Lafayette Leake (June 1, 1919– August 14, 1990) was an American blues and jazz pianist, organist, vocalist and composer who played for Chess Records as a session musician, and as a member of the Big Three Trio.
Leake was born in Winona, Mississippi, in 1919. Information about his early years is sparse, but he was a desperately shy man, but a natural piano player at home, with a vast range of music from classical to blues. He seems to have had formal training at some point and was proud of his ability to play Chopin, and would notate his friend Little Brother Montgomery's playing by ear. His range and his ability to replicate the work of other players, coupled with his powerful technique, made him stand out in the Chicago blues scene of the early '50s -- he became friends with Leonard "Baby Doo" Caston of the Big Three Trio, and was chosen as his successor when the latter's marital problems forced him to leave the group. Although Leake never recorded with that group, his enduring friendship with Willie Dixon, his reliability and his good taste made him a session mainstay, who recorded with all the major stars of Chicago blues.
Here's Slow Leake (1957) from above album
And when group leader Willie Dixon became a songwriter and resident producer at Chess Records, Leake came along, playing on a lot of the sessions that Dixon produced, and a lot more besides. Leake played piano on One Dozen Berrys, Chuck Berry's second album, released in 1958 by Chess. He was then on Berry Is on Top; Leake played the prominent piano on the classic original rendition of "Johnny B. Goode", as well as "Rock and Roll Music". Leake played on numerous other Chess sessions from the 1950s through the 1970s, backing many Chess musicians, including Howlin' Wolf, Billy Boy Arnold, Otis Rush, Junior Wells, Little Walter, Homesick James, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, and Taylor, to name but a few. Leake gave Chicago blues musician Harmonica Hinds his first harmonica lesson on the street in Toronto, Ontario.
During the 1960s, Willie Dixon formed the Chicago Blues All-Stars, with Leake as resident pianist. Leake toured and recorded with this group that featured at many Blues Festivals, at home and overseas until the mid-1970s. After that he did little recording or touring, although he appeared with Berry at the Chicago Blues Festival in 1986, and recorded "Hidden Charms" with Dixon in 1988. Besides being a respected performer, Leake was a composer. He recorded a number of his own songs as a member of various ensembles, and others have been covered by notable musicians. Fleetwood Mac, for example, recorded his song "Love That Woman" on their album The Original Fleetwood Mac. Leake's song "Wrinkles", performed by the Big Three Trio, was featured on the soundtrack of David Lynch's 1990 film, Wild at Heart. Blues band Slo Leak was named after one of Leake's instrumental pieces.
But for all of his talent and dexterity, Leake's shyness prevented him from exploiting his talent into stardom in his own right until very late in his career. Apart from some 1960s sessions with producer E. Rodney Jones, which yielded some not easily available music, it wasn't until the 1970s that Leake was recorded leading his own band. These were done for the French Black and Blue label, and have since been reissued on CD. Leake remained a ubiquitous presence in the credits of numerous CD reissues, especially in rock & roll and blues.
During the 70s, Lafayette stepped back from the spotlight a little, playing mainly in Chicago clubs, but his reputation and talent meant he was always a welcome guest on special occasions, like Chuck Berry’s 1986 Chicago Blues Festival show, and with Willie Dixon at the White House in 1989. Sadly, that was one of Lafayette’s last appearances.
Leake fell into a diabetic coma in his home in Chicago, where he remained undiscovered for several days, dying in hospital on August 14, 1990, at the age of 71.He remains one of the most enigmatic names on the Chess Records roster. In 2015 the Killer Blues Headstone Project placed a headstone for Lafayette Leake at Lincoln Cemetery in Blue Island, Illinois.
(Edited from Wikipedia & AllMusic)
Here's a video of a discussion and musical performance with blues musicians Lafayette Leake and Queen Sylvia Embry. Recorded on March 21, 1983.(Fast Forward to 0:28 for start)
John "Vic" Willis (31 May 1922- 1995) was a a singer, accordion, piano and member of the Grand Ole Opry through his work with The Willis Brothers and, later, the Vic Willis Trio, he spent his final 13 years as the secretary for the musicians' union in Nashville.
