When Jimmie Rodgers and The Carter Family became country music’s first superstars in 1927, their audience was the farmers, miners, wives and other blue-collar workers of the rural South. It was an audience that left school early for a life of hard work in isolated communities. When those men and women gathered at a tavern or schoolroom on ...
Hank Williams Jr. (b. 1949) was only three years old when his daddy died, and he barely knew the man who was, arguably, the greatest honky-tonker of them all. But his widowed mother groomed her baby boy to imitate his papa as closely as possible. He was on stage by eight, in the recording studio by 14 ...
Almost no Texan musicians have ever herded cattle, but most like to think of themselves as cowboys nonetheless. They imagine themselves pulling out an acoustic guitar after dinner and singing a song about the adventures and frustrations they have known. And not just any old song – it has to be one they wrote and it has to be more ...
(Vocal/instrumental group, 1970s–present) The most impressive and most successful of the western-swing revival bands was co-founded by a couple of hippies from the Philadelphia suburbs. Ray Benson (vocals, guitar, b. 1951) and Reuben ‘Lucky Oceans’ Gosfield (pedal steel guitar, b. 1951) fell in love with the records of Bob Wills and formed the band in 1969, ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1939) Shaver arrived in Nashville in 1968, sold songs to Kris Kristofferson and Tom T. Hall, and wrote all but one song on Waylon Jennings’ 1973 album Honky Tonk Heroes. That led to Shaver’s own debut later the same year with Old Five And Dimers Like Me. Shaver had his songs recorded by Elvis ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1941) Dylan had already conquered the folk and rock’n’roll fields completely by the time he recorded in Nashville for the first time in 1965. That was for the rock-flavoured Blonde On Blonde album, but he was soon back to cut the more obviously country projects John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, which helped kick ...
(Vocals, guitar, fiddle, b. 1936) Daniels was a North Carolina rock’n’roller who had a song cut by Elvis Presley and who played on Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. Daniels formed his own band in 1972, modelled on the southern rock of The Allman Brothers Band, and had a hit with the 1973 tall tale, ‘Uneasy Rider’ ...
In his short life, California guitarist-mandolinist Clarence White (1944–73) conceived innovations that would inspire country and rock guitarists from both a stylistic and technical perspective long after his death. He brought bluegrass picking to the forefront of rock, turning acoustic guitar into a solo instrument. He developed a device for electric guitar that let traditional guitarists sound like pedal-steel ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1939) Coe broke through first as a songwriter, penning tunes for Tanya Tucker (1973’s No. 1 ‘Would You Lay Me Down (In A Field Of Stone)’, Willie Nelson and George Jones. Coe scored his own hit with 1975’s ‘You Never Even Called Me By My Name’, followed by five more Top 25 hits, including ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1937) Fender was born Baldemar Huerta in the southernmost tip of Texas, but adapted his Anglo stage name in the late 1950s as he shifted from the Tex-Mex music he grew up on to rockabilly. After a marijuana conviction, however, he was reduced to working as an auto mechanic when producer Huey Meaux ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1949) Williams was only three when his famous father died, but the youngster was raised to imitate his daddy’s records as closely as possible. He finally rebelled against that formula in 1975 by releasing Hank Williams Jr. And Friends with his southern-rock friends. After an injury-induced break, he returned to performing in 1976, ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1943) James Talley grew up in Oklahoma near Woody Guthrie’s birthplace and carried on Guthrie’s legacy with acoustic songs that were tough in their attacks on social injustice, irreverent in their attacks on pomposity and tender in their defence of love. Though he had songs recorded by Johnny Cash, Johnny Paycheck and Hazel Dickens ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1942) Walker grew up in upstate New York State and wrote his most famous song, ‘Mr Bojangles’, as a Greenwich Village folkie, but when he moved to Austin in 1972 he embraced the town’s cowboy-hippie ethos so wholeheartedly that he became its personification. Backing his singer-songwriter material with a Texas dancehall band transformed his ...
(Vocals, b. 1943) Colter became associated with the Outlaw movement even though her big, pure pop-country voice gave her more in common with Glen Campbell than with her husband Waylon Jennings. She was born Mirriam Johnson in Phoenix, Arizona, where she married rockabilly guitarist Duane Eddy in 1962. After a 1968 divorce, she adopted her new ...
(Vocals, guitar, b. 1946) Prine was a Chicago mailman when Kris Kristofferson stumbled across him at a local folk club and recognized him as one of the best lyricists of his generation. A very different lyricist than Bob Dylan, Prine used the unspoken implications of plain, blue-collar speech rather than the dazzle of literary language to make ...
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