Random Music Power Couples Who Didn't Break Up (14 items)

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  (#1) Johnny Cash & June Carter Cash

  Johnny Cash made his Grand Old Opry debut on July 7, 1956. Backstage, he was introduced to June Carter for the first time. Cash had just released his first big hit, "I Walk the Line," while Carter, who had been an artist since she performed as a child with her family's group, had just finished a tour with Elvis Presley. At the time of their first meeting, both were married to other people, and while Carter would divorce her first husband (country artist Carl Smith), she soon remarried.

  Carter toured with Cash's band in the early 1960s. Cash's famous song "Ring Of Fire," which Carter co-wrote with Merle Kilgore, was born when she was driving around at 4 am. "I was miserable, and it all came to me: 'I'm falling in love with somebody I have no right to fall in love with,'" she told Rolling Stone years later. "I was frightened of his way of life. I thought, 'I can't fall in love with this man, but it's just like a ring of fire.'"

  Cash struggled with substance abuse and trouble with the law for much of the 1960s. He credited Carter with helping him move towards sobriety, even as she allegedly had addiction issues of her own. After they both got divorced from their partners, he proposed to her onstage at a concert in London, Ontario. They were married in March 1968 and had a son in 1970 (Cash had four daughters and Carter two daughters from their previous marriages). They continued to perform together, winning joint Grammys in 1967 (for their duet on "Jackson") and 1970 (for their duet on "If I Were A Carpenter"). Carter Cash passed in May 2003 and Cash passed in September of that same year. 
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  (#2) Bruce Springsteen & Patti Scialfa

  Bruce Springsteen first met Patti Scialfa at The Stone Pony, the famed Asbury Park, NJ, bar, in 1980. "It was the start of a beautiful friendship," Scialfa has said. In 1984 she auditioned for, and won, the job as backup singer on Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A tour. He warned her he had never had a woman in his band before and wasn't sure if it would work out. 

  Although Scialfa started touring with Springsteen, their relationship did not immediately blossom into romance. Instead, he married actress Julianne Phillips in 1985. But the marriage was rocky, and Phillips soon filed for divorce after seeing tabloid photos of Scialfa with Springsteen. Scialfa and Springsteen had their son Evan in 1990 and married the following year; two more kids followed.

  Scialfa once said, "When you’re married to someone famous, people know you, but they’re not really seeing you.” Others describe her as very down-to-earth and very independent. Very much her own person. Springsteen has said that it isn't hard to work with his wife because they've developed natural boundaries to separate their personal lives from their professional work. He also credited Scialfa with being strong enough and stable enough to help him through his bouts with depression. In his biography Born To Run, he admitted that Scialfa would see "a freight train bearing down, loaded with nitroglycerin and running quickly out of track."
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  (#3) Paul & Linda McCartney

  Linda Eastman was trying to build a career as a celebrity photographer when she first met Paul McCartney while on assignment in London in 1967; in fact, one year later, she became the first woman to have a photo on the cover of Rolling Stone. They married on March 12, 1969 , eight days before John Lennon and Yoko Ono married. The wives of the Beatles had never been treated all that well by the fans and when the band broke up in 1970, both Ono and Eastman got some of the blame. McCartney adopted Eastman's daughter from her first marriage, and the couple had three children of their own.

  The couple had no interest in spending any time apart; reportedly the only time they did so during their marriage was the 10 days McCartney spent in a Tokyo jail after he was taken in for having pot. Linda claimed McCartney had to convince her to collaborate with him. "It was hard work, and he really did have to force me ,” she admitted in a 1989 interview. “And it was very tough on me. It’s nothing I elbowed my way into." In the same interview, she said her husband was a hard taskmaster when it came to his music. “He had me singing on (his 1971 album) Ram , and he’d be like, 'Come on, get it together!’ It was nerve-racking because, since I wasn’t a good student, why would I be a good, in-tune singer? He’d get me in tune , but I found it hard.” She learned how to play keyboards and joined his first post-Beatles band, Wings. It turned out to be a very commercially successful band and received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Album ( Band on the Run ) in 1975.

  Linda McCartney passed because of complications related to breast cancer in 1998. Since her passing McCartney has remarried twice and pursued his successful solo career; at 77 years of age, he is still selling out shows.
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  (#4) Beyoncé & Jay-Z

  Beyoncé and Jay-Z (real name Shawn Carter) are notorious for trying to keep their relationship private; this was especially true in the early years. They reportedly started dating in 2002 after collaborating on his song "03 Bonnie & Clyde." They were married very quietly on April 4, 2008; as the couple said nothing publicly, it wasn't until the signed marriage license was found several days later that the media and public got any confirmation that the two artists had, indeed, wed.

