How country music broke my brain: take a behind-the-scenes glance at some of the most outrageous--and legendary--characters country music has to offer.

• Author: House, Gerry
• Position: Entertainment

I SAT ON THE SET of "Nashville Now" with her during a commercial. She leaned over and said in a stage whisper, "You're doin' a great job, honey. Keep it up." It was like being blessed by the Queen.

Filling in for Ralph Emery on his nighttime Nashville Network show was nerve-racking. Television is a touchy thing. It is like the camera can sense the inner soul of a person. Tune slows down sometimes when you are on the tube. It took me awhile to learn that a pause or gathering my thoughts only took a blip of time. It feels, however, like you have gone mute and that a tiny pause is forever. I really never got very good at TV. I was better off in a quiet studio with just a microphone and nobody staring at me.

Minnie Pearl, however, became electric in front of a crowd. "If you love them, they'll love you back," she was fond of saying.

I adored the stories that Pearl shared with me. I am certain she made everybody feel like they were part of her inner circle. Sarah Cannon (her real name) wore the Minnie Pearl hat with a price tag and matronly dresses like the pro she was. She also gave me one of the best life lessons of all time. This from a woman who wrote the great joke, "Marriage is like a hot bath. Once you get used to it, it ain't so hot." Isn't that classic? Since I write jokes, we talked every chance we got about construction, timing, and performing. For 25 years, I called it "doing a Minnie." She told me that her husband, Henry, stood beside the stage nearly every night when she was on tour and afterward gave her input on her act.

"Why do you do that joke?" Henry would ask--and here was the lesson part.

"Because I like it. It makes me laugh. I look forward to it."

"But," he argued, "the crowd don't seem to laugh at it very much."

Pearl: "I don't care. When you do comedy or anything, you've got to do something for yourself. It's my little joke. It's inside, but the folks who get it really get it. If I ain't havin' no fun, the audience will know I ain't, and they won't have no fun, either."

Good advice: do something just for yourself every now and then.

Pearl often told me about the "old days." I mean the really history-making, rough-and-tumble old days. She swore that one of the reasons she was slightly bent over was from riding in the back of Hank's car with a bull fiddle in the window behind the backseat. Hank is Hank Williams. The original Hank. Picture this: a sleek 1945 Buick with a long slope toward the back. Cars in those days had a...