Events
- January 10 — "Retro Country USA," a weekly two-hour syndicated radio program spotlighting major country hits of the 1980s (along with some from the 1970s and early 1990s), premieres. The show is hosted by Tampa radio personality Ken Cooper.
- February 25 — Johnny Cash's album, Unchained, wins a Grammy Award for Best Country Album. The album had been a critical success but was largely ignored by mainstream country radio, a fact Cash and producer Rick Rubin pick up on when they purchase a full-page advertisement in Billboard magazine. The ad, which appeared in March, featured a young Cash displaying his middle finger and sarcastically "thanking" radio for supporting the album.
- June 30 — The divorce of Vince and Janis Gill (of Sweethearts of the Rodeo) is finalized.
- December — The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts honors Willie Nelson for his lifetime contributions to the arts. Nelson is the first primarily country performer so honored.
Read more about this topic: 1998 In Country Music
Famous quotes containing the word events:
“One of the extraordinary things about human events is that the unthinkable becomes thinkable.”
—Salman Rushdie (b. 1948)
“That’s the great danger of sectarian opinions, they always accept the formulas of past events as useful for the measurement of future events and they never are, if you have high standards of accuracy.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Genius is present in every age, but the men carrying it within them remain benumbed unless extraordinary events occur to heat up and melt the mass so that it flows forth.”
—Denis Diderot (1713–1784)