  The couple's relationship has not always been smooth; Beyoncé's album Lemonade and Jay-Z's album 4:44 both addressed the couple's marital problems. "Sorry," the second single off of Lemonade, has lyrics that revolve around the protagonist dealing with her partner's affair with a woman named "Becky"; although neither artist has said that the song was about Jay-Z's infidelity, he later admitted that he had been unfaithful and that the couple had sought counseling. In fact, rumors about Jay-Z's cheating have been rampant for years, dating back to when the couple was dating, and his infamous 2014 fight in an elevator with his sister-in-law was said to be over his numerous infidelities. Meanwhile, the lyrics to his 2013 single "Holy Grail" suggest that Beyoncé may have strayed as well.

  But the couple has fought to try and save their marriage. In an interview with CNN in early 2018, Jay-Z talked about this, calling his wife his "soulmate." He went on to say that couples that experience problems could either address those problems or pretend they don't exist, "For us, we chose to fight for our love. For our family. To give our kids a different outcome. To break that cycle for Black men and women." He added, "We were never a celebrity couple - we were a couple that happened to be celebrities. We are real people."

  The couple has collaborated numerous times, beginning with her being featured on his song "03 Bonnie & Clyde." He was featured on "Crazy in Love," her first ever No. 1 song as a solo artist. He was featured on the lead single ("Deja Vu") off her second solo album, and on "Drunk in Love," which peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2013. They have also co-headlined two tours (On the Run Tour in 2014 and On the Run II Tour in 2018). In 2018, they released "Family Feud," their collaboration from his 4:44 album and, billed as The Carters (his last name), they released the album Everything Is Love.
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  (#5) Chris Frantz & Tina Weymouth

  Chris Frantz first met Tina Weymouth in a painting class at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1972, when he apologized for his roommate's rude critique of her work. At first, she thought Frantz was gay because of the people he hung out with, but soon discovered he wasn't. They married in 1977.

  Frantz had also met David Byrne at RISD and they started a band that would eventually be called the Talking Heads in 1974. When they were unable to find a bass player, Frantz recruited Weymouth to fill that spot; she had only been playing the bass for about five months when Talking Heads had their first gig, opening for the Ramones at legendary New York club CBGB, on June 7, 1975. In the early days of Talking Heads, the couple lived with Byrne in a commercial loft with no heat and no bathroom . The band quickly had success, signing a record deal in 1976 and releasing their debut album the following year.

  On hiatus from Talking Heads in 1981, Frantz and Weymouth formed Tom Tom Club as a side project. In order to not be accused of riding the coattails of Talking Heads, they made sure that this new group would have a different sound. The debut album was released in 1981, and two singles from it hit Number One on Billboard's Dance chart. Although it remained a side project for the couple until Talking Heads disbanded, they made four Tom Tom Club albums from 1981-92, then returned with new music in 2000 and 2012. Meanwhile, Talking Heads had critical and commercial success throughout the 80s, but dissolved in an acrimonious split in 1991; the band was inducted into the Rock And Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

  Frantz and Weymouth had their first son in 1982, but by that time Frantz had started indulging in substances. Weymouth told him that he would have to go to rehabilitation if he wanted to keep living with her and their son, and the couple also did a lot of counseling. In a 2013 interview with Rolling Stone , Weymouth was asked why she thought her marriage to Frantz had been so successful: "I think the consensus is generosity. I tend to like people that are generous and give other people the benefit of the doubt. Being able to allow people to be who they are without trying to change them is important. Generosity is the key to all relationships. To friendships and bands. That’s the golden rule."
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  (#6) Gloria & Emilio Estefan

  Gloria Fajardo García and Emilio Estefan, both Cuban immigrants, met at a jam session in Miami in 1975; "In comes Emilio. He’s playing the accordion in very short shorts, and he looked like he was [unclothed], so that was the first impression that I got," Gloria explained in 2017. A few months later, he asked her to join his wedding band, the Miami Latin Boys. They married in 1978 and had two children.

  They changed the name of the band to Miami Sound Machine and signed to CBS Records. After spending five years touring Latin America performing their music that fused pop with Cuban rhythms, Gloria came up with the idea of doing their music in English. Although record label executives complained that the group was "too Cuban for Americans and too American for Cubans," Gloria's idea worked; in 1985, "Conga" landed in Billboard's Dance, R&B and Hot 100 charts all at the same time and turned the band into international stars. On Your Feet!, a jukebox musical based on the couple's lives that premiered on Broadway in 2015, received four Tony nominations.

  In 2019, Gloria told PEOPLE why the relationship has worked for more than 40 years, “We’re different, but we balance each other. And we have the same priorities, the same values. We rarely argue about business or music, so it’s been a good thing.”
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  (#7) Kurt Cobain & Courtney Love

  There are conflicting stories about when Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love first met (in one interview, Love said it was in Portland, OR, in the early '80s , another source said it was at Portland's Satyricon nightclub in 1990 where his band was playing a gig, another claimed it was at an L7 concert in 1989 and yet another said it was at a concert in Los Angeles in May 1991). What everyone seems to agree on is that it was Love who aggressively pursued a relationship with the Nirvana frontman. She got his number and called him, told interviewers she had a crush on him, and even persuaded someone who wanted to manage her band Hole to get her plane and concert tickets so she could attend a Nirvana concert in Chicago. “People say, ‘How did she get Kurt?’" one friend of Love's told Vanity Fair in 1992. “Well, she asked. And she wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

  Love's and Cobain's relationship became serious soon after these albums came out, and by the time he proposed, she was pregnant. Kurt wore pajamas and Courtney a dress that ill-fated actress Frances Farmer had once wore in a movie. Their daughter Frances Bean was born without any health issues in August 1992. But because of the drug rumors, child welfare services did an investigation and the couple briefly had their infant daughter taken away from them, although they regained custody after a legal engagement.

  On March 18, 1994, Love phoned the Seattle police claiming Cobain was a threat to himself; when they arrived, they confiscated three guns and several bottles of pills from him, but he denied he wanted to end his life. Soon afterward, Love arranged an intervention that resulted in Cobain agreeing to go to a rehabilitation center. On April 1, he called Love. According to her , he ended the call by saying, "Just remember, no matter what, I love you." That was the last time she ever spoke to him; the next day he hopped over the wall of the rehabilitation center and disappeared. Love hired a private detective and his mother filed a missing persons' report, but although people claimed to have seen him in Seattle, it wasn't until April 8 that his body was found in his home.

  Many of Cobain's friends and fans blamed Love, making accusations such as she had driven him to end his life or that she had hired a hitman to end him. At her shows, she would have things thrown at her on stage. She even received fatal threats. In a 2006 interview, Love admitted that Kim Gordon [of Sonic Youth] had warned her , "'If you marry him [Cobain] your life is not going to happen, it will destroy your life.' But I said, 'Whatever, I love him, and I want to be with him!'"
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  (#8) Ozzy & Sharon Osbourne

  Sharon and Ozzy Osbourne met when she was just 18; her father, Don Arden, managed Black Sabbath, the group Ozzy fronted. When he was fired from the group in 1979 because of his problems with substances, she became his manager and they started dating. Ozzy divorced his first wife in 1982, and he and Sharon married on July 4 of that year.

  Violence, and substance abuse has threatened the marriage. The relationship hit rock bottom in August 1989 when a drunken Ozzy attempted to strangle his wife ; she called the police, and he ended up in rehabilitation for three months. The couple has continued to struggle with personal crises over the years: Sharon was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2002 and underwent a double mastectomy in 2012 ; in 2013, Ozzy announced that, although currently sober, he had been using substances over the previous year and a half. In 2013 and 2016, the couple was rumored to be getting a divorce .

  Sharon has been credited for being a tough manager who revitalized her husband's career and built her own; in 1996, after the people who ran Lollapalooza laughed at her attempt to get Ozzy a slot in that festival, she launched Ozzfest. The family also starred in their own reality television series, The Osbournes (2002-05).
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  (#9) John Lennon & Yoko Ono

  John Lennon and Yoko Ono first met at an art gallery in London, where Ono was preparing an exhibit of her conceptual art, in November 1966. Both were married to other people at the time, but they started a romantic relationship sometime prior to May 1968, when Lennon's wife, Cynthia, discovered Ono sitting in the Lennons' kitchen wearing Cynthia's bathrobe. The Lennons divorced later that year; a few months later, Ono divorced her husband. Lennon and Ono married on March 20, 1969; during their honeymoon, they staged as series of protests against the Vietnam War which they dubbed "Bed-ins for Peace." Some of the press and fans of the Beatles treated Ono badly, calling her racist names. And although the band had started to fall apart before Lennon started bringing Ono to their studio sessions, she received much of the blame when the Beatles broke up in April 1970.

