that felt distinctly modern, laying the groundwork for the oncoming pop-country surge of the ’90s. The album it came from, Don’t Close Your Eyes, may have represented Whitley’s move away from the glossier production of his debut toward an earthier feel, but it still exists in a very different world than the honky tonk he grew up idolizing. Like flipping through old Polaroids, there’s a sense of remove in the nostalgic tenor of the ’80s neotraditionalists that gives their soft production a texture all its own.
In the years since Whitley’s death, labels have doled out his remaining material, as they are wont to do. Though Whitley mainly sang other writer’s songs in his own career, he did record a handful of his own, including one unreleased track that offers an eerie twist on the perseverance he sang of in “I’m No Stranger to the Rain.” On it, Whitley talks about walking in Hank Williams’ footsteps, living hard on the road and making the same mistakes his heroes did. Declaring his resolve to keep going, he offers us a haunting wink as he sings out the title: “I’ve Done Everything Hank Did But Die.”