Music

Loveless played this guitar when she performed with her brother Roger Ramey as part of The Singing Swinging Rameys in the 1970s.

“Around 1969, we moved to just outside of Louisville [Kentucky],” Loveless recalls. “I was always, even at five or six years old, singing songs I heard on the radio or sometimes I would try to make up my own songs. Daddy used to hear me singing and when we did move to Louisville, I think he saw potential there. He sent us to take guitar lessons and the teacher told my dad, ‘She has the ear and she can hear the notes.’ I started taking lessons and Daddy decided to buy me my own guitar and that was that Epiphone guitar. That guitar was one thing I kept with me from day one. When I decided to leave North Carolina, I put my clothes and that guitar and a few other items in my car and came back to Nashville. That guitar was always like a friend to me, saying, ‘You better take me along.’”

The exhibit also highlights the jacket and floral print dress, accented with rhinestones and beads, that Loveless wore on June 11, 1988, the evening Porter Wagoner inducted her into the cast of the Grand Ole Opry.

“I met [stylist] Sheri McCoy when I was opening some shows for Reba McEntire around like 1987,” Loveless says. “When Sheri came off the road, she started a company with Ann Waters. They were together from like 1988 to 1991 and they dressed so many artists—Reba, Kathy Mattea, Trisha Yearwood, Pam Tillis. They picked up the dress in a little boutique and then they had the jacket made to go over the dress. I loved it because I felt like it represented the style of music I was doing and I felt like it represented what the Opry was about.”

In 1988, alongside Randy Travis, Loveless did a USO tour that visited United States military bases in Alaska, Japan and South Korea. The Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum exhibit includes a monogrammed USO jacket Loveless wore during the tour.

“That was a major experience for me to be able to see how it really works over there in the military,” Loveless says of the USO Tour. “I remember our trip started in Alaska and I was getting ready for shows in one of those big hangers, which was so cold. It was rough, but I wasn’t going to complain, of course. I remember it was ‘Bags at four [in the morning], bodies at six,’” she said with a laugh, “and off we went. We spent the whole day visiting bases and then we’d have a show at night, and sometimes wouldn’t get to sleep until 2 in the morning and had to be up at four. I got a taste of what it was like to be on call and we did a week in Alaska, a week in Japan and a week in South Korea. That jacket was one of those things I always kept, because that experience was one I never want to forget.”

The exhibit also includes the black velvet dress, with floral pleats and velvet sleeves, that Loveless wore in the music video for her 1991 song “I’m That Kind of Girl”—but Loveless says there is more to the story than the video.

“There was a cape that went around that dress, and that cape–and that whole dress–is the one I wore when I performed ‘When I Call Your Name’ with Vince Gill at the CMAs in like 1990 or 1991,” Loveless recalls. “My clothing that I wore on awards shows and things, I would incorporate them into videos. Back then, I was always focusing on the road, the band. I focused on where the money needed to go and that was more important to me, so I thought, ‘I’ll make use of that [dress] and something else.’”

On May 2, 2013, the country music community gathered at the Grand Ole Opry House in Nashville, Tennessee, to pay its final respects to country music legend George Jones. One of the service’s emotional zeniths came when Loveless and Vince Gill performed Gill’s “Go Rest High on That Mountain.” Loveless’ Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum exhibit includes the black Givenchy jacket and pants that Loveless wore during the performance. As with the black velvet dress from her “I’m That Kind of Girl” video, this wasn’t the first time Loveless had worn the Givenchy set.

“I chose to wear that outfit to the Grammys when I was up for a country album Grammy for The Trouble With the Truth [in 1996]. I didn’t win, but that was the outfit I wore when the awards were given out before the televised part of the show. I kept that outfit, so when the ‘Go Rest High’ performance happened I thought, ‘I can still fit into this. This is probably the right outfit to wear.’ I wanted to put this outfit into the exhibit because so many people saw that performance and it seemed to touch so many people.”