Jeanie sheppard biography

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She topped off a highly successful year with the top ten solo hit If Teardrops Were Silver. I’m a very strong-willed person, very outspoken—sometimes too much so, probably.”

Though her first single, Crying Steel Guitar Waltz, failed to chart, it remained a long-time fan favourite.

It's an honest recollection of her career and life. Their union proved to be short, however: Hawkins perished in the same 1963 airplane crash that took the lives of Patsy Cline, Cowboy Copas, and Cline’s manager, pilot Randy Hughes. . Here was a lady who meant it when she sung of love gone bad, good times to look forward to, memories to cherish.

She continued to record, but as a hardcore honky-tonk singer she found herself in an age when smooth country-pop was in vogue.

All too often she has been overlooked and has been in the shadows of more readily-known artists, yet, if you study her music and her career, she was equally important as all of the others in building the heritage of country music. In 1964 Jean scored her first top ten hit in eight years with Second Fiddle (To An Old Guitar).

“Buck Owens was in the car with us, and we were going from Bakersfield to LA to cut another session. She later recorded for a series of smaller labels.

A Grand Ole Opry Mainstay

A Grand Ole Opry mainstay, Shepard was for years the longest continuously tenured Opry star. She also laments that the business is a lot different now than it used to be, and that goes far beyond the music.

After leaving the show she moved to Nashville to be closer to the Grand Ole Opry, which she had also joined in 1955.

In 1956, she released her first album, SONGS OF A LOVE AFFAIR, with all 12 songs, which Shepard had a hand in writing, telling the story of a marriage ripped apart by an affair. Jean sang and played the upright bass in the band.
One night while playing at Noble’s Melody Ranch, Jean met Hank Thompson, who was also scheduled to perform.

I miss that camaraderie with those wonderful people. He asked her to play with him and later introduced her to musician Speedy West, who helped her get signed to Capitol Records in 1952.

Based in Hollywood, Capitol was beginning to build up a strong roster of country music acts. As a young girl, Jean listened to the Grand Ole Opry on the radio every week and saved her pennies to buy a Jimmie Rodgers record every year.

When Jean began recording for producer Ken Nelson, there was no precedent in country music for a young woman recording and touring on her own rather than as a member of a family team, couple, or as a band’s token ‘girl singer.’ The teenager dared to sing Twice The Lovin’ In Half The Timeon her first single and would go on to have hard-country hits with songs like Don’t Fall In Love With A Married Man, The Root Of All Evil (Is a Man)and The Other Woman—songs that presented a strong and—rare for that era—empowered female point of view, which later influenced artists including Loretta Lynn and Jeannie C.

Riley.

“Years ago, you just didn’t go on the road unless you were with a brother or a husband or a family, or people would just look down their noses at you,” Jean said a few years ago. Kitty Wells worked with Johnny [Wright], her husband. She enjoyed a highly successful country music career stretching back over more than 60 years and was still playing the occasional show dates and Opry appearances up until a few months before her passing.