Don Williams Similar Artists

John Conlee - 100% match to Don Williams

11 August 1946, Versailles, Kentucky, USA. Conlee’s 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 Read more

Ronnie Milsap - 95% 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

Conway Twitty - 93% match to Don Williams

Harold Lloyd Jenkins, 1 September 1933, Friars Point, Mississippi, USA, d. 5 June 1993, Springfield, Missouri, USA. His father, a riverboat pilot, named him after a silent-film comedian and gave him a guitar when he was five years old. The family moved to Helena, Arkansas, and Twitty’s schoolboy friends - Jack Nance, Joe E. Lewis and John Hughey - have since played in h Read more

Kenny Rogers - 93% match to Don Williams

Kenneth Donald Rogers, 21 August 1938, Houston, Texas, USA. Rogers was the fourth of eight children, born in a poor area, where his father worked in a shipyard and his mother in a hospital. By sheer perseverance, he became the first member of his family to graduate. By 1955 Rogers was part of a doo-wop group, the Scholars, who recorded ‘Poor Little Doggie’, ‘S Read more

George Strait - 87% match to Don Williams

18 May 1952, Poteet, Texas, USA. Country superstar George Strait is a throwback to the 50s honky-tonk sound of country music. He uses twin fiddles and steel guitar and his strong, warm delivery is similar to that of his idols Merle Haggard and Lefty Frizzell. He has made no secret of his influences, recording a fine tribute to Frizzell, ‘Lefty’s Gone’. Read more

George Jones - 84% match to Don Williams

George Glenn Jones, 12 September 1931, Saratoga, Texas, USA. Jones is the greatest of honky tonk singers but he has also been a victim of its lifestyle. He learned guitar in his youth, and in 1947, was hired by the husband-and-wife duo Eddie And Pearl. This developed into his own radio programme and a fellow disc jockey, noting his close-set eyes and upturned nose, nicknamed Read more

Gene Watson - 82% match to Don Williams

Gary Gene Watson, 11 October 1943, Palestine, Texas, USA. Raised in Paris, Texas, in a musical family, he first worked as a professional at the age of 13. In 1963, he moved to Houston, where he found daytime employment in car engine and bodywork repairs. During the evenings, his vocal style, with its slight nasal sound in the best country tradition, made him a very popular h Read more

T. G. Sheppard - 81% match to Don Williams

Ricky Van Shelton - 77% 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

Vern Gosdin - 77% 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

Merle Haggard - 75% match to Don Williams

6 April 1937, Bakersfield, California, USA. ‘Like a razor’s edge, Merle Haggard sings’ is how John Stewart described his voice in ‘Eighteen Wheels’, and that razor has been honed by his rough and rowdy ways. In the 30s Haggard’s parents migrated from the Dustbowl to ‘the land of milk and honey’, California. Life, however, was almost a Read more

Oak Ridge Boys - 75% match to Don Williams

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 Read more

Oak Ridge Boys, The - 75% match to Don Williams

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 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 - 73% 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