Keith Whitley - His Life and Career

The Country Music Hall of Fame inducted Keith Whitley, a premier vocal stylist and recording artist who helped define country music’s New Traditionalist movement in the 1980s.

Whitley made his mark in bluegrass in the 1970s after Ralph Stanley discovered Whitley and recruited the teenager for his Clinch Mountain Boys band. He spent about twelve years playing with Stanley and then with J. D. Crowe and the New South, but Whitley’s childhood musical heroes were hard-country singers such as Lefty Frizzell, George Jones, and Hank Williams, so he moved to Nashville to pursue recording as a mainstream country artist, starting in 1984.

Whitley’s rich, instantly identifiable baritone could convey melancholy, vulnerability, or devil-may-care exuberance. His solo career was barely five years long, but he earned eight Top Twenty songs during his lifetime, as well as six posthumously. His death of acute alcohol poisoning in 1989, at the age of thirty-four, left a promising and still-influential career unfinished.

Whitley was inducted along with Joe Galante and Jerry Lee Lewis.

To learn more about Whitley's career, visit his Hall of Fame member web page: https://www.countrymusichalloffame.org/hall-of-fame/keith-whitley

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Видео Keith Whitley - His Life and Career канала Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum