Henry William Thompson, 3 September 1925, Waco, Texas, USA, d. 6 November 2007, Keller, Fort Worth, Texas, USA. Thompson, as a young boy, was fond of records by Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. He first learned the harmonica and then his parents gave him a guitar for his tenth birthday. He also played Hawaiian guitar, learned conjuring tricks and had a ventriloquist
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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. Arnolds father and mother played fiddle and guitar, respectively, and he learned guitar as a child. His father died on Eddys 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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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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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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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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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
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Ernest Dale Tubb, 9 February 1914, near Crisp, Ellis County, Texas, USA, d. 6 September 1984, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Ernest was the youngest of five children of Calvin Tubb, the foreman of a 300-acre cotton farm, and his wife Sarah. In 1920 the family relocated to Benjamin, and then moved again, to Kemp, in 1925. The following year, his parents divorced and initially he
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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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Maurice Woodward Ritter, 12 January 1905, near Murvaul, Panola County, Texas, USA, d. 2 January 1974, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. The youngest of six children, he grew up on the farm that the Ritter family had worked for over 70 years. He attended High School in Beaumont and then entered the University of Texas in Austin. Here he began his studies for a law degree in Governme
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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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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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Merle Robert Travis, 29 November 1917, Rosewood, Kentucky, USA, d. 20 October 1983, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, USA. Travis was the son of a tobacco farmer but by the time he was four years old, the family had moved to Ebenezer, Kentucky, and his father was working down the mines. Travis father often remarked, Another day older and deeper in debt, a phrase his son
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Sollie Paul Williams, 23 August 1917, Ramsey, Fayette County, Illinois, USA, d. 11 October 1985, Newhall, California, USA. His father was a keen fiddler, and by the time he was 13 years old, Williams had a local radio programme as a one-boy band. He toured with the Reno Racketeers but he soon turned to Hollywood. In 1940 he appeared alongside Tex Ritter in Rollin Home
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Hiram (misspelled on birth certificate as Hiriam) Williams, 17 September 1923, Georgiana, Alabama, USA, d. 1 January 1953, on the road between Montgomery, Alabama and Oak Hill, West Virginia, USA. Misspelling notwithstanding, Williams disliked the name and took to calling himself Hank. He was born with a spine defect that troubled him throughout his life, and which was furth
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