Barney Hall wasn't ready to go.

He thought he was. The radio man had traveled the world as a youngster in the Navy. He'd traveled the United States as a broadcaster, chasing and covering the NASCAR circuit. He'd seen so much more than he could have ever expected as he grew up in Elkin, North Carolina, a hamlet of barely 4,000 people sandwiched in the hills of Wilkes County, where moonshiners first birthed stock car racing.

On this particularly rough summer day somewhere over southern Michigan, Hall had been telling the story of that life to a fellow broadcaster, former race car driver Dick Brooks. Brooks, in his trademark denim overalls, had recently joined the team at the Motor Racing Network, the national NASCAR network that Hall helped start in 1970.

Hall and Brooks were hitching a ride to Michigan International Speedway in a plane being flown by racing legend David Pearson ... and Pearson was still really new at flying.

"Barney was talking Dick up, you know," Pearson recalled two years ago. "Telling him his whole life story. Dick said, 'Barney, it sounds like you've had a great life. I think if it was time for you to go, you'd be ready to go.' And Barney kind of agreed with him."

Then lightning struck the plane. As they attempted to land, pitched about by the wind, another bolt struck a water tower at the end of the runway. Hall yelped and, as Brooks always swore, scratched up the windows in desperation to get out of the private plane.

"It turns out," Pearson recalled with a laugh, "Barney was not quite ready to go yet."

"Not that day," Hall replied. "I didn't have a ticket."

On Tuesday morning, he was ready. Hall passed away at 83, after years of battling various medical conditions. Some will no doubt call it a silencing of a great voice. But his voice was more than great. It was a unique blend of North Carolina foothills dialect trimmed with just enough touch of old school radio broadcaster flair, his only professional training coming via the Navy and as a disc jockey at his hometown station, WIFM in Elkin.

Even in his later years, there was warmth in Hall's aging tone that never failed to cut through the endless noise that comes with life at the racetrack. It was the perfect pitch to complement a gentleman who could also cut through the shells that often come with the men who make their living on that racetrack.

"People ask me all the time, Barney, how do you get these guys to talk to you or to trust you enough to tell you how it really is? Well, it's really not that complicated," he explained nearly 20 years ago to me, a young and awestruck TV producer who'd struck up a conversation in the Daytona International Speedway garage. I was working my first Daytona 500. Hall was working his 36th. "Sure, there's something to be said about these guys being country guys and me being one, too. But there's also nothing wrong with doing your job with class and dignity. If they know I'm being genuine with them, they know they can be genuine with me."

That's how Hall became such great friends with some of NASCAR's most notoriously guarded personalities, his lifelong friendship with Pearson being exhibit No. 1. Everyone got a fair shake, even those at the far end of the garage who struggled to keep up with the superpowers week-to-week. Whenever an underdog managed to sneak into the top 10, they'd receive Hall's trademark "Give a call to (fill in the blank) ... "

In 2009, when the family of fellow beloved broadcaster Benny Parsons organized a Moonshiners and Revenuers Reunion in Wilkes County, they asked Hall to be the emcee. He stood on a makeshift stage in between two rows of rocking chairs. The first group consisted of Junior Johnson and other bootleggers-turned-racers. The second was made-up of the retired government agents who used to chase them.

"They asked me to moderate this because I'm the only person up here who has never dealt in illegal alcohol distribution ... as far as you know," Hall deadpanned. "Besides, if a fight does break out up here, we're all so old now it would look like a slow-motion replay of a fight."

That relatability is also how he became such a beloved broadcaster, his voice soothing its way from turns and press boxes and garages through speakers in cars, trucks and transistor radios from coast to coast.

He was auto racing's answer to Red Barber or Vin Scully. While others shouted over the action, he described the action as if he was reading us all the greatest bedtime story ever.

"You give me too much credit for that," he said to me during an interview in 2011. "I would probably talk faster than I do if I could. But this is just Elkin speed."

I can still hear Barney's bass as it whirred through the big wooden console cabinet stereo in our family basement, calling Dave Marcis' improbable rain-soaked win at Richmond in 1982. My father had been on Dave's pit crew a decade earlier and we cheered as Hall called it.

A couple of years later, I stood with my grandfather as Hall's voice ricocheted off the aluminum walls of Pa-Pa's work shed, listening as local hero Parsons, a poster of whom hung by the radio, earned what would be his final career win, holding off Dale Earnhardt at Atlanta.

But can we really use the word silenced? No. Never. Not even in death. We'll still hear Barney Hall's voice whenever we go to Bristol Motor Speedway, where he started as a public address announcer. We'll still hear it on YouTube, where Barney Hall tributes keep popping up.

We'll hear it on satellite radio, where the NASCAR channel still plays classic MRN broadcasts. We'll hear it whenever current broadcasters win the NMPA Broadcaster of the Year, which is named for Hall, or when media members are honored by the NASCAR Hall of Fame, a medal which is co-named for Hall and of which he was the first co-recipient.

And we'll hear it forever in the voices of the broadcasters he took under his arm, both the MRN Radio team of today and alums who are scattered across every sports network in your channel guide.

Me? I'll hear Barney loudest whenever I go to Martinsville Speedway. That's where he shocked me just four years ago, in the spring of 2012. Just a few weeks earlier he'd missed only his second Daytona 500 in decades, this time due to his failing health. The reports were not good. I'd tried to reach out to him, but had no luck. We all feared the worst. Then, sitting in the Martinsville media center on a Friday afternoon, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

"Hey, young man, get up out of that chair and let this old man sit down for a minute," he said.

Immediately, he launched into stories. He told me about the first race he ever covered, right there at Martinsville as a young radio man.

He told me a story about a train conductor who got fired because he couldn't help but stop along the backstretch to watch a Martinsville race and in the process mucked up train traffic along the entire eastern seaboard.

And he told me about the motel that used to be across the street from the speedway, where he once stomped out of his room in the wee hours of the morning to complain about all the noise out by the swimming pool and saw "Curtis Turner, Fireball Roberts and Joe Weatherly, all these future Hall of Famers, running around out there totally buck naked ... can you believe that?"

Yes, I could. Because Barney Hall said it was so. He stood up to leave and shook my hand.

"I'm doing OK," he assured me, thanking me for my concern and explaining that he'd be back in the MRN booth that Sunday.

"I wasn't ready to go quite yet. I didn't have a ticket."