Biography
Jack Rhodes was born in 1908 in Van Zandt County, Texas. Little is known about his early childhood except that he never completed school. It has been rumored that he only made it through the third grade. Like many school-age children during that period, he quit to help support his family. During World War II, he worked in the Houston, Texas shipyards, where he eventually injured his back in a fall and, as a result, began songwriting.
Rhodes owned a café in Grand Saline, Texas, and later opened The Trail 80 Motor Courts, a gas station and restaurant in Mineola, Texas.
Leon Payne (Rhodes' step-brother) wrote "I Love You Because", which has been covered by — among others — Elvis Presley (Elvis Presley LP, 1956), Al Martino (Billboard Hot 100 #3, 1963), Jim Reeves (UK Singles Chart #5, 1964), Johnny Cash, Matt Monro and Slim Whitman.
Rhodes' first wife's name was Lucille, although the date of their marriage is unknown. They had three sons, called Bobby, Billy Jack and Don, and a daughter, Wanda. Bobby was killed while crossing traffic as a young boy.
Rhodes divorced Lucille in the mid to early 1950s, and in 1955 married Loretta Williams. They had one son, Buddy, in 1956.
In October 1968, Jack Rhodes died of a heart attack.
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Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“The death of Irving, which at any other time would have attracted universal attention, having occurred while these things were transpiring, went almost unobserved. I shall have to read of it in the biography of authors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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