Sad news. All of the great talents of that era are getting very much up there in years now. It's likely we'll see big names like this come up on news sites with more and more frequency (which sucks, but time marches on). It's amazing to think about how many who got their country music start in the 60s and 70s and continued to be popular on the radio and on tour well into the 80s are already gone and have been for some time now. Conway Twitty (whose country recordings date back to 1956) died in 1993. Lynn Anderson died in 2015. Tammy Wynette died in 1998. Waylon Jennings (whose first recording was 1959) died in 2002. Dottie West died in 1991. Eddie Rabbit died in 1998. George Jones (whose country recordings date back to 1954) died in 2013. Merle Haggard died in 2016.
You know you're getting old when so many of the people you grew up listening to on the radio are gone (in any genre).