James "Guy" Willis, Charles "Skeeter" Willis, and John "Vic" Willis started playing music on their family farm as kids. As teenagers in 1932, the Willis Brothers formed the Oklahoma Wranglers, formed as a band, playing a blend of Western swing and cowboy. Skeeter Willis sang and fiddled; Guy sang lead and played guitar; and, in the original line up, eldest brother Joe played along. The Willis Brothers played on Shawnee, OK's KGEF throughout the '30s. In 1939, Joe married and left, and Vic, who played accordion, piano, and sang, joined.
The brothers moved to Kansas City to appear on Brush Street Follies until 1942, when they disbanded to fight in the war. Reunited in 1946, they joined the Grand Ole Opry and signed to Sterling Records, and had the distinction of backing Hank Williams on his first recordings.
In 1949, the group left the Opry and toured nationally with Eddy Arnold through 1957. They also performed in the films Feuding Rhythm and Hoe Down. In an attempt to play to an audience beyond just Western fans, the Oklahoma Wranglers name was dropped for the Willis Brothers. In the late 1950s, the Willis Brothers hosted a live noonday TV show on WRPG-TV, the NBC affiliate in Chattanooga, TN. Guy, Vic and Skeeter were accompanied by Chuck Wright, who played bass in full Indian headdress. Guy Willis also hosted an afternoon children’s program on the same station for several years.
The band recorded steadily with Mercury, RCA, and Coral before signing with Starday and finally charting with the truck-driving country hit "Give Me 40 Acres (To Turn This Rig Around)" in 1964 after which they had a few lesser entries to follow...But they were used to plugging away as second stringers: their big hit came nearly two decades after they started playing together, and even though they fell off the charts, they recorded and performed prolifically, regularly appearing on the Grand Ole Opry while cutting countless singles and albums for Starday Records. They recorded a whole slew of trucker songs and other novelty numbers, always looking for trend or a surprise hit to put the wind in their sails.
The band broke up in the '70s: Skeeter passed away in 1976, followed by Guy in 1981. Vic Willis formed a Trio with C.W. Mitchell and Curtis Young debuting on the Grand Ole Opry for the first time in November, 1980. The Vic Willis Trio remained a fixture on the Opry. Vic served an unusual role in the Grand Ole Opry cast from the early 1960s through the 1980s, producing and recording commercial jingles from his home recording studio, recording hundreds of commercials featuring country artists and others, for local Nashville and national sponsors, such as Big Star Stores, Kellogg's (for which they also performed live commercial jingles on the Grand Ole Opry when they were in town), Fender Musical Instruments, Acme Boots, Lava Soap, Luzianne Coffee, Levy's Men's Wear, and others.
Vic's Trio emained an Opry regular, until 1995, when Vic died in a car crash near the Meriwether Lewis Park and Monument on the Natchez Trace, at age 73.
Most of the Willis Brothers recordings remain out of print, which perhaps isn't so surprising since even in their heyday they weren't exactly the hottest band in the land. Still, those old albums are worth tracking down just to see what a hard-working, old-school hard-country band sounded like, plugging away in an era of slick Nashville pop.
John Paul Gimble (May 30, 1926 – May 9, 2015) was an American country musician associated with Western swing. He was considered one of the most important fiddlers in the genre.
Gimble was born in Tyler, Texas and grew up in nearby Bascom. He began playing in a band with his brothers at age 12, and continued playing with two of them, George and Jerry, as the Rose City Swingsters. The trio played local radio shows, and gigs at dance halls. Gimble later moved to Louisiana and began performing with the Jimmie Davis gubernatorial campaign. He was offered a job in the Governor's administration but turned it down to volunteer for service in the U.S. Army. Gimble returned to Texas after completing his service in the U.S. Army in World War II.
