Although relatively few country performers die in the midst of active recording careers, those who do leave their labels with a couple of problems: Should the record companies continue to market the dead stars’ music? If so, how? Is a label paying tribute or playing the ghoul when it attempts to extend the life of the art significantly past the life of the artist?

The topic of posthumous marketing has arisen again with the release of Wherever You Are Tonight, the new Keith Whitley album on BNA Records. In 1989, at the age of 33, Whitley died of an alcohol overdose. The selections on the new album are demos he did of his own material while he was a writer for Tree Publishing (now Sony Tree).

There are no industry standards on selling the music of performers who have since passed on, but there are some instructive case studies, beginning with Jimmie Rodgers, the “father of country music.” Rodgers died of tuberculosis in 1933 when he was 35 and still one of the best-selling recording artists in America. There were no trade charts at the time to track his subsequent rise or fall in popularity. Even today, though, his albums still sell, in part because of the efforts of his most ardent disciple, the late Ernest Tubb. When Tubb launched his weekly Midnight Jamboree show on WSM-AM in 1947, he decreed that a sample of Rodgers’ music was to be played on each show. This edict is scrupulously honored to this day. Curiously enough, Rodgers did get one single on the country charts—albeit 22 years after his death. Sweetened with new tracks by Chet Atkins and Hank Snow, “In the Jailhouse Now. No. 2” went to No. 7 in 1955.

It was Hank Williams, however, who set the pace for the musical life eternal. After his death at 29 in January 1953, Williams’ singles continued to chart in the Top 10 for two more years; four of them reached No. 1. A decade later, in 1966, “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” trudged to No. 43, and in 1976 “Why Don’t You Love Me” topped out at No. 61. Then, in 1989, Hank Williams Jr. added his vocals to his father’s long-forgotten recording of “There’s a Tear in My Beer.” The song went to No. 7, aided in its trek up the charts by a technically astounding music video that put father and son side by side onstage.

After 30-year-old Patsy Cline died in a plane crash in 1963, her music went into a sharp decline. She had three Top 10 country singles during the remainder of 1963, but after that nothing went higher than No. 23; most of the releases peaked considerably lower. Interest in Cline’s music was revived by Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn’s 1980 film biography, which ultimately led to the Cline biopic Sweet Dreams in 1985. Soon after, k.d. lang came along to tout Cline’s importance. The upshot of all these rediscoveries is that Patsy Cline albums have been selling lately at a rate of half a million copies annually. Cline’s Greatest Hits album has been on Billboard’s Top Country Catalog Albums chart for 232 weeks—200 at the No. 1 spot—and has sold more than 6 million copies. And just this year, MCA Records released the original Nashville cast recording of Always...Patsy Cline, the stage play that has been running at the Ryman Auditorium for the past two summers.

The year following Cline’s death, country crooner Jim Reeves also perished in a plane crash. He was less than a month shy of 40 when he died, and he was still at the top of the charts. Amazingly, RCA Records kept him at the top, or very near it, for the next 16 years. Between his death in 1964 and 1980, Reeves had six No. 1 and 12 Top 10 singles. He had one more Top Five hit in 1981 when producer Owen Bradley electronically paired him with Patsy Cline for “Have You Ever Been Lonely (Have You Ever Been Blue).” The two never recorded together in real life.

Many both within and without the record industry believed Mel Street was on the verge of greatness when he killed himself in 1978 on the morning of his 45th birthday. He had first hit in 1972 with “Borrowed Angel.” Although he scored only three more Top 10 singles during the intervening years, he seemed poised to break through with his rivetingly dramatic vocals, good looks and stage presence. After his death, Street’s music lost all its momentum: Mercury issued no additional singles, and the ones that came out between 1979 and 1981 on the independent labels Sunset and Sunbird made comparatively little noise. Happily, Mercury is now working on a collection of Street’s songs, with notes by Sammy Kershaw, tentatively scheduled for release next June.

Marty Robbins, Dottie West and Conway Twitty were all past their chart prime when they died. This may explain why none of them achieved much in the way of posthumous success. Robbins, who died in 1982 at the age of 57, hadn’t had a No. 1 single since 1978. He did have a couple of Top 10 hits in 1982, but his last two singles on Columbia in 1983 charted low. West, who died in a car wreck in 1991 at age 58, had a major career revival during the late ’70s, when she began recording with Kenny Rogers. But her singles between 1981 and 1985, when she had her last chart record, seldom came close to the top. Twitty was 59 when he died in 1993. Although he had compiled an unmatched string of No. 1 records during his long career, his radio exposure and achievements began tapering off in the late 1980s. His last No. 1 came in 1986, and his last Top 10 in 1991.

In an age of music videos and short memories, labels find it difficult to market a record when they don’t have a young and tireless artist making the rounds to support it—which brings us back around to Keith Whitley. Two of his singles continued on to No. 1 the year of his death, and another one went to No. 3 in 1990. That same year, Whitley’s widow, Lorrie Morgan, added her vocals to his on “Til a Tear Becomes a Rose,” which topped out at No. 13 and won the Country Music Association’s vocal event of the year award. In 1991, the Whitley/Earl Thomas Conley duet “Brotherly Love” made it all the way up to No. 2.

Because Garth Fundis had produced Whitley’s breakthrough album, RCA Records commissioned him in 1991 to put together a memorial album. Comprised of archival recordings, demos and previously unreleased material, yielded two chart singles, “Brotherly Love” and “Somebody’s Doin’ Me Right.” Last year, BNA Records, RCA’s sister country label, released Keith Whitley: A Tribute Album, which featured covers of Whitley’s hits by several top country acts, as well as four songs by Whitley himself. The cut that eventually gained the most attention, however, was Alison Krauss and Union Station’s cover of “When You Say Nothing at All.” It brought critical attention to the album and also gave Krauss a prominence on radio she had never had before. Some radio stations were so enchanted by her interpretation that they electronically “duetted” her with Whitley’s own 1988 version of the song. BNA then tried to persuade Krauss to go into the studio and sing along with Whitley’s recording so that the label could have an official duet to service radio, but she demurred. She said she did not want to tamper with the original, particularly since Whitley wasn’t around to approve such an alteration.

Even though the songs on Wherever You Are Tonight were originally intended to serve only as demos, the record is still a real treasure. The sweetening is sensitively and lovingly done, and Whitley’s voice sounds as urgent and dedicated as if he were doing a master recording. There is nothing here, I think, that he would be ashamed of. BNA is working this album the way it would any other new project: The first single, which is the title track, has already been released, and the album itself will be in stores Oct. 24. We’ll have to wait and see how this experiment plays itself out. Whitley was a remarkable talent, and RCA has a history of being able to breathe commercial life into otherwise dead projects. But it may take more attributes than these to affect a market already saturated with good artists who are still able to promote their music.

There’s no word yet if there is additional Whitley material to draw on, should this present effort succeed. There is, however, one song of his that will probably never reach the public. It’s a demo that made the rounds on Music Row in the weeks following his death; it’s called “I’ve Done Everything Hank Did but Die.”