Uploaded on Aug 26, 2007
James Travis "Jim" Reeves (August 20, 1923 – July 31, 1964) was an American country and popular music singer-songwriter.
With records charting from the 1950s to the 1980s, he became well known as a practitioner of the Nashville sound (a mixture of older country-style music with elements of popular music).
Known as "Gentleman Jim", his songs continued to chart for years after his death.
Reeves died at age 40 in the crash of a private airplane.
He is a member of both the Country Music and Texas Country Music Halls of Fame.
Biography
Early life and education
Reeves was born in Galloway, Texas, a small rural community near Carthage.Winning an athletic scholarship to the University of Texas, he enrolled to study speech and drama, but quit after only six weeks to work in the shipyards in Houston.
Soon he resumed baseball, playing in the semi-professional leagues before contracting with the St. Louis Cardinals "farm" team during 1944 as a right-handed pitcher.
He played for the minor leagues for three years before severing his sciatic nerve while pitching, which ended his athletic career
Early career
Reeves began to work as a radio announcer, and sang live between songs.During the late 1940s, he was contracted with a couple of small Texas-based recording companies, but without success.
Influenced by such Western swing-music artists as Jimmie Rodgers and Moon Mullican, as well as popular singers Bing Crosby, Eddy Arnold and Frank Sinatra, it was not long before he was a member of Moon Mullican's band, and made some early Mullican-style recordings like "Each Beat of my Heart" and "My Heart's Like a Welcome Mat" from the late 1940s to the early 1950s.
He eventually obtained a job as an announcer for KWKH-AM in Shreveport, Louisiana, home of the popular radio program Louisiana Hayride.
According to former Hayride master of ceremonies Frank Page, one day singer Sleepy LaBeef was late for a performance for the Hayride, and Reeves was asked to substitute.
(Other accounts—-including Reeves himself, in an interview on the RCA album Yours Sincerely—-name Hank Williams as the absentee.)
Early 1960s and international fame
Reeves scored his greatest success with the Joe Allison composition "He'll Have to Go", a great success on both the popular and country music charts, which earned him a platinum record.Released during late 1959, it scored number one on Billboard magazine's Hot Country Songs chart on February 8, 1960, which it scored for 14 weeks consecutive.
Country music historian Bill Malone noted that while it was in many ways a conventional country song, its arrangement and the vocal chorus "put this recording in the country pop vein".
In addition, Malone lauded Reeves' vocal styling—lowered to "its natural resonant level" to project the "caressing style that became famous"—as why "many people refer to him as the singer with the velvet touch."[2]
In 1963, he released his well proclaimed "Twelve Songs of Christmas" album, which had the well known songs "Chirstmas" and "An Old Christmas Card".
During 1975, RCA producer Chet Atkins told an interviewer, "Jim wanted to be a tenor but I wanted him to be a baritone...
After he changed his voice to that smooth deeper sound, he was immensely popular."[3]
Reeves' international popularity during the 1960s, however, at times surpassed his popularity in the United States, helping to give country music a worldwide market for the first time.
Source: Wikipedia.org
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