Career in Music
Guthrie's rewritten version of a Woody Guthrie song "Oklahoma Hills" (Capitol 201) reached No. 1 in 1945, staying on the charts for 19 weeks. The b side, "I'm A Brandin' My Darlin' With My Heart", reached No. 5 later that year. At the time the record became a hit Jack Guthrie was in the U.S. Army and stationed in the Pacific Theater. As soon as he got out of the service he wrote and recorded more songs, played live gigs up and down the West Coast. His version of "Oakie Boogie" (Capitol 341), a hit at No. 3 in 1947, is considered a candidate for the first rock and roll record. In July 1947 he was admitted to a hospital with tuberculosis. He died in 1948 in Livermore, California.
Guthrie's style was influenced by Jimmie Rodgers and adapted to fit his cowboy image. Although the labels listed Jack Guthrie and His Oklahomans as the artist, in reality Guthrie had no band. The studio brought in some of its better musicians to back Guthrie. Many of them, Porky Freeman, Red Murrell, Cliffie Stone, and Billy Hughes among them, were stars in their own right.
Read more about this topic: Jack Guthrie
Famous quotes containing the words career and/or music:
““Never hug and kiss your children! Mother love may make your children’s infancy unhappy and prevent them from pursuing a career or getting married!” That’s total hogwash, of course. But it shows on extreme example of what state-of-the-art “scientific” parenting was supposed to be in early twentieth-century America. After all, that was the heyday of efficiency experts, time-and-motion studies, and the like.”
—Lawrence Kutner (20th century)
“Morning work! By the blushes of Aurora and the music of Memnon, what should be man’s morning work in this world?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)