Wayland Arnold Jennings, 15 June 1937, Littlefield, Texas, USA, d. 13 February 2002, Arizona, USA. Jennings’ mother wanted to name him Tommy but his father, William Alvin, insisted that the family tradition of ‘W.A.’ should be maintained. His father played guitar in Texas dancehalls and Jennings’ childhood hero was Ernest Tubb, with whom he later recorded
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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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6 September 1939, Akron, Ohio, USA. From the age of nine, Coe was in and out of reform schools, correction centres and prisons. According to his publicity handout, he spent time on Death Row after killing a fellow inmate who demanded oral sex. When Rolling Stone magazine questioned this, Coe responded with a song, ‘I’d Like To Kick The Shit Out Of You’. Whatev
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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
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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
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Alvis Edgar Owens Jnr., 12 August 1929, Sherman, Texas, USA, d. 25 March 2006, USA, Bakersfield, California, USA. Buck Owens became one of the leading country music stars of the 60s and 70s, along with Merle Haggard, the leading exponent of the ‘west coast sound’. Owens gave himself the nickname Buck at the age of three, after a favourite horse. When he was 10, his
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28 May 1945, Jenkins, Kentucky, USA, d. 16 December 2003, Fort Pierce, Florida, USA. Stewart’s family moved to Florida when he was 12, where he made his first record for the local Cory label and played in a beat group called the Amps. Teaming up with a policeman, Bill Eldridge, he wrote Stonewall Jackson’s 1965 US country hit, ‘Poor Red Georgia Dirt’. Sev
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Marion Bandy, 12 February 1944, Meridian, Mississippi, USA. Bandy was nicknamed Moe by his father when a child in the home town of the legendary Jimmie Rodgers, so it is perhaps not surprising that he grew up to be a country singer. He later stated: ‘My grandfather worked on the railroads with Jimmie Rodgers. He was the boss of the railway yard in Meridian and Jimmie Ro
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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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25 May 1936, Olive Hill, Kentucky, USA. Hall was one of eight children and his father was a bricklayer and part-time minister. Hall described the family home as ‘a frame house of pale-grey boards and a porch from which to view the dusty road and the promise of elsewhere beyond the hills - the birthplace of a dreamer’. Hall, who started to learn to play a school fri
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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
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Mirriam Johnson, 25 May 1947, Phoenix, Arizona, USA. Her mother became Sister Helen, an ordained Pentecostal minister, and Colter became the church pianist when only 11, hence her subsequent gospel album, Mirriam. She impressed Duane Eddy who produced her 1961 single ‘Lonesome Road’, and who then married her in 1963. He wrote and recorded an instrumental, ‘Mir
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6 September 1942, Checotah, Oklahoma, USA. McDaniel began working in bands around Tulsa - first on trumpet, then on guitar - and J.J. Cale wrote and produced his first single, ‘Lazy Me’. He moved to Nashville in 1969, and after two years of knocking on doors, his brother found him steady work at a club in Anchorage, Alaska. In the mid-70s, he began recording demos
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