The journalist who named country’s ‘outlaw music’

Hazel Smith was a fixture on Nashville’s Music Row for almost half a century. The self-described mother hen of country music was a journalist, songwriter, publicist, cookbook author, and radio and TV personality. She made her biggest mark in 1973 while doing PR for Tompall & the Glaser Brothers, when a radio station asked what it should call the rough, rock-influenced material being produced by country renegades such as the Glasers, Waylon Jennings, and Willie Nelson. Inspired by Jennings’ recent single, “Ladies Love Outlaws,” Smith replied, “Outlaw music.” The name stuck, and when RCA released 1976’s million-selling Wanted! The Outlaws—an album featuring Jennings, Nelson, and others—it became a movement. Yet Smith never took her beloved country music too seriously. “You go to Music Row and you see these people prissing around like they’re Mr. Albert Einstein,” she said. “Really what they’re doing is selling hillbilly songs.” Born in Caswell County, N.C., Smith worked in a hosiery mill after graduating from high school, said the Nashville Tennessean. Her farmer parents refused to send her to college out of fear she’d become “an old-maid schoolteacher.” At age 19, Smith married a musician, and had two sons. When the couple divorced, she began dating Bill Monroe, “the father of bluegrass.” Their tumultuous romance inspired Monroe’s “Walk Softly on This Heart of Mine,” which became a Top 40 country hit for the Kentucky Headhunters. Smith moved to Nashville in 1970 and took a job as “publicist for the iconoclastic Texas singer-songwriter Kinky Friedman,” said The New York Times. By the end of the decade, she was working with the rock band Dr. Hook & the Medicine Show, who “recorded several of her songs,” and was writing a “popular column for Country Music magazine.” Smith went on to become country music’s matriarch, said RollingStone.com. She had a syndicated radio show, hosted a Country Music Television food series, and wrote a Southern cookbook. Stars including Garth Brooks and Brad Paisley said they owed her “a measure of their success.” In her later years, Smith jokingly complained that modern songwriters had lost their outlaw spirit. “[They] now come dragging in about 9:30 a.m. wearing clean clothes. They’ve slept all night in their very own bed in their very own home beside their wife and not somebody else’s wife,” she said. “I don’t know how they get their material.”

Born in Young Harris, Ga., Miller served in the Marines before beginning his political career, at age 27, as mayor of his hometown, said The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He quickly climbed Georgia’s political ranks, serving two terms as a state senator and then 16 years as lieutenant governor. Elected governor in 1990, Miller “gambled his political fortunes” on introducing a state lottery to fund school scholarships. It worked. He left the governor’s office in 1999 “with a remarkable 85 percent approval rating.”

Miller came out of retirement the following year to fill a vacant U.S. Senate seat, said The Washington Post. Declaring he wouldn’t “play the partisan game,” he proved his cross-party credentials by co-sponsoring Bush’s taxcut bill. Democrats mocked him as “Zig Zag Zell” for his shifting policy positions, a criticism he rejected. “I would be suspect of any politician,” he said, “who doesn’t change their mind on some issues.”