Vernon Dalhart's 1924 recording of "The Wreck of the Old 97", a classic American ballad about the derailment of Fast Mail train No. 97 near Danville, Virginia in 1903, sold a staggering 7 million copies, alerting national record companies to the existence of a sizable market for country-music vocals.

Before rising to fame in the late 1920s, Jimmie Rodgers worked as a brakeman on the New Orleans and Northeastern Railroad, a position formerly held by his oldest brother, Walter, who had been promoted to conductor.

Cash's most popular and best-selling albums were the live albums he recorded in prisons: namely, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison in 1968 and Johnny Cash at San Quentin in 1969. Throughout his career, he performed in prisons, sympathetic to the plight of inmates who ran afoul of society. Although he himself was arrested seven times on a variety of charges, he only spent a few nights in jail.

"Coal Miner's Daughter" tells the true story of Lynn's life growing up in rural Kentucky "in a cabin on a hill in Butcher Holler", while her father, Melvin "Ted" Webb, worked all night in the Van Lear coal mine.

"Your Cheatin' Heart" was released in January 1953, about a month after Williams' driver found him dead in the back seat of his car during a stop on the way to a New Year's show in Canton, Ohio. The song became an instant hit, reaching number one on Billboard's Country & Western chart, where it remained for six weeks.

At his 2014 the Cowboy Rides Away Tour finale in Arlington, Texas, George Strait broke the Rolling Stones' record for the largest indoor concert when 104,793 fans crowded into AT&T Stadium.

While at San Quentin, Merle Haggard played for the prison's country music band. He attributed a performance by Johnny Cash at the prison on New Year's Day 1959 as his main inspiration to pursue a musical career. In 1972, after Haggard had become an established country music star, then-California governor Ronald Reagan granted him a full and unconditional pardon for his past crimes.

Bobby Gentry's "Ode to Billie Joe", released on July 10, 1967, was a number-one hit in the US within three weeks of release. The song's popularity proved so enduring that in 1976, nine years after its release, Warner Bros. commissioned author Herman Raucher to expand and adapt the story as a novel and screenplay.

The Kipsigis tribe in Kenya first heard Jimmie Rodgers' music from British soldiers during World War II. Believing his yodeling to be the work of some sort of antelope-human hybrid creature, the Kipsingis wrote a song called "Chemirocha" to celebrate this bizarre yodeling monster.

Nashville is home to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, the annual four-day CMA Music Festival and the famous Grand Ole Opry, just to name a few.