eBay

Here’s a Document Signed by

HANK SNOW

(1914 - 1999)

COUNTRY MUSIC LEGEND – A SINGER, SONGWRITER, COMPOSER and MUSICIAN FROM 1936-1996 – RECORDING ON THE RCA VICTOR LABEL.

Snow had a career that spanned more than 50 years, he recorded 140 albums and charted more than 85 singles on the Billboard country charts from 1950 until 1980. His number-one hits include the self-penned songs "I'm Moving On", "The Golden Rocket" and "The Rhumba Boogie" and famous versions of "I Don't Hurt Anymore", "Let Me Go, Lover!", "I've Been Everywhere", "Hello Love", as well as other top 10 hits.

As a performer of traditional country music, Snow won numerous awards and is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, the Canadian Country Music Hall of Fame and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame.

<<>::<>>

HERE’S A PERSONAL CHECK SIGNED BY HANK SNOW, USING HIS FORMAL NAME “CLARENCE H. SNOW,” DATELINED AT NASHVILLE, TENNESSEE, DEC 16, 1994, MADE PAYABLE TO ‘SOUTH CENTRAL BELL’ FOR $19.23

BOLDLY SIGNED BY SNOW!

The document measures 8¼” x 3” and is in VF condition – Boldly executed by Snow.

<<>::<>>

BIOGRAPHY OF HANK SNOW

Hank Snow (09 May 1914–20 December 1999), country musician, was born Clarence Eugene Snow in Brooklyn, Nova Scotia, Canada, the son of George Snow, a sawmill worker, and Marie Boutlier Snow. His parents' marriage soured when he was a small child. He later recalled that he and his siblings feared being taken away to an orphanage by a government organization, the Overseers of the Poor, because of their family's unhappy home life. When his parents divorced around 1922, he became the ward of his paternal grandmother; two of his sisters were placed in foster homes. He despised his grandmother, who beat him with a leather strap because he was a chronic bed-wetter. He often ran away in attempts to visit his mother, who lived in a nearby town, Liverpool. Around 1925 a judge ordered that he be returned to his mother, who soon thereafter married a fisherman named Charles Tanner. A heavy drinker with a violent temper, Tanner physically and emotionally abused his stepson. “I was constantly called ‘little bastard,' ‘son of a bitch,' and other names too filthy to put in print,” Snow later wrote. “[He] was extremely jealous of Mother whenever I was near… . For no good reason he would twist my frail arms and hit me with his fists. Many times he knocked me on my back onto a bare floor” (pp. 27–28). Snow dropped out of school during the fifth grade. At the age of twelve, seeking to escape the turmoil of his home, he took a job as a cabin boy on a fishing schooner that operated out of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia.

Snow was taught to play the guitar by his mother, who also introduced him to the music of Vernon Dalhart, the first recording star in country music. While at sea, Snow occasionally entertained the fishermen on his boat by singing and playing the harmonica in exchange for nickels and pieces of fudge. He worked on various schooners for four years, quitting in 1930 after surviving a terrifying storm that drowned more than 130 Nova Scotian fishermen.

Snow first became seriously interested in music at the age of sixteen, when he heard his mother playing a Jimmie Rodgers record, “Moonlight and Skies.” Within a few weeks, he purchased a mail-order guitar and found himself “picking it up just about every free moment I had, and I experimented with guitar runs and chord progressions that sounded like Jimmie Rodgers. [He] had become my idol” (p. 83). Over the next few years he led a peripatetic existence, sleeping on broken sofas in the homes of relatives, often surviving on meals of molasses and bread, and working as a stevedore, lumberjack, lobsterman, and Fuller Brush salesman. Determined to become a music star like Rodgers, he hitchhiked in 1933 to Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he successfully auditioned at radio station CHNS. Given a weekly, unpaid radio show, Snow, billed as “The Cowboy Blue Yodeler” (in imitation of Rodgers's moniker, “America's Blue Yodeler”), proved to be locally popular and in 1935 became a paid performer with a daily show sponsored by Crazy Water Crystals, a laxative manufacturer. However, he continued to live a hand-to-mouth existence; in the winter of 1935 he was forced to go on city relief, shoveling ice from the street in front of the hotel that housed the CHNS radio station. That year he married Minnie Aalders, who worked as a chocolate dipper at a candy factory. Their only child, whom they named after Jimmie Rodgers, was born in the charity ward at a Salvation Army hospital.