  Lennon and Ono collaborated on multiple musical projects, including: Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins (1968), which became infamous for the couple appearing unclothed on the album cover, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band (1970) and Double Fantasy (1980). The couple moved to New York City, but when they separated in 1973, Lennon moved to Los Angeles with his mistress May Pang; Lennon referred to this 18-month separation as his "lost weekend." He and Ono reconciled in early 1975 and their son Sean was born in October of that year. After his son's birth, Lennon retired from music temporarily to help raise Sean.

  His collaborative project with Ono, the Double Fantasy double album, was meant to mark the start of Lennon's musical comeback. Tragically, he was slain outside of the couple's apartment building on December 8, 1980. He was just 40 years old. In the years since his passing, Ono has worked to keep her husband's legacy alive and has also seen numerous gallery retrospectives of her artwork.
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  (#10) Elton John & David Furnish

  Elton John met David Furnish, who is 15 years his junior, at a dinner party in October 1993. The musician wanted to meet some new people, so asked a friend to invite some people John didn't know to a dinner at the singer's home. He and Furnish were immediately attracted to each other and quickly fell in love. 

  Furnish was an advertising executive in London when he met John. He soon moved into filmmaking; his directorial debut was the 1997 television biography Elton John: Tantrums and Tiaras, which ended up being nominated for a BAFTA; he also was a co-producer on the 2019 John biopic Rocketman. And he sits on the board of the musician's Elton John AIDS Foundation, which has raised more than $400 million to support HIV-related programs. Many people, including John himself, call Furnish Yoko (as in Ono) because of how he pushed out much of the singer's previous inner circle in order to become his partner's de facto manager. In 2016, John told Rolling Stone Furnish had saved the singer's financial life. “David came into my life, and in the last two years has been very involved in sorting out the dross that we had surrounding me,” Elton said. “We had so many people who were earning vast amounts of money that weren’t pulling their weight.”

  John proposed to Furnish at a dinner party in May 2005, and they entered into a civil partnership in December of that year. When same-sex marriage became legal in Britain, they married on December 21, 2014, the ninth anniversary of their civil partnership.

  In 2010, John told PARADE Magazine the couple sent each other a card every Saturday, no matter where they were in the world, to say how much how much they loved each other. He went on, "I knew he was the one because he is not afraid of me. He always tells me exactly what he thinks."
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  (#11) Tim McGraw & Faith Hill

  Tim McGraw and Faith Hill were up-and-coming artists when they first met at the 1994 Country Radio Seminar in Nashville, where both performed in the "New Faces" showcase, but the two didn't become romantically involved until 1996, when Hill opened for McGraw on his Spontaneous Combustion Tour. At the time, McGraw had just broken off his engagement to Kristine Donahue, but Hill was engaged to record producer Scott Hendricks. Hill soon broke up with Hendricks; as she later told PEOPLE, "If someone is going to judge my character because I was engaged to somebody and then I left him for somebody else - ‘Oh, okay, now she's a slut and a bad person' - I can't control that. But I wasn't about to let Tim slip through my hands."

  McGraw proposed to Hill backstage between their respective sets on a tour stop in Colorado on June 26, 1996. On October 6, 1996, they surprised their guests, who thought they had been invited to a softball game and concert in McGraw's hometown of Rayville, LA, by getting married under an oak tree; Hill was three months pregnant at the time of the wedding (their daughter, Gracie Katherine, was born in May 1997).

  There have been many rumors about the state of McGraw's and Hill's marriage over the years, including one about their daughter Maggie Elizabeth (who was born in August 1998) not being McGraw's child. But the couple tends to laugh off the rumors. A third daughter, Audrey Caroline, was born in December 2001; when the kids were young, McGraw and Hill tried to keep them out of the spotlight as much as possible. The couple also had to deal with McGraw's drinking and partying; "I partied too much. And did other things too much. Chemically. No needles or that kind of stuff, but . . . use your imagination," he told Men's Health magazine in 2014. "When your wife tells you it's gone too far, that's a big wake-up call," McGraw said. "That, and realizing you're gonna lose everything you have. Not monetarily, not careerwise, but familywise."

  The couple has frequently collaborated on music projects. They released their first duet, "It's Your Love" in May 1997; it was No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Country Songs chart for six straight weeks and won multiple CMA Awards. In 2000, they co-headlined the Soul2Soul Tour; in 2006, they went out on the Soul2Soul II Tour, which became the top-grossing tour (at the time) in country music history. In 2012, they did a joint residency in Las Vegas, and in 2017, they went out on another co-headlining tour, this one dubbed Soul2Soul: The World Tour. That same year they jointly released an album of duets entitled The Rest of Our Life. The couple has won multiple awards for their collaborations, including Grammy Awards in 2001 (for "Let's Make Love") and 2006 (for "Like We Never Loved At All").
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  (#12) Garth Brooks & Trisha Yearwood

  Garth Brooks met Trisha Yearwood in 1987 while recording a demo at Kent Blazy's studio. Yearwood reportedly was paid $10 for her work, while Brooks was not paid. In an interview on the Ellen DeGeneres Show in 2013, Brooks said that when Blazy asked him what he thought of Yearwood, he'd told him that he felt a feeling like "when you first meet your wife." Only problem was, both Brooks and Yearwood had recently married other people.

