Charlie Rich

Colt/Forrest City

1932 –1995

Charlie Rich spent his life resisting easy musical categories. Born in Colt and raised near Forrest City, he grew up surrounded by gospel, country, blues, and jazz, a combination that would eventually become the foundation of one of the most distinctive careers in American popular music.

Music was part of the Rich household. His parents sang in a gospel quartet, and his mother taught him piano using hymns and gospel standards. Outside the home, Rich encountered another powerful influence in C. J. Allen, a Black sharecropper and gifted honky-tonk pianist who worked on the Rich property. By high school, Rich was playing saxophone in the Forrest City marching band and had become such an admirer of jazz bandleader Stan Kenton that classmates called him “Charlie Kenton.”

He briefly attended the University of Arkansas as a music major before joining the U.S. Air Force. Stationed in Oklahoma, Rich formed a jazz-blues group called the Velvetones with his wife, Margaret Ann, singing lead. After leaving the service, the couple settled in West Memphis, where Rich farmed during the day and played jazz and rhythm-and-blues clubs at night. He and Margaret Ann also wrote songs together, putting Rich close to the Memphis recording world while he was still trying to make a living from the land. Farming did not last. Music did.

Margaret Ann played a decisive role in moving his career forward. Without telling him, she took a home recording of Charlie to Bill Justis at Sun Records in Memphis. Rich was soon working at Sun as a studio musician, songwriter, and recording artist, playing on sessions and writing material recorded by artists including Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. In 1960, his own recording of “Lonely Weekends” became a million-selling hit.

Rich spent much of the next decade moving among labels and styles. He recorded rock and roll, blues, jazz, pop, and country, scoring occasional hits but resisting the idea that he belonged neatly inside any one genre. That broad musical vocabulary finally became his advantage when producer Billy Sherrill signed him to Epic Records and helped frame Rich’s voice and piano within the lush country-pop sound later called countrypolitan.

The breakthrough was dramatic. “Behind Closed Doors” became a major country and pop success in 1973, followed by “The Most Beautiful Girl,” which reached number one on both country and pop charts. Rich suddenly found himself at the center of American popular music. The Country Music Association named him Male Vocalist of the Year in 1973 and Entertainer of the Year in 1974.

Yet the success never fully explained Rich. What distinguished him was the ease with which he moved between musical languages. Gospel phrasing, blues feeling, jazz harmony, country storytelling, and pop sophistication all lived inside his performances. His white hair earned him the nickname “The Silver Fox,” but his musicianship, not image, was the source of his lasting reputation.

Rich’s career had difficult periods, including struggles with alcohol and years when commercial momentum faded, but his finest recordings outlived the trends around them. Late in life, his album Pictures and Paintings returned him to a more intimate, jazz-influenced sound and reminded critics of the depth of his talent.

Sun Records founder Sam Phillips may have described Rich best: it all seemed effortless, the way he moved from rock to country to blues to jazz. That fluidity began in eastern Arkansas and became Charlie Rich’s defining gift.