Faron Young - Biography
Country singer Faron Young was both a phenomenal talent and a seething mass of contradictions. Equally adept at hardcore honky-tonk and pop-tinged romantic ballads, capable of stunning acts of generosity as well as unprovoked, vicious acts of outrageous behavior, Young’s photograph would have been an ideal illustration to accompany the “Creativity, Madness Linked, Researchers Say” newspaper headline. A complex, volatile individual, the Grand Ole Opry star not only made his mark on country music with a superb catalog of hits, he also boosted the careers of some key figures at points when they desperately needed help; one of the first in Nashville to cut a Willie Nelson composition, Young’s hit recording of “Hello, Walls” provided the struggling writer with a much needed cash infusion. Young’s band was a proving ground for a host of future stars (Johnny Paycheck, Roger Miller prominent among them), and Young provided valuable exposure for struggling and drastically unconventional up-and-comers such as Elvis Presley and Charley Pride by using them as his opening act. As Roger Miller (who was a hotel bellhop with no musical experience when Young hired him) famously said, “The only thing bigger than Faron’s heart is his mouth.“ But Young’s penchant for disruptive, even bizarre antics ultimately sidelined his own career, and the singer endured a bleak season of alcohol-fueled depression and failing health, so punishing that he ultimately took his own life.
Born February 25, 1932 in Shreveport, Louisiana, he was raised on a struggling, Depression-era dairy farm and came of age watching the cattle and strumming a guitar, becoming proficient enough by high school that he led his own combo which appeared at local barn dances and community events. The kid did not lack in nerve; once while driving through Shreveport, he spotted Hank Williams taking a smoke break on a balcony back of the Municipal Auditorium. “Hey Hank,” he shouted. “Why don't you let me come up there and teach you how to sing a song?” Soon enough, Young was working on the famed KWKH Louisiana Hayride with honky tonk pioneer Webb Pierce, and made his first recordings with get-around Shreveport scene boss Tillman Franks& his Rainbow Boys in 1952. Tagged “the Hillbilly Heartthrob,” Young impressed Capitol Records A&R man Ken Nelson enough to get a deal with the Hollywood based label, and it paid off when Young’s 1953 single “Goin Steady” went Top 3 on the country charts, followed by a series of equally successful releases. His career likely would have taken off faster, but Young was over in Korea singing to the troops after being drafted and assigned to the Entertainments Unit.
Discharged in 1955, Young next turned out one of his most famous records, the volcanic honky tonk raver “Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young,” which became the singer’s first number one country hit and remains one of country’s most infamous exercises in bad boy mystique. After appearing in a B-movie Western, Young assumed the nickname “the Young Sheriff” (later, “the Singing Sheriff”) and dubbed his band the Country Deputy’s, an ironic choice in as much as Young’s subsequent encounters with law enforcement were rarely amenable. But the good looking, fast-moving singer was on top of the heap and, despite the threat of rock & roll, hits kept coming, most notably with almost unspeakably beautiful recording of “Sweet Dreams.” The song stayed on the country chart eight months--a real boost for struggling writer Don Gibson (and later, of course, was a hit for Patsy Cline). Other key hits in the late fifties were his croon-tastic “I Miss You Already (and You’re Not Even Gone)” and the lascivious romp “Alone with You” which haunted the top of the country chart for over two months and crossed to reach number sixty on the Pop chart.
By the time he cut Willie Nelson’s offbeat “Hello, Walls” (a song that had been rejected by everyone else in town with derisive sneers of “hello, commode . . “ but for Young, spent nine weeks at number one and hit fifteen on the pop charts), Young had established himself as a artful, high stylist unafraid of risks. But that fact was a double-edged razor, and tales of Young’s drunken exploits are some of the wildest in all of country music’s catalog of aberrant behavior; he would humiliate autograph seeking fans with the nastiest of insults, reportedly once held an entire dinner at gunpoint, was known to have stripped, with a single swift, vicious yank, the dress off a waitress who’d angered him, was arrested for discharging a firearm into his own kitchen ceiling (that one ended his marriage), and had numerous DUI’s (most of which, in classic good ole boy fashion were reduced to lesser charges, like reckless driving). The most famous was a 1972 Clarksburg, West Virginia incident where he grew annoyed at a little girl sitting in the front row--Young stopped the show, strode into the audience, grabbed the child and administered a few well-aimed swats to her backside, resulting in an arrest, lawsuit and a new nickname--”The Spankin’ Sheriff.”
Yet the singer was also famed for his boundless generosity, routinely handing over hundreds and often thousands of dollars to band members in need of medical attention or funeral expenses, and subsequent attempts to re-pay him were always politely refused; these unprompted gestures extended to fans and complete strangers--he once whipped out his bankroll, peeled a few hundreds and handed to a woman, saying "You'd be a pretty woman if you had pretty teeth." Like Frank Sinatra, Faron Young was a classic Jekyll and Hyde, known to shift from benign to brutal while in the middle of a single sentence. Despite an impressive, sustained run of hits through the 1960s and 1970’s, with great records like “Crutches,” one of the all-time essential drinking songs (as in “pour me a tall pair of crutches”; hear also the fabulous “Wine me Up“), Young, who had alienated almost everyone in Nashville at some point (he was simply left off his headliner boss’ tour bus in the middle of nowhere at one point), found that his career was on the rocks. By the 1980’s, his chart entries were at the bottom, and he managed but two of these. He developed emphysema, and the combination of ill-health and severe depression finally led him to suicide--a grisly by gunshot act that he almost botched, shooting himself in the head a second time after the first .38 calibre bullet didn’t finish him. Even then, he lingered on for another twenty four hours, dying in a Nashville hospital on December 10, 1996.
