Billie Jo Spears › Similar Artists

Lynn Anderson - 100% match to Billie Jo Spears

Lynn Rene Anderson, 26 September 1947, Grand Forks, North Dakota, USA. Anderson, the daughter of country songwriters Casey and Liz Anderson, was raised in California. She started performing at the age of six, but her first successes were in horse shows. Her quarter horses amassed 700 trophies and she won major awards as a rider at shows all over California. In 1966, recordin Read more

Barbara Fairchild - 94% match to Billie Jo Spears

12 November 1950, Knobel, Arkansas, USA. Fairchild was raised on a farm and was entertaining at every opportunity. The family moved to St. Louis when she was 12 years old and she was soon recording for the local Norman label and working on television. In 1968 she moved to Nashville to further her career and among her early singles is ‘Remember The Alimony’ for Kapp Read more

Hank Locklin - 89% match to Billie Jo Spears

Lawrence Hankins Locklin, 15 February 1918, McLellan, Florida. d. 9 March 2009, Brewton, Alabama. A farm boy, Locklin worked in the cotton fields as a child and on the roads during the Depression of the 30s. He learned to play the guitar at the age of 10 and was soon performing on local radio and at dances. His professional career started in 1938 and after an interruption fo Read more

Donna Fargo - 84% match to Billie Jo Spears

Yvonne Vaughn, 10 November 1949, Mount Airy, North Carolina, USA. Fargo is the daughter of a tobacco farmer, and she sang in church as a child. She became a schoolteacher and was discovered by her future husband, record producer Stan Silver, singing in a club in Los Angeles. She first recorded in 1969, but her success started once she had signed with Dot Records in 1971. She Read more

Dottie West - 83% match to Billie Jo Spears

Dorothy Marie Marsh, 11 October 1932, McMinnville, Tennessee, USA, d. 4 September 1991, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. The eldest of 10 children, West worked the cotton and sugar cane crops on the family farm as well as looking after her younger siblings. Country music was popular with her parents and she first learned to play guitar from her father. She completed a college educ Read more

Charley Pride - 77% match to Billie Jo Spears

18 March 1938, Sledge, Mississippi, USA. Charley Pride was born on a cotton farm, which, as a result of his success, he was later able to purchase. Pride says, ‘My dad named me Charl Frank Pride, but I was born in the country and the midwife wrote it down as Charley’. Harold Dorman, who wrote and recorded ‘Mountain of Love’, also hails from Sledge and wro Read more

Don Gibson - 77% match to Billie Jo Spears

3 April 1928, Shelby, North Carolina, USA, d. 17 November 2003, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. If loneliness meant world acclaim, then Gibson, with his catalogue of songs about despair and heartbreak, should have been a superstar. Considering himself ‘a songwriter who sings rather than a singer who writes songs’, Gibson is best remembered as the author of three standar Read more

George Hamilton IV - 77% match to Billie Jo Spears

Ferlin Husky - 75% match to Billie Jo Spears

3 December 1925, on a farm near Flat River, Missouri, USA. Husky learned to play guitar as a child and during World War II served in the US Merchant Navy. His mother wanted him to be a preacher and his father a farmer, but after discharge, he found radio work as an announcer and disc jockey but gradually turned to performing while at KXLW St. Louis. In the late 40s he moved Read more

Barbara Mandrell - 68% match to Billie Jo Spears

25 December 1948, Houston, Texas, USA. Raised in Oceanside, near Los Angeles, California, Mandrell comes from a musical family: her father, Irby, sang and played guitar and her mother, Mary, played piano and taught music. At the age of 12, Mandrell demonstrated the steel guitar at a national convention and then worked in Las Vegas with Joe Maphis and Tex Ritter. By her teens Read more

Faron Young - 68% match to Billie Jo Spears

25 February 1932, Shreveport, Louisiana, USA, d. 10 December 1996, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Young was raised on the farm his father bought just outside Shreveport and learned to play the guitar and sing country songs as a boy. Greatly influenced by Hank Williams (in his early days he was something of a soundalike) and while still at school, he formed a country band and beg Read more

Jeannie C. Riley - 63% match to Billie Jo Spears

Jeannie Carolyn Stephenson, 19 October 1944, Anson, Texas, USA. Stephenson wanted to be a country singer, and after marrying her childhood sweetheart, Mickey Riley, she persuaded him to move to Nashville. He worked in a filling station, while she became a secretary on Music Row for music publisher Jerry Chesnut. She also recorded demo records for his writers and her voice ap Read more

Freddy Fender - 61% match to Billie Jo Spears

Baldemar G. Huerta, 4 June 1937, San Benito, Texas, USA, d. 14 October 2006, Corpus Christi, USA. Fender, a Mexican-American, came from a family of migrant workers who were based in the San Benito valley. A farm worker from the age of 10, Fender reminisced how he ‘worked beets in Michigan, pickles in Ohio, baled hay and picked tomatoes in Indiana. When that was over, it Read more

Janie Fricke - 61% match to Billie Jo Spears

Jane Frickie, 19 December 1947, on the family farm near South Whitney, Indiana, USA. Fricke, who adopted the spelling in 1986 to avoid mispronunciation, has sung in public since the age of 10. Her father was a guitarist and her mother a piano teacher and organist. Fricke sang jingles to pay her university fees and then moved to Los Angeles to find work as a session singer. A Read more

Tammy Wynette - 61% match to Billie Jo Spears

Virginia Wynette Pugh, 5 May 1942, Itawamba County, near Tupelo, Mississippi, USA, d. 6 April 1998, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Wynette is primarily known for two songs, ‘Stand By Your Man’ and ‘D.I.V.O.R.C.E.’, but her huge catalogue includes 20 US country number 1 hits, mostly about standing by your man or getting divorced. After her father died when she Read more