Ferlin Husky, 1925–2011

Ferlin Husky got his first guitar before he turned 10 on a farm near Cantwell, Mo. It was a barter deal with a neighbor, who traded it for a hen that subsequently stopped laying eggs. He left home to serve five years in the Merchant Marine during World War II, then headed West to make his career in the honky-tonks of Bakersfield, Calif.

Husky started out using pseudonyms, said The New York Times, at the urging of a producer who thought his real name “sounded like a fabrication.” It was under his real name, however, that he became “the first major country star” to come out of Bakersfield, a scene that later produced Buck Owens and Merle Haggard.

Husky pioneered “a distinctively twangy California strain of country,” said the Los Angeles Times, and helped Capitol Records land new talent. His first hit came in 1953, when he and Jean Shepard recorded his song “A Dear John Letter” in the midst of the Korean War. In 1955, he headlined a show featuring the young Elvis Presley. “There were a lot of years when nobody in the business could follow Ferlin Husky,” Haggard later said.

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Husky’s biggest success came in 1957, when he laid off the twang and recorded his lush, classic single “Gone,” which crossed over to become one of Nashville’s first pop hits. It made him a national star and put him in the movies; he was one of the first country singers with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. “The Bakersfield Sound and the Nashville Sound often were portrayed as country music’s dust-bitten yin and smooth-polished yang,” said the Nashville Tennessean, “yet Husky was at the forefront of each of these styles.”