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
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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
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Charley Pride
- 71% match to Ronnie Milsap
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
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Vern Gosdin
- 71% match to Ronnie Milsap
5 August 1934, Woodland, Alabama, USA. Gosdins 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
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John Conlee
- 70% match to Ronnie Milsap
11 August 1946, Versailles, Kentucky, USA. Conlees early years were filled with farm chores, but he was playing the guitar on local radio before he was 10. He describes Versailles as a very small town with a very large barbershop chorus in which he sang high tenor. Like soul singer Solomon Burke, he became a licensed embalmer. In the mid-70s he set about es
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Mickey Gilley
- 70% match to Ronnie Milsap
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
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Keith Whitley
- 67% match to Ronnie Milsap
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
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Donna Fargo
- 66% match to Ronnie Milsap
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
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T.G. Sheppard
- 66% match to Ronnie Milsap
William Neal Browder, 20 July 1944, Humboldt, Tennessee, USA. Sheppard is a nephew of old-time country performer Rod Brasfield, and his mother was a piano teacher who gave him lessons. Sheppard began his professional musical career in Memphis in the early 60s, working as a backing vocalist for Travis Wammack and then performing as Brian Stacey, having a regional hit with
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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
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Steve Wariner
- 64% match to Ronnie Milsap
25 December 1954, Noblesville, Indiana, USA. Wariner played in his fathers country group from the age of 10. One night he had a residency at a club near Indianapolis and the starring attraction, Dottie West, went on stage to harmonize with him. He then played bass for West and after that, for Bob Luman. Luman recorded several of Wariners songs, while Wariner revi
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Janie Fricke
- 60% match to Ronnie Milsap
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
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Originally called the Country Cut-Ups, the Oak Ridge Boys were formed in 1943 in Knoxville, Tennessee, USA. They often performed at the atomic energy plant in Oak Ridge, where, in the midst of a war, their optimistic gospel songs were welcomed, and hence they were renamed the Oak Ridge Quartet. They recorded their first records in 1947 with a line-up featuring leader Wally Fowl
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Artist matches
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