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1987 Black Gold Festival

Keith Whitley appeared at the Black Gold Festival in 1987, as his wife, Lorrie Morgan, looked on. Sadly, Keith would die only two years later at age 33 of an alcohol overdose. Keith, a native of East Kentucky, was no stranger to Perry County. As a young struggling musician, he appeared on Sterling Acker's Jamboree program on Channel 57 in Hazard. He took an interest in Country music as his parents had a good collection of Country records. A few years later, he met Ricky Skaggs and they formed the East Kentucky Mountain Boys, re-creating a sound similar to the early efforts of the Stanley Brothers. Ralph Stanley heard them in 1970 and invited them to guest with him and the Clinch Mountain Boys at a few festivals. They worked all summer with him in 1971 and 1972, gaining valuable experience. After the second summer, Keith and Jimmy Gaudreau formed a short-lived band and Ricky went on to work with other bands. That group disbanded and Keith rejoined Ralph Stanley�fs band in 1974, remaining three years with the Clinch Mountain Boys. Keith left the Stanley band in 1978 to play with J.D. Crowe and the New South, who played a progressive brand of Bluegrass. By 1984, Ricky Skaggs had hit it big in Nashville and Keith went there hoping for his own success. He got a contract with RCA Victor, but at first had only modest success. In 1985, Keith reached the Top 15, then had three Top 10 singles in a row in 1986 and 1987. After a couple more moderate successes, Keith had three No. 1 hits in a row starting in the spring of 1988. When Keith Whitley died suddenly and tragically in 1989, at age 33, it was the abrupt and somewhat sordid collapse of a musical promise left largely unfulfilled. Though frequently overshadowed during his lifetime by more commercially successful peers like Randy Travis and George Strait, Whitley had, by the end of his life, matured into a hard country vocal stylist second to none and an accomplished and moving songwriter. The pity is he took his own life just at a point where the rest of the world was starting to recognize this. As Mark Coleman, writing for The Journal of Country Music, noted in a brilliant essay on Whitley's slender but significant musical legacy: "All of Keith's Number One singles -- 'Don't Close Your Eyes,' 'When You Say Nothing At All,' 'No Stranger to the Rain,' 'I Wonder Do You Think of Me' -- achieve a remarkable balance between pop accessibility and emotional purity. Keith Whitley discovered his musical niche -- a place where traditional culture and popular concerns overlap -- just around the same time he was dealing with some related personal problems."

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