  At that first meeting, Brooks had promised Yearwood she could open for him on tour after he landed a record deal. He made good on that promise; in 1990, Brooks had her sing background vocals on his second album, and after she signed with MCA Records, he took her on the road as the opening act for his 1991 national tour. 

  The two had been friends for years, but after Yearwood divorced her second husband in 1999 and Brooks and his wife split in 2000, the friendship turned to romance. They made their first public appearance as a couple in 2002, and on May 25, 2005, Brooks proposed to Yearwood in front of an audience of 7,000 during an unveiling of bronze statues of country music artists at Buck Owens' Crystal Palace in Bakersfield, CA. They married in December of that year.

  The couple made a pact to never be apart. Brooks had retired from music in 2000 in order to help raise his three daughters; Yearwood cut down on her tour dates and eventually stopped touring altogether. Brooks returned to music on a part-time basis a few years later; he did several concerts in 2007 and then he and Yearwood had a periodic weekend residency at Encore Las Vegas (called "Garth at Wynn"). Brooks returned to music full-time in 2014 and he and Yearwood headed out on a world tour, Brooks' first real tour in 13 years. Brooks headed out on his next tour in 2019, but Yearwood did not go with him, focusing on her own solo tour. Still, the couple remain determined to spend as little time apart as possible.
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  (#13) Alicia Keys & Swizz Beatz

  Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz (Kasseem Dean) were teenagers when they first met in the 1990s, but it wasn't exactly love at first sight for the Grammy-winning artist. She told Marie Claire UK in 2013 she found him annoying because everything about him was over the top and ostentatious. But the hip-hop producer grew on her; they are rumored to have started dating in 2008. One problem: Although Beatz claimed he and his first wife, R&B artist Mashonda, were separated by the time he and Keys started dating, his ex said differently. In a 2009 twitter post she accused Keys of destroying her family (she and Beatz have a son together).

  Still, Keys and Beatz fell in love and got married in July 2010. Their first son, Egypt Daoud, was born in October of that year, and their second son, Genesis, turned born in December of 2014. And the relationship between the couple and his ex has improved greatly; Mashonda even published a book entitled Blend with the help of Keys and Beatz.

  In addition to raising their family and supporting each other's music careers, in August 2019, Keys and Beatz announced plans to transform a 110-acre property in Macedon, NY, into the Dean Collection Music & Art Campus, which would house a performing arts center, recording studio, classrooms, and offices, along with buildings that would house the couple's personal art collection, a gym and training center.
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  (#14) Vince Gill & Amy Grant

  Vince Gill and Amy Grant had not met prior to the country star inviting the Christian music recording artist to perform on his Christmas television special in 1993. Although the attraction was immediate, both were married to other people at the time. They became friends and recorded their first duet, "House of Love," in 1994.  In a 2011 interview with AARP Magazine, Gill insisted that there was no cheating and neither spoke to the other about leaving their spouse. "We were both married, and though we were crazy about each other, we thought, 'Well, that's not our life.'" Grant, who was married to Christian music artist Gary Chapman, even sought out marriage counseling.

  But Chapman knew how his wife felt about Gill. In 1997, when they learned the country star was getting divorced, Chapman told his wife that he was glad someone had finally made the first move. The Chapmans divorced in 1999 and Gill and Grant started dating shortly thereafter; they were married in March of 2000.

  Grant's divorce and remarriage damaged her career as a Contemporary Christian Music (CCM) artist; her music disappeared from many Christian retail stores and radio stations, and she received no more invitations to perform at high-profile events like Billy Graham crusades. In 2002, she told The New York Times, ''There are probably some things I have lost the privilege of participating in, and I don't find fault with that.'' To try and repair the rift with her fans, Grant released Legacy...Hymns and Faith in 2002. Co-produced by Gill, it was her first overtly religious album in many years; it won the Dove Award for the Inspirational Album of the Year. 

  She and Gill have continued to collaborate on occasion over the years and their annual Christmas residency at the Ryman is a Nashville tradition.

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