Don Williams › Similar Artists

Charley Pride - 100% match to Don Williams

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

Ronnie Milsap - 92% match to Don Williams

Ronnie Lee Millsaps, 16 January 1943, Robbinsville, North Carolina, USA. Milsap’s mother had already experienced a stillbirth and the prospect of raising a blind child made her mentally unstable. Milsap’s father took him to live with his grandparents and divorced his mother. What little vision young Ronnie had was lost after receiving a vicious punch from a schoolm Read more

Ricky Van Shelton - 88% match to Don Williams

12 January 1952, Danville, near Lynchburg, Virginia, USA. Shelton was raised in a church-going family and he learned to love gospel music. His brother worked as a musician and through travelling with him, he also acquired a taste for country music. He worked as a pipe fitter but his fiancée Bettye realized his singing potential, and in 1984, suggested that they went t Read more

Earl Thomas Conley - 74% match to Don Williams

17 October 1941, Portsmouth, Ohio, USA. The son of a railway worker, Conley left home at 14 when his father lost his job. His influences were the Grand Ole Opry, followed by Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis, and then the Beatles. He originally planned to be a painter, but developed his love for country music while in the US Army. After his military service, Conley had a suc Read more

Don Gibson - 69% match to Don Williams

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

Donna Fargo - 66% match to Don Williams

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

Dan Seals - 65% match to Don Williams

8 February 1948, McCamey, Texas, USA. Leaving successful pop duo England Dan And John Ford Coley was, at first, a disastrous career move for Dan Seals. His management left him with unpaid tax bills and mounting debts and he lost his house, his van, and his money. He says, ‘I was bankrupt, separated and living at friends’ places. My kids were with friends. It was a Read more

Johnny Lee - 65% match to Don Williams

Vern Gosdin - 64% match to Don Williams

5 August 1934, Woodland, Alabama, USA. Gosdin’s first steps in carrying out his wish to be a country singer-songwriter came in the early 50s, when as a result of singing with his two brothers in the local church, they became regulars as the Gosdin Family on WVOK Birmingham. In 1953, he moved to Atlanta where he sold ice cream and in 1956 to Chicago where he ran a countr Read more

Bobby Bare - 60% match to Don Williams

Robert Joseph Bare, 7 April 1935, Ironton, Ohio, USA. Bare was raised on a farm; his mother died when he was five, and his sister was adopted. As an adolescent, he dreamed of being Hank Williams: ‘then Hank died and I didn’t want to be like him no more’. Nevertheless, he started songwriting and secured an early morning radio spot, and later worked on televisio Read more

Mickey Gilley - 60% match to Don Williams

9 March 1936, Natchez, Louisiana, USA, but raised in Ferriday, Louisiana. Gilley is a cousin to Jerry Lee Lewis and the evangelist Jimmy Swaggart. He grew up with his cousins and his mother, a waitress, who saved her money to buy him a piano when he was 12 years old. Gilley left Louisiana when he was 17 and started working in bars in Houston. His first record was ‘Tell Read more

Hank Locklin - 59% match to Don Williams

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

Barbara Mandrell - 58% match to Don Williams

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

Tanya Tucker - 58% match to Don Williams

Tanya Denise Tucker, 10 October 1958, Seminole, Texas, USA. Tucker’s father, Beau, a construction worker, and her mother, Juanita, encouraged her fledgling musical talents. Her early years were spent in Wilcox, Arizona, before moving to Phoenix in 1967. Her father booked her to perform with visiting country stars on stage at local fairs. Never one to consider that some Read more

Keith Whitley - 57% match to Don Williams

1 July 1955, Sandy Hook, Kentucky, USA, d. 8 May 1989, Goodlettsville, Tennessee, USA. Whitley, who grew up in a musical family, learned to play the guitar from the age of six and was on the radio with Buddy Starcher in Charleston, West Virginia, aged eight. He joined Ralph Stanley And His Clinch Mountain Boys when he was 15, and both he and his friend Ricky Skaggs made thei Read more