While performing on CHNS, Snow began billing himself as “Hank, the Yodeling Ranger,” having learned that Rodgers had been made an honorary Texas Ranger. A radio announcer advised him to take the name “Hank” because it sounded more “country” than his given name, Clarence. In 1936 he signed a recording contract with Canadian Bluebird, a subsidiary of RCA Victor. His early recordings were usually ballads and story songs, many of which included excellent, Rodgers-inspired yodeling. But as his voice deepened over the next few years, he was forced to give up yodeling and change his moniker to “Hank, the Singing Ranger.” During the late 1930s he toured extensively through eastern Canada, often playing at movie theaters during the intermissions between films and supplementing his income by teaching guitar lessons. In 1942 he became a featured performer on radio station CKNB in Campbellton, New Brunswick, which was powerful enough to broadcast into border towns in the United States. After receiving fan letters from as far away as Kentucky, he determined to make the jump from Canada into the U.S. country music market. “I just liked the sound—America,” he later told an interviewer. “Texas was always big in my mind. Because I wrote a lot of songs about Texas, you know, I'd read about these places, seen them in the movies” (quoted in Guralnick, p. 41). Between 1936 and 1949 he recorded approximately ninety sides for Bluebird, several of which proved to be major hits in Canada, including “The Blue Velvet Band,” “Galveston Rose,” “My Blue River Rose,” and “I'll Not Forget My Mother's Prayers.” None of his records, however, was released by RCA Victor in the United States.

Snow first performed in the United States in 1944, playing a few shows in Philadelphia. That year he met country singer Big Slim Aliff, who in 1945 got him a regular slot on the popular “Wheeling Jamboree” program, broadcast from radio station WWVA in Wheeling, West Virginia. Aliff, a former cowboy, also taught Snow how to perform riding tricks on horseback; these stunts became an important component of Snow's live shows. During the late 1940s, in an attempt to become a singing cowboy in the movies, he made two extended trips to Hollywood. He later characterized this experience as a “shell game,” in which various promoters advised him to buy expensive advertisements in trade magazines, then sent him to loan companies that charged exorbitant rates to borrow money to pay for the advertisements. He was booked into only a few shows on the West Coast, made no headway at the studios, and eventually spent more than $13,000 trying to start a Hollywood career. In 1948 he moved to Dallas, where he appeared on the “Big D Jamboree.” A group of local disc jockeys played one of his Canadian records, “Brand on My Heart,” until it became a grassroots hit in Texas and other southwestern states, despite having never been released or distributed outside of Canada. This success finally convinced RCA Victor to sign him to an American recording contract in 1949.

In Dallas, Snow became friends with country star (and fellow Jimmie Rodgers enthusiast) Ernest Tubb, who used his influence in Nashville to get Snow a spot on the Grand Ole Opry. He debuted on the show in January 1950, but the audience initially gave him a cool reception. After several frustrating weeks, he expected to be fired and made plans to return to Canada, but in March 1950 his record “I'm Movin' On” was released. The song, which celebrated the freedom to travel provided by the railroad, featured Snow's strong baritone voice, his “hot” flat-picking guitar style, and his propulsive rhythm section of fiddler Tommy Vaden, bassist Ernie Newton, and steel guitarist Joe Talbot. Snow later described the song's electric effect on his career: the Opry audiences “were completely indifferent one week, and the next week they were wildly enthusiastic” (p. 324). “I'm Movin' On” was a nationwide number-one hit that stayed on the charts for forty-four weeks. “The Golden Rocket,” another train song, became his second number-one hit in late 1950.

