Keith Whitley was buried in May 1989 with his next album still unfinished. Four months later, its title song, “I Wonder Do You Think of Me,” was the No. 1 country record in America. Four months after that, the same album gave him one more No. 1.
The year the hits caught up with the voice
Whitley had come up in Kentucky bluegrass, singing in Ralph Stanley’s Clinch Mountain Boys as a teenager alongside his friend Ricky Skaggs. After moving to Nashville in 1983 and signing with RCA, he spent years making records that did not sound like him.
In 1987 he asked RCA to shelve a finished album and let him start over with Garth Fundis, the producer best known for his work with Don Williams. The record they made, Don’t Close Your Eyes, came out in May 1988.
The title song, “When You Say Nothing at All” and “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” went to No. 1 back to back. The last of them sat at the top of the Billboard country chart for two weeks starting April 8, 1989. The Grand Ole Opry was preparing to invite him to become a member at the end of May.
A harder spring in the studio
RCA wanted a follow-up quickly, and Fundis was asked to work toward a fall release. The previous sessions had gone smoothly, a relief to Fundis, who had been assured Whitley’s drinking was behind him. Whitley had stayed sober for a stretch after 1987, then relapsed.
The new sessions, held in April 1989, mostly at Sound Emporium on Belmont Boulevard in Nashville, were a different story. One detailed account at Country Universe describes them as tortured, with Whitley frequently missing sessions. Other accounts say he had finished his part. What is clear is that the album was not finished when he died, and that the job of finishing it fell to Fundis.
The first week of May
Early that month, Whitley drove his wife, Lorrie Morgan, to the Nashville airport for a promotional trip to Alaska. Her own debut RCA album, Leave the Light On, was about to come out. Before she boarded, he handed her a greeting card. She did not open it until the flight home.
After seeing her off, he began a weekend of heavy drinking. On Saturday, May 6, he played what turned out to be his last show, at the Armadillo Ballroom in Brazoria, Texas.
On the morning of Tuesday, May 9, he spoke briefly with his mother on the phone. His brother-in-law, Lane Palmer, came by the house in Goodlettsville, Tennessee. They had coffee and talked about playing golf and getting lunch. Whitley planned to start writing songs for him and Lorrie to record together once her tour ended.
Palmer left around 8:30, planning to be back in about an hour. When he returned, he found Whitley fully clothed and unconscious on his bed. He was taken to a hospital and pronounced dead. The medical examiner ruled the next day that the cause was alcohol poisoning. Many reports at the time gave his age as 33; he was born July 1, 1954, which made him 34.
The next day, Music Row was lined with black ribbons. On May 12, more than 500 people came to the funeral. Ricky Skaggs, the boyhood friend he had sung bluegrass with since they were teenagers, gave the eulogy, urged mourners to stay away from alcohol, and sang the gospel songs the two of them had learned together in Kentucky.
Building the record without him
Fundis went back to the tapes and assembled the album from the work they had completed. It became a short record, ten songs in under 33 minutes.
The choice of the first single was not left to the label alone. Lorrie Morgan gave her personal approval to “I Wonder Do You Think of Me.” It was written by Sanger “Whitey” Shafer, the Texas songwriter who had once knocked on Lefty Frizzell’s front door to pitch him a song and ended up as his writing partner. Together they had written “I Never Go Around Mirrors,” which Whitley had recorded on Don’t Close Your Eyes and had wanted to release as a single. Whitley had even had Shafer write a second verse for it.
“I Wonder Do You Think of Me” appealed to Whitley because it reminded him of that Lefty song. RCA released it in June, weeks after the funeral. The album followed on August 1, 1989.
No. 1 four months later
The song reached No. 1 on the Radio & Records chart on August 18, 1989, and on Billboard on September 9. It was his fourth straight chart-topper and the first he did not live to see.
That October, at the CMA Awards, “I’m No Stranger to the Rain” was named Single of the Year. Lorrie Morgan walked up to accept it for him, exactly five months to the day after his death.
Five months ago to this day I lost the world’s greatest husband.
The last time at the top
RCA released a second single in October 1989, “It Ain’t Nothin’,” a hopeful song written by Tony Haselden. It spent two weeks at No. 1 on Radio & Records at the end of December. On January 13, 1990, it reached No. 1 on Billboard, eight months after Whitley was buried at Spring Hill Cemetery outside Nashville.
It was the last time Keith Whitley topped the chart. A third single, “I’m Over You,” climbed to No. 3 in early 1990, and the album was eventually certified gold.
The Opry invitation he never received came anyway. On October 14, 2023, more than 34 years after his death, the Grand Ole Opry posthumously inducted Keith Whitley during a tribute concert on its own stage.