I don't think I've seen Lefty here before, though maybe I've missed him or forgotten. In the early 1950s he was probably as popular as Hank Williams, but that doesn't seem to have lasted.
He wrote this first one, which I'm sure you've heard covered by others:
According to Wikipedia, Lefty toured with Hank and later pulled a teenaged Merle Haggard on stage and handed him his custom Gibson J-200 guitar. Merle says that was the first guitar he played on a professional stage. Many years later, after Lefty passed away and the guitar had been displayed for some time at the Country Music Hall of Fame, it was auctioned off and Merle Haggard bought it. Roy Orbison was also a big fan.
Lefty had alcohol problems and passed away in 1975. His brothers David and Allen Frizzell are also country musicians.
4 comments:
Is it true that we’ve never featured Lefty? That’s very weird. If so, thanks for correcting my oversight.
Well, I couldn't find anything on him in the Blogspot search bar or when I used Google to search the blog, though I too found it weird. Maybe he's there but his name wasn't used in searchable text.
It's possible. I don't really have a plan for any of this. I just show up and talk about whatever I want to that day. He's just a huge influence on honky tonk music -- really, you might almost credit him with developing what we think of as the 'honky tonk sound.'
Sure, it's a blog. It's what we do. Or don't do? I dunno. (At least, at unmonetized blogs, I think.)
Yeah, I enjoyed reading the Wikipedia article on him. I hadn't realized how influential he'd been.
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