The Real Reason Labels Turned Down Randy Travis Early On In His Career

According to Country Thang Daily, Randy Travis became a unique country music voice in the 1980s after others during the same era tried to copy the sounds of the hit John Travolta movie "Urban Cowboy." Travis helped pioneer the New Traditionalist sound but hit a few roadblocks to finding superstardom along the way.

Travis had been working with Elizabeth Thatcher since 1975, and by 1982 the relationship became romantic. That's also around the time that record labels started rejecting Travis' music for sounding "too country," but Thatcher took care of that when she used an independent album he recorded called "Live at the Nashville Palace" and convinced Warner Brothers Records to take a chance on him — under one condition: nobody could know about Thatcher and Travis' relationship.

Of course, that didn't work out in the long term, as Travis and Thatcher finally made their long relationship official in 1991 with a marriage that lasted until 2010. Thatcher had been Travis' manager for more than three decades at that point, but their divorce was bitter and resulted in them each filing lawsuits against the other, according to The Sun. In 2015 after suffering from a stroke two years prior, Travis wed singer Mary Davis Travis.