Bob Wills & His Texas Playboys
Back in Texas, Gimble continued to hone his fiddling skills with a number of Texas radio and dance bands. In 1948, he made his first recording, playing with Robert Brother's Rhythmairs in Corpus Christi. A year later he joined Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, with whom he toured for most of the next decade. With Wills, he played both fiddle and electric mandolin, and distinguished himself by using a five-string fiddle (most fiddles have four strings).
His fiddling style was influenced by other Texas fiddlers who played the "breakdown" fiddle tunes. Gimble's fiddling style, while uniquely his own, came to be known as the "Texas fiddling style" that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century among fiddlers such as Cliff Bruner, Louis Tierney, and Jesse Ashlock. Gimble learned from them, and further developed while playing with Wills, who epitomized and promoted a new sound known as Western swing. Western swing rose to national prominence in the 1940s, combining the old-time, Southern-derived Anglo string band tradition, with its breakdowns, schottisches, waltzes, and reels, with the big band jazz and pop music of the day.
After Gimble married Barbara Kemp of Gatesville, Texas, in 1949, he settled in Dallas, where, in the early 1950s, he began doing radio and television shows with Bill and Jim Boyd (of the Lone Star Cowboys) and performed on The Big D Jamboree, a weekly variety show broadcast live from the Dallas Sportatorium. He broke off to form his own group in 1951, performing as the house band at Wills's clubs in Fort Worth and Oklahoma City, but rejoined in 1953 and continued to play with Wills until the early 1960s. He played fiddle on Marty Robbins' No. 1 hit "I'll Go On Alone".
In 1955, Gimble moved to Waco, Texas, and split time between running a barber shop near the regional VA Hospital and music. In 1960, he quit touring with Bob Wills and hosted one of the first locally produced television shows on KWTX, Johnny Gimble & the Homefolks. Gimble's show featured a young bass player from nearby Abbott, Texas, named Willie Nelson, and a lifetime friendship and partnership was born. In 1968, after repeated encouragement from his peers, Gimble moved his family to Nashville, Tennessee. From then on, his steady work as a session musician included sessions with Merle Haggard and The Strangers on their Bob Wills tribute album (A Tribute to the Best Damn Fiddle Player in the World (or, My Salute to Bob Wills)), Conway Twitty, Connie Smith, Loretta Lynn, Lefty Frizzell, Ray Price, Willie Nelson, and Chet Atkins on Superpickers in 1973. The following year he took a cue from a song ("Fiddlin' Around") which he had written and performed on the Atkins' Superpickers album, and recorded his first solo album, titled Fiddlin' Around. He recorded nine other solo albums.
From 1975 to 1990, he was nominated 15 times for Instrumentalist of the Year and won the Country Music Association Award five times. Gimble toured with Willie Nelson worldwide from 1979 to 1981, and appeared in a supporting role in the film Honeysuckle Rose. In 1983, Gimble assembled a Texas swing group featuring Ray Price on vocals, and charted a country radio hit with "One Fiddle, Two Fiddle", featured in the Clint Eastwood film Honkytonk Man in which Johnny had a supporting role portraying Bob Wills. He appeared from the 1970s through the 2000s on Austin City Limits on TV and Garrison Keillor's broadcasts (radio). At the time of his death, he held the record for most appearances on the Austin-based PBS show. He was a member of the Million Dollar Band, and frequent guest on "Hee Haw". He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999 in the early influences category as a member of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys.
Gimble's career spanned into the 21st century, recording with Vince Gill, Tanya Tucker, and performing at the 49th Annual Grammy Awards with Carrie Underwood in 2007. "Until Lloyd Maines surpassed him, Johnny held the record for most appearances on Austin City Limits. He played with heart and soul and had an infectious spirit and sense of adventure - both in his music and personality," said ACL Executive Producer Terry Lickona. Johnny was also a regular on Minnesota Public Radio's A Prairie Home Companion hosted by Garrison Keillor, who in 1994 penned "Owed to Johnny Gimble" as a tribute to his friend after Gimble received the NEA's National Heritage Fellowship, and who performed the song again on May 9, 2015, to commemorate Gimble's life.
