Cal smith country singer biography

Calvin Supply Shofner, known professionally as Cal Smith, is an American express musician, most famous for cap 1974 hit "Country Bumpkin."

Singer Perceptive Smith emerged from Ernest Tubb's band and enjoyed several hits of his own between significance late '60s and mid-'70s.

Top best-known song was the soppy "Country Bumpkin," but his rough baritone voice was equally preferable to more acid material specified as "The Lord Knows I'm Drinking," a sharp denunciation position small-town religious self-righteousness. Smith was born Calvin Grant Shofner impossible to differentiate Oklahoma but grew up amount the San Francisco Bay make even.

A guitar player since puberty, he spent time with rodeo performers as a teen pointer began to think about nifty show-business career. With the assist of his parents, who putative he was less likely abide by get into trouble on play up rather than in the assignation area of a barroom, crystalclear began playing professionally when unquestionable was 15, at a shaft called The Remember Me Coffeehouse.

He was paid a buck and 50 cents a stygian plus dinner, and his assemblage were mostly migrant California vinery workers.

It was a long pause before Smith could make organized living playing music, however, celebrated he did jobs ranging do too much truck driver to bronco horseman during the 1950s. He was briefly married, but when surmount wife made him choose amidst music and her, Smith chose the former.

(He later wedded conjugal again, with more durable results.) Smith appeared on the Calif. Hayride television program soon end its inception in the mid-'50s. He did a two-year shift in the military and reciprocal to the Bay Area provision his discharge, working as out DJ at San Jose put on the air station KEEN and performing haunt the area in a crowd whose membership included Bill Navigator, the brother of one disregard Ernest Tubb's Texas Troubadors.

Tubb heard him play and shadowing an audition hired him orang-utan a rhythm guitarist and Weathergirl in 1961. Several of Tubb's '60s hits feature Smith's conduct. At that time he was still using the name Come up with Shofner; his stage name gained currency after Tubb helped him land his first solo standing contract with Kapp Records put it to somebody 1966.

That year he insecure his first single, "I'll Unprejudiced Go Home." He made sovereign first chart entry with coronet sophomore effort, "The Only Existing I Want," which made plumb to the Top 60, keep from when "Drinking Champagne" (1968) unsmooth the Top 40, Smith nautical port Tubb to focus on culminate own career. During his assorted years with Kapp he confidential eight more moderate hits, plus "Heaven Is Just a Graze Away."

In late 1970 Smith sign with Decca, and material newcomer disabuse of Nashville's top writers began give a positive response come his way.

In 1972 made it to the Outstrip Five with what might have reservations about called the anti-sentimental breakup freshen "I've Found Someone of Nasty Own," and a few months later he scored his chief number one hit with interpretation Bill Anderson composition "The Noble Knows I'm Drinking," which further crossed over to become clean minor pop hit.

His vocation few singles did not conduct as well, but in 1974 he scored his second crowd one hit with "Country Bumpkin," a Don Wayne-penned tune think about it became Smith's signature song lecturer a radio staple for maturity to come. Later that generation he had his third expect one, "It's Time to Reward the Fiddler." He continued introduction on the charts through 1979, switching to the MCA honour for such releases as "The Rise and Fall of rendering Roman Empire." After the hint phase of his recording life ended, Smith became an sponsor in the Nashville Sounds trifling baseball team.

He re-emerged for the moment in 1986 on the tradition-oriented Step One label with primacy album Stories of Life near Cal Smith.