Between 1951 and 1954 every Snow release reached the top ten on the country charts. These included “Rhumba Boogie,” “Bluebird Island” (a duet with Anita Carter), “The Gold Rush Is Over,” “Married by the Bible, Divorced by the Law,” and “Spanish Fireball.” In 1954 Snow had two number-one hits, “I Don't Hurt Anymore” and “Let Me Go, Lover.” A somewhat nasal singer with remarkably crisp enunciation, he proved adept at performing songs in a variety of styles: slow honky-tonk ballads about love gone wrong; Jimmie Rodgers-influenced traveling songs and story songs; novelty numbers that he sang with a comical, rapid-fire delivery; driving, boogie-oriented numbers; and songs with a Latin or Hawaiian flavor. During the 1950s he became the first country artist to release “concept albums,” which were built around a specific theme or style of music. These included Old Doc Brown (1955), a set of talking blues and recitations; When Tragedy Struck (1958), a collection of sentimental standards; and tributes to Rodgers. In 1953 he and Tubb established a memorial and museum dedicated to Rodgers in Rodgers's hometown of Meridian, Mississippi. In the mid-1950s Snow played an important role in Elvis Presley's fledgling career, helping to book him on the Grand Ole Opry and the Louisiana Hayride and touring with him extensively in 1955.

During the 1960s Snow was a vocal critic of the “Nashville Sound,” a pop-oriented style that dominated country music during the decade, typically featuring crooning backup singers and string sections. Although he occasionally capitulated and recorded in this style, for the most part he remained a staunch country traditionalist. Perhaps for this reason, he enjoyed less chart success during the 1960s, with only three top-five hits: “Beggar to a King,” “I've Been Everywhere,” and “Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead-End Street).” He continued to busily record, however, often releasing three LP albums per year. His most popular album of the decade was Souvenirs (1961), which featured new recordings of many of his biggest hits from the 1950s. One of the few major country singers who was also an excellent musician, he recorded two albums of instrumental duets with Nashville guitar virtuoso Chet Atkins. His discography from the 1960s also includes several gospel albums, an album of train songs, and a tribute album to the Sons of the Pioneers. He toured in Europe and Southeast Asia, spending eighteen days in Vietnam in 1966; the tour was intended not only to entertain U.S. troops but also to defy the antiwar sentiments of demonstrators in the United States.

During the 1970s Snow served briefly as president of the Association of Country Entertainers, a group that opposed Nashville's growing pop orientation. His last number-one hit, “Hello, Love,” was released in 1974. In 1977 he founded the Hank Snow Foundation for the Prevention of Child Abuse in Nashville. The following year he was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters International Hall of Fame, and in 1979 he was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame. During his career he released approximately 140 albums; eighty-five of his songs reached the country charts, including twenty-seven top-five singles. In 1981 RCA Records unceremoniously dropped him from his contract, ending a forty-five-year affiliation. He continued to appear regularly on the Grand Ole Opry into the early 1990s. His contemporaries noted his steely, “all-business” demeanor both on- and offstage; “you get an unmistakable impression,” wrote music journalist Peter Guralnick, “of the fierce combativeness which must have carried him through a loveless childhood and a thoroughly improbable career” (p. 37). Respiratory illness prevented him from playing at the Opry during the mid-1990s, but he managed to return in 1996, receiving standing ovations. He spent his last years at his modest home on three acres in suburban Nashville, which he had grandly named “Rainbow Ranch.” He died in Nashville.

Bibliography

The best source of information on Snow's life is his lengthy, detailed autobiography, The Hank Snow Story (1994), cowritten with Jack Ownbey and Bob Burris. An excellent profile of Snow appears in Peter Guralnick, Lost Highway: Journeys and Arrivals of American Musicians (1979). For his career within the context of country music history, see Bill C. Malone, Country Music USA: A Fifty-Year History (1968); Malone and Judith McCulloh, eds., Stars of Country Music: Uncle Dave Macon to Johnny Rodriguez (1975); and Barry McCloud, Definitive Country (1995). Bear Family Records has extensively documented Snow's career on compact disc, including The Yodeling Ranger (1936–1947) (1993), a five-CD collection of his Canadian recordings; The Singing Ranger (1949–1953) (1994), a four-CD set that includes his early U.S. hits; and The Thesaurus Transcriptions (1994), five CDs of transcriptions from the early 1950s made for radio airplay. The best single-disc retrospective of his career is RCA's The Essential Hank Snow (1997). An obituary is in the New York Times, 21 Dec. 1999.

BIOGRAPHY OF HANK SNOW

Bibliography

See also