Gimble and his wife Barbara were divorced twice and remarried twice. They had a son and two daughters, and as of 2022 they had four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Johnny and his son Dick Gimble, a college professor of music at McLennan Community College, started a Western Swing Camp focusing on fiddle. After two years in Waco and with the help of daughter Cyndy they moved the camp to SMU's Taos Campus and ensured that the western swing style of country music was passed on to the next generation. Gimble's granddaughter, Emily, is a notable vocalist and keyboard player who has performed with Johnny, Asleep at the Wheel, Warren Hood, and Hayes Carll. She has since launched a solo career, based out of Austin, Texas.
In 2010, he released his final album "Celebrating with Friends," a collection of collaborations with artists like Nelson, Haggard, Ray Benson, Dale Watson, Vince Gill and others. Gimble died not far from his home in Dripping Springs, Texas, on May 9, 2015, aged 88. His daughter stated that her father was "finally rid of the complications from several strokes over the past few years". He was posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2018.
Freddie Redd (May 29, 1928 – March 17, 2021) was an American hard-bop pianist and composer.
Redd was born in New York City to Freddie, a porter, and Helen, a homemaker. His father was a pianist but died before the child was two, leaving the keyboard for him to discover. Though his mother moved around New York's various boroughs, the piano always travelled with them. Redd began teaching himself to play as soon as he could comfortably reach the keys from the bench. His primary interest, however, was in the drums. That early obsession influenced his piano playing later on; Redd's sense of rhythmic invention and propulsion proved a distinctive aspect of his formidable style. As a young teen in Harlem, Redd would often skip school to see Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Jay McShann, and Earl Hines at the Apollo Theatre.
Redd was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1946. This is where he spent the next three years learning more about the piano and playing gigs with his friends throughout bases and camps within South Korea. There were pianos in every recreation room, which is where Redd taught himself how to play and formed a band during his time of service. Another GI played him Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker's bebop hit "Shaw 'Nuff," and it changed the direction of Redd's musical life. Discharged in 1949, Redd returned to New York. He had developed his technique while in the service and began getting work at home. He worked in the clubs in New York and Syracuse, New York, in a small group led by drummer Johnny Mills, and in 1951 recorded with Tiny Grimes and toured the South in Cootie Williams's sextet. In 1952 he returned to New York, where in the following year he worked briefly with Oscar Pettiford and Charles Mingus.
Redd belonged to the Jive Bombers with the saxophonist Earl Johnson, the double bass player Clarence Palmer, and the singer and guitarist Pee Wee Tinney (1954), recorded with Art Farmer's and Gigi Grace's quintet and Gene Ammons's All Stars (1955). That same year, Redd shared Piano: East/West (Savoy) with pianist Hampton Hawes -- they each led half the LP -- and released Introducing the Freddie Redd Trio on Prestige. In 1956, he served as pianist on Rolf Ericson & the American All Stars and toured Sweden. In 1957, he led a trio for San Francisco Suite on Riverside, and in 1958 released Get Happy with Freddie Redd for the U.K.'s tiny Nixa label that featured trumpeter Benny Bailey and bassist Tommy Potter. On piano, Redd was never the most dynamic improviser, but his keen ear and deep attunement to song form made him a striking "A busy chorder, he will start rattling away behind a soloist, prompting him and prodding hard," Watrous wrote for The New York Times. "Chords jar and fragment. New rhythmic and harmonic ideas pop up regularly."
Here's "Old Man River" from above album.
On returning to the USA he moved to San Francisco, where he played for a brief period with Mingus at the Black Hawk and worked as the house pianist at Bop City. In 1959, Redd was commissioned to compose original music for Jack Gelber's play The Connection. In both the Living Theatre's off-Broadway production and Shirley Clarke's 1961 film, he played the role of musician and actor alongside saxophonist Jackie McLean and others. Blue Note signed Redd and released the recorded score as The Music from "The Connection" in 1960. The following year, Redd issued the quintet offering Shades of Redd with saxophonists McLean and Tina Brooks, bassist Paul Chambers, and drummer Louis Hayes. He recorded a third album for the label, but due to a dispute between Redd and Blue Note's Alfred Lion, it was shelved until 1989.
