Faron Young, posthumously inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2000, gained fame as one of the great honky tonk singers of the 1950s. His hits continued into the 1960s and 1970s, while he established himself as a Nashville businessman. By the 1980s, he had become an elder statesman of the country music industry.
He was born February 25, 1932, in Shreveport, Louisiana. The youngest of six children, he grew up on the dairy farm his family operated outside Shreveport. Faron started singing at an early age, as his sister Dorothy recalls: “He sang all the time. He sometimes nearly drove us crazy. He was good from day one–very good. None of the rest of us could carry a tune.” While a senior at Fair Park High School, Faron fronted Webb Pierce’s band. His first solo performance on the Louisiana Hayride occurred in October 1951, shortly before he dropped out of Centenary College to pursue a music career.
Ken Nelson of Capitol Records gave Faron his big break. Impressed by an unknown singer on Webb Pierce’s live radio show, Ken rushed to KWKH in Shreveport to find the owner of this terrific voice. Because Faron was only 19, his parents signed his Capitol Records contract for him in January 1952. Within six months, he was living at Mom Upchurch’s boarding house in Nashville, singing on the Grand Ole Opry and working as an early-morning disk jockey on WSM Radio.
Then his draft notice arrived. He said he “cried like a rat eating a red onion.”
Capitol Records released Goin’ Steady two weeks after Faron’s induction into the Army in November 1952. The song hit the Billboard country charts while Faron suffered through the rigors of basic training. It eventually peaked at number two.
The Third Army Division at Fort McPherson, Georgia, snatched the young singer to replace Eddie Fisher as Special Services headliner, the first country music singer in that position. Backed by the Circle ‘A’ Wranglers, a “hillbilly” band that included fiddler Gordon Terry, Faron traveled throughout the seven-state region covered by the Third Army.
He continued to record for Capitol and periodically made Grand Ole Opry appearances in return for recruiting pitches. At a specially built studio in Atlanta, Faron recorded weekly 15-minute radio recruiting shows. When he returned to Nashville at the end of two years, he brought his bride of four months, Hilda Macon, daughter of an Army master sergeant. They had met at the Fort McPherson swimming pool. Their 32-year marriage–which ended in divorce–produced three sons, Damion, Robyn, and Kevin, and one daughter, Alana.
Faron put together a band fronted by the Wilburn Brothers, and they started touring in November 1954. From a name-the-band contest they acquired “The Young Sheriff and his Country Deputies.” Over the next four decades, the Deputy roster included such names as Gordon Terry, Darrell McCall, Roger Miller, Johnny Paycheck, Lloyd Green, Ben Keith, and Vassar Clements. Faron later changed his title to The Singing Sheriff.
In the ten years Ken Nelson produced Faron on Capitol Records, the hits that followed Goin’ Steady included If You Ain’t Lovin’ (You Ain’t Livin’), Live Fast Love Hard Die Young, I’ve Got Five Dollars and It’s Saturday Night, Sweet Dreams, I Miss You Already, Alone With You, Country Girl, Riverboat, and Hello Walls. Switching to Mercury Records in 1962, Faron worked with producer Jerry Kennedy to release such hits as Unmitigated Gall, Wine Me Up, Step Aside, Leavin’ and Sayin’ Goodbye, This Little Girl of Mine, and It’s Four in the Morning.
