After Red died (in the novel)...

...Whit and Marlene sang their way across the country to California, stopping at the old homestead in Oklahoma to find it empty. They hopped freights and sang on streets for handouts, she, pregnant, wore a sign around her neck that read, "Expectant mother," in order to elicit more money, and he, after getting dirty looks, wore one that read 'It wasn't me.' They eventually found Whit's parents living in a tent and sleeping on cotton sacks in a migrant farmworkers' camp near Bakersfield.

"Just about nine months after the fateful night in Noxpater, Arkansas, Marlene gave birth to a seven-pound baby boy with a shock of frizzy red hair. She named him Wagoner Stovall."

On the tenth anniversary of Red's death the Country Music Institute paid for and erected a huge marble monument on his grave with a big bronze plaque in the center commemorating the birth and death of "Red Stovall, one of the all-time great country singers and songwriters who lives on in his undying music."

Sixteen years after Red's death, Whit, with his band called 'Hoss Wagoner and the Big Wheels,' performed on the same stage in Redondo Beach, Calif., on which Red had told him he'd once performed.