The pianist left the U.S. in 1962 for an extended stay in Europe. He spent years living and working in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, and France as well as England. His only known recorded appearance between 1961 and 1970 was playing organ on James Taylor's first single, "Carolina in My Mind," at Apple Studios in 1968. In 1971, Redd released the trio outing Under Paris Skies with a French rhythm section, and in 1973 he issued In Sweden accompanied by old friends Potter and drummer Joe Harris. Redd returned to the United States in 1974 and headed for California. He spent the next 15 years between Los Angeles and San Francisco. He became a valued member of the northern and southern California jazz scenes and led a band that played clubs across Mexico -- he even moved for a time to Guadalajara.
In 1977, Redd released Straight Ahead! with bassist Henry Franklin and drummer Carl Burnett on the Interplay label, and followed with the solo outing Extemporaneous a year later. He continued to work bandstands in California, but he spent more and more time playing resort gigs in Mexico -- where he was given free rein in choosing his musicians and material. He gigged more than once with Mexican jazz pioneer/drummer/composer Tino Contreras. Redd also returned to Europe for festivals, club gigs, and occasional tours.
In 1988, Redd's Blues, his unreleased 1961 Blue Note outing, appeared for the first time, and was followed by Mosaic Records' limited-edition The Complete Blue Note Recordings of Freddie Redd, the liner notes of which quoted Jackie McLean as saying: "You never know what town you'll see Freddie in. He's always been itinerant. Freddie just appears from time to time, like some wonderful spirit."
He returned to New York to record 1989's Lonely City for the independent Uptown label, leading a septet that included Clifford Jordan, Ben Riley, and George Duvivier. In 1990, he released Live at the Studio Grill with drummer Billy Higgins and bassist Al McKibbon. He followed with the studio album Everybody Loves a Winner for Milestone in 1991, leading a sextet that included saxophonist Teddy Edwards and trombonist Phil Ranelin.
Redd moved to North Carolina to care for his ailing mother in late 1991. After her death in 1995, he returned to New York City, then moved to Pittsburgh for close to a decade. While it was his home base, he continued to work and travel internationally. He released Freddie Redd and His International Jazz Connection in 1998. Redd moved to Baltimore, Maryland, in 2009. He went on a large European tour in 2013 and undertook several recording sessions. In 2015, he issued his SteepleChase debut, Music for You with bassist Jay Anderson and drummer Billy Drummond. The following year, he released the sextet date With Due Respect, featuring the previous set's trio, plus trombonist John Mosca, saxophonist Chris Byars, and clarinetist Stefano Doglioni.
Redd retired from music at the age of 87 and returned to New York City. In January 2021, Washington, D.C.'s Bleebop Records released the unissued 2013 recordings Baltimore Jazz Loft -- a quartet offering co-led with bassist Butch Warren -- and the quintet album Reminiscing, which included bassist Michael Formanek. Redd died at a Manhattan care facility in New York City on March 17, 2021, aged 92. His grandson, Leslie Clarke, announced that Redd had died from natural causes in his sleep.
(Edited from AllMusic, New Grove Dictionary of Jazz & Wikipedia)
"Sonny" Burgess (May 28, 1929 – August 18, 2017) was an American rockabilly guitarist and singer.
Albert Austin Burgess was born near Newport, Arkansas, about 60 miles west of Memphis. His parents, Albert Austin and the former Esta Parsley, ran a cotton and soybean farm. After graduating from Newport High School in 1948, he spent two years in baseball’s minor leagues but could not hit a curveball. Giving up on a baseball career, he formed a country band, the Rocky Road Ramblers, with three friends, Kern Kennedy, Johnny Ray Hubbard, and Gerald Jackson and played boogie woogie music in dance halls and bars around Newport. He served in the Army (1951-1953) during the Korean War, stationed in West Germany with the military police. On his return to Arkansas, he reorganized the Ramblers into the Moonlighters, taking the name from the Silver Moon Club in Newport, where the group often played.
