Many of us grow up listening to country music, which is also known as country and western, and hillbilly music. It is a genre of popular music that originated in the Southern United States in the early 1920s. It takes its roots from genres such as American folk music and blues.
NOTE: Mel Street shares a birthday with Flicka63
King Malachi "Mel" Street (October 21, 1933 – October 21, 1978) was an American country music singer who had 13 top-20 hits on the Billboard country music chart.
Biography
Street was born in Rowe, VA to a coal mining family. Publications cite his year of birth as 1933, although his family maintains that he was born in 1935 and his gravestone gives the year as 1936. He began performing on western Virginia and West Virginia radio shows at the age of sixteen. Street subsequently worked as a radio tower electrician in Ohio and as a nightclub performer in the Niagra Falls, NY area. He moved back to West Virginia in 1963 to open an auto body shop.
From 1968 to 1972, Street hosted a show on a Bluefield, WV television station. He recorded his first single, "Borrowed Angel" -- which he also wrote -- in 1970 for a small regional record label. A larger label, Royal American Records, picked it up in 1972 and it became a top-10 Billboard hit. He recorded the biggest hit of his career, "Lovin' on Back Streets", in 1972.
Street's last television appearance was in 1977. He performed his 1976 hit "I Met A Friend Of Yours Today" on That Good Ole Nashville Music.
Street recorded several hits in the mid-1970s, such as "You Make Me Feel More Like a Man," "Forbidden Angel," "I Met a Friend of Yours Today," "If I Had a Cheatin' Heart," and "Smokey Mountain Memories". He signed with Mercury Records in 1978, but suffering from clinical depression and alcoholism, he killed himself by a self-inflicted gunshot on October 21, 1978, his 45th birthday. He had a record debut on the country charts on October 21 as well, called "Just Hangin' On", and later charted four posthumous songs. Street's idol George Jones sang at his funeral.
Congrats to TerryBaldridge, CaneMaster & Rock Thrower on the FTF!