This week I was looking through some various Facebook posts after checking Dad’s page for comments or trolls. I didn’t see anything that required my attention, so I was briefly checking out a few of the posts that Facebook had spoon fed to us.

The first one I noticed was the lovely and extremely talented Rhonda Vincent in which she was announcing her farewell tour, “One Last Ride • 2026.” Every entertainer eventually has to decide when it’s time to hang it up, but Rhonda seems way too young to be considering retirement, and we saw here a few weeks ago at the Opry 100 tribute to Dad and she never mentioned any need to retire.

Then I looked again and saw where Willie Nelson was also going to call it a career and take time off the road and he was announcing a tour, “One Last Ride • 2026.”

Interesting that two such prolific artists would both look at retiring at the same time, although Willie would seem to make more sense than Rhonda, not to mention, both of them launching tours with identical names. SO I decided to take take a deep dive and see if my ”Spidey Sense” was tingling for a reason.

It was.

In fact, I had seen one or two cases of this phenomenon in the past month or so, but I was always too busy to take a dive down the rabbit hole… Just for the record, I’m still too busy for this deep dive, but I feel that it’s important to speak up.

“One Last Ride” seems to currently be the most popular tour name, and this is across all genres, from Country, to Rock to Hip Hop.

I’ve put this off long enough. It’s here whether I like it or not, so I have to deal with it.

As I write this, it’s Saturday afternoon on July 5, 2025, a little more than sixteen hours before the call from Mom came at 5:45 that something was wrong with Dad in 2020.

My life changed forever that morning, and got much more difficult much more frustrating and much more complicated, and in many ways, it still is.

For my Mom and I, Dad was our rock. He was the dependable father who always took care of us, even when times were lean early on. He was an incredibly talented musician and entertainer. He was a generous man in private and in business.

He was the kind of man who gave writer’s credit to his band, no matter how much or little of a song they had contributed, several former band members or their families still earn money from the songs they performed on.

He loved horses, he loved dogs and cats, he loved people, he could strike up a conversation with a complete stranger and he would give you his last dollar, or even the shirt off his back.

He was kind, he was wise and he gave great hugs.