Burgess was a fan of the blues singers Jimmy Reed and Big Joe Turner and performed a mix of rhythm and blues and old standards, but in 1955 the group changed its sound after opening for Elvis Presley on four dates. “We heard Elvis and said, ‘Man, I want to go to Memphis and record and be like that,’ ” Mr. Burgess told Kicks magazine in 1988. Presley, in turn, liked the group’s version of Smiley Lewis’s “One Night of Sin,” which he recorded in 1958 as “One Night.” Adding a second guitar and trumpet and taking a new name, the Pacers, the group began recording at Sun with Sam Phillips, who encouraged Burgess to coarsen his vocal style and let loose, which he did.
The band's first record was "Red Headed Woman." The flip side was "We Wanna Boogie." Both were written by Burgess and delivered a straight shot of full-tilt rockabilly, with manic instrumental solos behind Mr. Burgess’s growling vocals, punctuated by whoops and shrieks and growls. “Here was total abandon: coarse, untutored singing; unintelligible lyrics; ragged drumming; distorted guitar, backed by a wildly bleating trumpet,” Colin Escott wrote in “Roadkill on the Three-Chord Highway: Art and Trash in American Popular Music” (2002). “It was punk before punk, thrash before thrash.”
The record was said to have sold nearly 100,000 copies, but Mr. Burgess, who wrote both songs, was unable to capitalize on its success. His later releases for Sun including “Thunderbird,” “Ain’t Got a Thing,” “My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” and “Sadie’s Back in Town,” went nowhere. “Maybe Sonny’s sound was too raw, I don’t know — but I tell you this,” Phillips said in an interview for a boxed set of Sun recordings. “They were pure rock ’n’ roll.” In performance, the Pacers lived up to their sound. Inspired by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, whose stage antics had enlivened Bill Haley and the Comets’ movie “Rock Around the Clock,” they did splits and back flips onstage, formed a human pyramid and threw themselves into the audience at the end of every performance.
After leaving the Sun label in 1959 he scratched out a living playing bass and touring with the country singer Conway Twitty and performing with a variety of groups. After leaving Twitty in 1964, Burgess formed a new group, the King’s IV, but in 1972 he left the music business to run shoe store in Little Rock and also becoming a traveling salesman for St. Louis Trimming, a sewing-supply company. In 1986 he joined with former musicians from the Sun label to form the Sun Rhythm Section and was invited to a show in Washington DC where he made a big hit. After that, Burgess travelled all over the world and became a sensation in Europe. Due to his European fans, Mr. Burgess enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s, and recorded the albums Tennessee Border with Dave Alvin of the Blasters and Sonny Burgess with Garry Tallent of the E Street Band.
In 1998, the Smithsonian Institution made a video called “Rockin’ on the River” that brought Burgess and the Legendary Pacers together again. In addition to original member Kern Kennedy, the group now included Bobby Crafford, Jim Aldridge, Fred Douglas, J. C. Caughron, and Charles Watson II. They made two album-length recordings in the late 1990s: They Came from the South and Still Rockin’ and Rollin’ which in 2000, was voted the best new album in the country and roots field in Europe. The group was inducted in 2002 into the Rockabilly Hall of Fame. They also performed at the 2006 National Folk Festival in Richmond, Virginia. With June Taylor, he was the host of “We Wanna Boogie,” a Sunday night show on KASU, the radio station of Arkansas State University, in Jonesboro. Burgess was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Music degree from Arkansas State University in Jonesboro on May 7, 2011.
In 2014, he received the Delta Cultural Center’s Sonny Payne Award for Blues Excellence. Sonny Burgess and the Legendary Pacers were given the Folklife Award by the Arkansas Arts Council, presented at the Governor’s Arts Awards ceremony on March 10, 2016. That same year, in poor heath, he moved to Little Rock (Pulaski County). In July 2017, Burgess suffered a fall at his home. He died the following month in Little Rocks Arkansas hospital, at the age of 88.
