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:
“Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child’s loss of a doll and a king’s loss of a crown are events of the same size.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“When the world was half a thousand years younger all events had much sharper outlines than now. The distance between sadness and joy, between good and bad fortune, seemed to be much greater than for us; every experience had that degree of directness and absoluteness which joy and sadness still have in the mind of a child”
—Johan Huizinga (1872–1945)
“Turn where we may, within, around, the voice of great events is proclaiming to us, Reform, that you may preserve!”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)