Born Randy Bruce Traywick on 4 May 1959 in North Carolina, Randy Travis won a talent show at the age of 16, but found his music career progressed painfully slow. Hankering after a more exciting lifestyle, he dropped out of high school in the ninth grade. Music eventually came to his aid, but not without a great ...
Randy Rhoads (1956–82) had a career that lasted only six years. He played with Quiet Riot and Ozzy Osbourne before dying in a plane crash in 1982. But his guitar style, which included classical influences, opened up new directions in heavy metal, and he was an acknowledged influence on a subsequent generation of guitarists, including Zakk Wylde. ...
Merle Travis was both a vital cog in the development of the West Coast country scene and a major influence on a whole generation of guitarists. Highly innovative, he had a style of three-finger playing named after him – ‘Travis picking’ – and the equally skilled Chet Atkins well acknowledged the Travis influence, although the latter modestly shrugged off ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1963) James Travis Tritt burst on to the country-music scene in 1989 with a Top 10 single, ‘Country Club’. Utilizing strains of southern rock and expressing emotions of everyday people, he gained an audience with such singles as 1991’s ‘Here’s A Quarter (Call Someone Who Cares)’, his second chart-topper, ‘Anymore’, and ‘The Whiskey ...
‘Just When I Needed You Most’, 1979 Written when VanWarmer was only 18, ‘Just When I Needed You The Most’ was a surprising UK No. 8 and US No. 4 hit, and a pop ballad that also appealed to the disco market. Unable to recreate his pop success in 1980, VanWarmer embarked upon a country music career that ...
In 1995, Alison Krauss (vocals, fiddle, b. 1971) achieved a level of success no other bluegrass act had ever matched. Her 1995 retrospective album, Now That I’ve Found You: A Collection, went double platinum, and she won the CMA Awards for Single, Female Vocalist, Vocal Event and Emerging Artist as well as the ...
The Lone Star State is steeped in tradition, producing both songwriters and swing bands. In the 1980s, the clean-cut George Strait And His Ace In The Hole band took the baton from such earlier legends as Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price and Hank Thompson. Born on 18 May 1952, in Poteet (south of San Antonio), ...
Johnny Hiland (b. 1975) is one of the top guitarists to emerge from the Nashville music scene in recent years. His playing combines country chicken pickin’ with elements of blues, metal and jazz. Often compared to Danny Gatton, Hiland displays an amazing vocabulary as he plays seemingly effortlessly onstage. His skill is also noteworthy because he is legally blind ...
(Vocals, songwriter, b. 1957) The daughter of songwriter Mel Tillis started performing at the age of eight, learning to play various instruments at Nashville’s Blair Academy. In the late 1970s, she tried various musical ventures, before singing back-up in her father’s road show in the 1980s and releasing five minor chart singles. Emerging country label Arista ...
At least until the 1930s and 1940s the dominant themes in country music were a celebration of bedrock rural values like family, faith, fidelity and the redeeming powers of true love and honest labour. The music served as much as anything to offer listeners comfort, reassurance and a soothing sense of place and identity. But as America’s national ...
From the urban cowboys came the neo-traditionalists, who offered a stark and welcome alternative. Their music, with its resolute devotion to earlier styles like honky-tonk, bluegrass and old-time country, bristled with the vitality and spirit of innovation that urban cowboy lacked. Emmylou Harris, a lovely, ethereal singer, came of age in the country and ...
After the 1960s heyday of the cultured Nashville sound, country music was all but swept aside. It had survived the lasting effect of 1950s rock – rock’n’roll and traditional old-timey music and bluegrass, especially – but it was now the turn of a musical hybrid, country rock, to lead the way for almost a decade. Country rock ...
New country took many years and miles of travel before its current evolution – not least the new traditionalist movement of the 1980s, which returned country music to its roots. Garth Brooks (b. 1962) did it far more quickly, but that’s a different story. Sometimes it seemed like these artists were chipping away at a mountain with nothing more ...
The singing cowboys did not have the monopoly on country music on the silver screen, although it was their breed that first caught Hollywood’s attention. By the time the 1940s rolled around, several of Nashville’s top stars found that they could expand their careers by bringing their talents to the vast new audiences. Singing Stars In the earlier decade ...
The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band started out in 1966 as a student jug band in Los Angeles, and in an early incarnation it included a teenage Jackson Browne. Among the group’s founder members was singer and guitarist Jeff Hanna. Both Hanna and multi-instrumentalist Jimmie Fadden are still Dirt Band members 40 years on. The extremely ambitious Will The Circle Be ...
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