“My daddy hired Ken Dudney to be our drummer,” Barbara Mandrell told CBN’s “The 700 Club.” “It was my daddy’s band, called the Mandrell Family Band.”
That drummer has been her husband for 59 years. Veterans Day is Wednesday, and on Dec. 7 Barbara receives the Kennedy Center Honors in Washington.
She shared the news on Instagram on Nov. 2, and she thanked God and her family first. “I’m humbled that the songs and performances we shared continue to mean something to people,” she wrote, as Taste of Country reported.
Barbara is the Country Music Hall of Famer behind “Sleeping Single in a Double Bed.” In 1981, she became the first artist to win the CMA’s Entertainer of the Year award two years in a row.
Her start came long before the awards. Her father, Irby, put together a family band with Barbara on steel guitar and her mother, Mary, on piano. They played military bases in the U.S. and Asia, the Country Music Hall of Fame says. One of the outside musicians Irby hired was Ken.
“He was smart enough to be kind and polite but cool,” Barbara told The 700 Club. “When I fell, I fell hard.”
The family even took the show to Vietnam to play for the troops. A San Diego TV reporter, George Lewis, talked with Barbara and Irby when they got home in September 1966.
Barbara and her dad talk with a San Diego reporter in 1966
Ken, meanwhile, had left the band to fly for the Navy. Her official website calls him a Navy carrier pilot. The two married on May 28, 1967, shortly after she finished high school, and Barbara stepped away from music to be a wife.
It didn’t last long. Ken shipped out with the Navy, and Barbara went to stay with her parents, who had moved to Tennessee. One night she and her dad went to a taping of “The Porter Wagoner Show” before the Grand Ole Opry.
Barbara leaned over to her father. “Daddy, I can do that,” she whispered, as the Country Music Hall of Fame tells it. “I want to get back in music if you’ll manage me.”
Irby didn’t hesitate. “I’d bet my last penny on you,” he told her.
“I wasn’t cut out to be in the audience,” she said later, in a line quoted in “Finding Her Voice,” Mary Bufwack and Robert Oermann’s history of women in country music. Her dad became her manager, and producer Billy Sherrill signed her to Columbia Records in 1969.
Now the young couple had two careers pulling in different directions. Hers was in Nashville. His could send him anywhere.
So Ken gave up his Navy flying career to help hers. That’s how “Finding Her Voice” tells it, and Country Rebel reports the same. The 1997 TV movie about her life, “Get to the Heart,” shows Ken leaving the Navy around the time their first son, Matthew, was on the way. He was born in 1970.
Barbara joined the Grand Ole Opry in 1972. Ken stayed close to her work, too: IMDb lists him as a producer on several of her TV specials in the 1980s.
She has never pretended it was always easy. “There are times when Ken and I would like to put each other through a wall! It happens,” she told The Boot in 2009, “but we married for forever, and keeping God at the center of our lives has made it work and made it blessed and happy.”
In July 2022, the Opry threw a party for her 50 years as a member, and the Associated Press was there.
Barbara returns to the Opry for her 50th anniversary as a member
Barbara retired from the stage in 1997 and later sold her instruments, Taste of Country reports, so don’t count on a steel guitar solo in Washington next month. Her thank-you note for the Kennedy Center put her family near the top, and that family started with a drummer her daddy hired.