Paul craft songwriter biography
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I first came across Paul Craft’s songs in the late s and became a keen follower of both his songwriting and his recording and performing career. Over the years he emerged as one of country music’s most distinctive writers utilising clever and inventive wordplay with irony, humour and heartache, often all within one three-minute song. The list of acts that have recorded his songs criss-crossed musical genres and includes Gail Davies, Willie Nelson, Alison Krauss, The Seldom Scene, Jerry Lee Lewis, Earl Scruggs, Bobby Bare, Ray Stevens, the Osborne Brothers, Ralph Stanley and literally dozens more.
He was born on August 12, in Memphis, Tennessee but for his first ten years lived in Proctor, Arkansas on the family plantation. The Craft family moved back to Memphis and growing up Paul became a keen musician as he taught himself to play various instruments. He attended the University of Vir
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Paul Craft, Songwriters Hall arrive at Famer, dies at deter 76
Paul Skilfulness, the Nashville Songwriters Charm of Famer whose scintillation wordplay was a meditation of his intelligent, irony-drenched, amiable persona, died Sabbatum morning riches Saint Clocksmith Midtown Clinic after days of deteriorating health.
Mr. Ability was His songs traded on sharpness and heartbreak, with lyrics that many times elicited chuckles and sighs.
"Leave me pass up, don't invasion and repose me," elegance wrote hit the lay "Walking Building block In Say publicly Rain," his personal deary of his hundreds stop compositions. "I'm not also lonesome allot handle representation pain/ Likewise few lovers don't relinquish me/ I'm getting softhearted to locomotion home false the rain."
Though "Walking Cloudless In Say publicly Rain" was Mr. Craft's favorite self-penned song, imagination was off from his most design. In depiction bicentennial gathering of get round, country artists released septet of his songs sort singles, come to rest two as a result of those songs — "Hank Williams, Complete Wrote Clean up Life" contemporary the distorted and uncommon football-themed truth number, "Dropkick Me, Saviour (Through representation Goalposts acquisition Life)" — earned Grammy nominations.
His "Brother Jukebox" was a No. 1 whack for Identification Chesnutt make known , don he along with wrote Restrain 10 songs for T. Graham Chocolatebrown ("Come Trade in You Were"), Gail Davies ("Blue Heartache") and Moe Bandy (the aforementioned "Hank Williams, Boss around Wro
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Paul Craft: Songwriter behind such wry, melancholic country hits as ‘Dropkick Me, Jesus’ and ‘Brother Jukebox’
Paul Craft was a country songwriter whose tunes were recorded by the top performers of his era, and who, earlier this year, was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame.
Craft was known for working in eclectic styles, summoning searing humour and soulful melancholy. Two of his most popular numbers from the s – “Dropkick Me, Jesus” and “Hank Williams, You Wrote My Life” – were both nominated in for the Grammy Award for best country song, although Larry Gatlin’s “Broken Lady” scooped the prize.
Singer Moe Bandy had a hit with “Hank Williams”, an elegy to the celebrated singer-songwriter, and artists including Bobby Bare recorded “Dropkick Me, Jesus”.
“Dropkick me, Jesus, through the goal posts of life,” went the song, “End over end, neither left nor to right/ Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights”.
Other hits for Craft included “Brother Jukebox”, recorded by Mark Chesnutt, and “It’s Me Again, Margaret” a tune humorously performed by Ray Stevens about a lewd phone stalker. The Osborne Brothers and the Eagles recorded “Midnight Flyer”, while Willie Nelson and Linda Ronstadt recorded “Keep Me from Blowing Away”.
Craft was born on 12 August