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
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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
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Clarence Eugene Snow, 9 May 1914, Brooklyn, near Liverpool, Nova Scotia, Canada, d. 20 December 1999, Madison, Tennessee, USA. After his parents divorced when he was eight years old, Snow spent four unhappy years with his grandmother, finally running away to rejoin his mother when she remarried. However, he was cruelly mistreated by his stepfather, which prompted him to absc
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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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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
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Ray Noble Price, 12 January 1926, on a farm near Perryville, Cherokee County, Texas, USA. Price grew up on a farm and by the time he left high school, was already singing and playing guitar locally. In 1942, while studying veterinary medicine at Abilene’s North Texas Agricultural College, he was drafted into the Marines. He returned to his studies in 1946, but also bega
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8 August 1921, near West Monroe, Louisiana, USA, d. 24 February 1991, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. His father died when Pierce was only three months old, his mother remarried and he was raised on a farm seven miles from Monroe. Although no one in the family performed music, his mother had a collection of country records which, together with Gene Autry films, were his first cou
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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
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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
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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
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Paul Rennee Belobersycky, 21 July 1972, Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Before entering the music world, Paul Brandt, whose parents are both involved in the medical profession, worked as a paediatric nurse. During those years he continued to sing and play the guitar, however, having first sung in church. He began entering talent competitions while in high school but also concentra
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William Orville Frizzell, 31 March 1928, Corsicana, Navarro County, Texas, USA, d. 19 July 1975, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. The eldest of eight children of an itinerant oilfield worker, Frizzell was raised mainly in El Dorado, Arkansas, but also lived in sundry places in Texas and Oklahoma. Greatly influenced by his parents’ old 78s of Jimmie Rodgers, he sang as a young
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12 August 1927, West Plains, Howell County, Missouri, USA, d. 28 October 2007, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Wagoner grew up listening to country music on the radio, particularly the weekly Grand Ole Opry broadcasts. He learned to play the guitar at the age of 10 and, owing to his father’s illness, his education was curtailed in order that he could help with the farm work.
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Richard Edward Arnold, 15 May 1918, on a farm near Madisonville, Chester County, Tennessee, USA, d. 8 May 2008, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Arnold’s father and mother played fiddle and guitar, respectively, and he learned guitar as a child. His father died on Eddy’s 11th birthday and he left school to work on the farm. By the end of the year the bank foreclosed, and
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