Bill Anderson has spent six decades earning the right to say whatever he wants about whoever he chooses in country music — the songwriter whose pen produced Still, Po’ Folks, Whiskey Lullaby, and more than a hundred other recordings that the genre has never stopped playing, the performer whose career has outlasted every trend and every format shift and every industry transformation that Nashville has produced since the late 1950s, and the man whose quiet, observant presence at the center of country music’s real community has given him a perspective on the people and the talent and the genuine worth of what this music produces that very few people alive are positioned to match.

He has always been generous with his praise and precise with his assessment — the combination that makes a compliment from Bill Anderson mean something that a compliment from someone less discerning could never carry — and when he has chosen to speak about a fellow artist with the specific, considered weight of someone who has heard everything and is impressed by very little, the Nashville community has always known to pay attention. Linda Davis has spent thirty years being one of country music’s most criminally underappreciated voices — the Arkansas native whose harmonies with Reba McEntire on Does He Love You gave the genre one of its most vocally stunning moments, whose own recordings demonstrated a range and an emotional depth that the mainstream country machinery never quite figured out how to fully harness, and whose reputation among the musicians and the producers and the serious students of the genre has always stood considerably higher than her chart positions suggested. At 88 Bill Anderson has confirmed what everyone in that community has suspected for years — speaking about Linda Davis with the specific, unhurried certainty of a man who has been listening to this music his entire adult life and who knows, with the authority that only that kind of sustained attention produces, exactly what genuine talent looks like and exactly what Linda Davis represents within the tradition he has spent sixty years both serving and defining.