Bob Macdill: Last News

Chris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic Tanya Tucker, Patty Loveless and Bob McDill will be the Country Music Hall of Fame’s three 2023 inductees, it was announced in a news conference at the hall’s museum in Nashville Monday morning. Tucker will be inducted into the hall in the “Veterans Era Artist” category, while Loveless will get her entree in the “Modern Era Artist” category. McDill is to be inducted in the “Songwriter” category, which is in rotation with the “Recording and/or Touring Musician” and “Songwriter” categories, each coming up every three years. Cheers went up at the announcement ceremony as well as around Nashville, as all three have long been favored for induction, and Tucker and Loveless particularly talked up as should-be shoo-ins for their historical importance as leading women in the genre.

Chris Willman Music WriterThe maxim “everything’s bigger in Texas” most definitely applies when it comes to having an outsized per capita concentration of brilliant songwriters. So, it’s almost surprising to realize that it took until 2005 for a Texas Heritage Songwriters Association to be formed, for the purpose of finally founding a Hall of Fame.One key figure in its origins was a beloved Texan not everyone realizes had a reputation as “a lover of the song, and a friend to songwriters”: University of Texas football coach Darrell K.