He performed with his band, The Pacers, up until a month before he passed away. His legacy endures as a testament to his role in shaping the sound of rockabilly and influencing generations of musicians who followed.
(Edited from The New York Times, Wikipedia & Encyclopedia of Arkansas)
Henry Ellis Stewart (May 27, 1923 – August 4, 2003), better known as Redd Stewart, was an American country music songwriter and recording artist who co-wrote "Tennessee Waltz" with Pee Wee King in 1948.
Pee Wee & Redd
He was born the son of musical parents in Ashland City, Tennessee. Redd's family moved to Louisville, Kentucky, while he was still young. He learned to play the banjo, piano, fiddle and guitar as a child. All six of his brothers and sisters also became musicians. He dropped out of school after the seventh grade to perform in local bands. At age 14, he wrote his first commercial song, an ad jingle for a Louisville Ford automobile dealership. He also formed his own band at that time, the Kentucky Wildcats. He legally changed his name to Redd because of his russet-coloured hair.
In 1939, Redd Stewart became a member of Pee Wee King's band, the Golden West Cowboys, and joined the cast of the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. World War II. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Redd was drafted into the U.S. Army and sent to the South Pacific. While stationed there with the rank of sergeant, Redd wrote "A Soldier's Last Letter," which Ernest Tubb worked on and recorded in 1944, making it a No. 1 hit staying at the top for four weeks out of a seven month stay on the Country charts and crossing over to the Pop chart Top 20.
When Redd returned to Pee Wee's Golden West Cowboys at the end of WW II, he became the band's vocalist, replacing Eddy Arnold who had gone solo. Most of the band's biggest hits were sung by Stewart. In 1946 he married Frances Jean Grimes. Stewart and King left the Opry and moved to Louisville in 1947. From there, they became pioneers in country music TV, starring in both regional and national programs.
When Stuart and King became a song writing team in the 1950s their first major success, "Bonaparte's Retreat," was Kay Starr's launch-pad to stardom They provided material to Eddy Arnold, Cowboy Copas and other country stars of the day. Their "Tennessee Waltz" became a pop smash for Patti Page in 1951 (reportedly selling more than 6 million copies)and was also covered by Roy Acuff, the Louvin Brothers, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley and many others. It was also named a state song of Tennessee in 1965. "Slow Poke" was # 1 on both the country and pop charts for King & the Golden West Cowboys and was covered by Hawkshaw Hawkins. King and Stewart's romantic ballad "You Belong to Me," co-written with Chilton Price, topped the pop charts when recorded by Jo Stafford in 1952 and became a major doo-wop hit when revived by the Duprees a decade later.
Redd appeared in several movies with Pee Wee King, including Gold Mine in the Sky (1938), Ridin' the Outlaw Trail (1951) and The Rough, Tough West (1952), the last two starring Charles Starrett as the Durango Kid. In 1961, Redd and King appeared in the movie, Hoedown. In 1950–51, Stewart signed with King Records as a solo vocalist, though none of his singles were successful. Stewart also wrote songs that would be made famous by other artists. He provided Jim Reeves with "That's a Sad Affair", (Reeves also recorded "You Belong to Me") and Moon Mullican with "Downstream" and "When Love Dies Where Does it Go" in the mid-1950s. "Tennessee Waltz" In 1971 he married Darlene Iona Collins and in 1972, he was inducted as a charter member into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. During his lifetime, Redd Stewart estimated that he had written more than 400 songs.
On August 2, 2003, Stewart died at 80 at Baptist Hospital East in Louisville, from complications of injuries due to a fall at his home in Louisville, in the early 1990s. n 2004, "Tennessee Waltz" was awarded BMI's 3,000,000 Airplay Award. (equivalent to 17.1 years of continuous playing). In 2004, he was inducted into Country Legends Hall of Fame and the Traditional Country Music Hall of Fame; and in 2005, Tennessee Waltz Parkway opened in his birthplace, Ashland City.
(Edited from Wikipedia, Nashville Songwriters Foundation & IMDb)
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