Sheb Wooley

Sheb Wooley was born in 1921 in Erick, Oklahoma, the third son of William C. Wooley and Ora E. Wooley.^[2] Wooley claimed to be part Cherokee.^[3] He had two older brothers, Logan and Hubert, as well as a younger brother, William.^[4][2] Federal census records for 1930 and 1940 identify Sheb's father only as a "Farmer", although the family's livestock holdings apparently included horses, for Sheb learned to ride at an early age and became a working cowboy and later an accomplished rodeo rider.

Wooley married for the first time in 1940, wedding 17-year-old Melva Miller, a cousin of Roger Miller who would later become a successful song writer and actor himself.^[5] Wooley became friends with Miller when he lived in Oklahoma. He taught the boy how to play guitar chords and bought his first fiddle for him.

When the United States entered World War II, Wooley tried to enlist in the military but was unsuccessful due to his numerous rodeo injuries. Instead, in the early 1940s he worked in the oil industry and as a welder. In 1946 he moved to Fort Worth, Texas, where he earned a living as a country-western musician recording songs and traveling for three years with a band throughout the South and Southwest.^[5] In Fort Worth he also married for the second time, to Edna Talbott Bunt, a young widow with an infant son named Gary.^[6] The three of them left Texas in 1950 and moved to Hollywood, where Wooley hoped to establish himself as an actor or singer in film or in the rapidly expanding medium of television.^[5]

At the age of 15, with a talent for music, Wooley formed a band called the "Plainview Melody Boys", that periodically performed on radio at station KASA in Elk City, Oklahoma.^[5] He started his recording career in 1945.^[7] His music encompassed Western swing,^[7] country, hillbilly, rock and roll,^[8] pop^[9] and novelty songs.^[1] At the start of the 1950s, Wooley began fusing Western swing with rhythm and blues, but later in his career his music would shift to the more commercial Nashville sound.^[7]

In 1958, Wooley earned considerable fame with his hit rock and roll comedy single, "The Purple People Eater", utilizing tape manipulation inspired by the David Seville single "Witch Doctor".^[8][9] In the United Kingdom, he enjoyed a minor hit with the comedy single "Luke the Spook" on the flip side of "My Only Treasure", a ballad in the country and western tradition. Wooley also had a string of country hits, with his "That's My Pa" reaching No. 1 of Billboard's Hot C&W Sides chart in March 1962. That same year, Wooley intended to record the song "Don't Go Near the Indians", but he was delayed by an acting job. Meanwhile, Rex Allen recorded the song, and it was a hit. Wooley, however, would do the sequel to the song, "Don't Go Near the Eskimos", about a boy in Alaska named Ben Colder (had never "been colder").^[10] This sequel was so successful that Wooley continued using the name Ben Colder, with one of his later recordings being "Shaky Breaky Car" (which parodied the song "Achy Breaky Heart").^[10] In December 1963, his single "Hootenanny Hoot" became a top-10 hit in Australia; and in 1967 his song "The Love-in" (1967) was recognized as an acerbic commentary on the 1960s' counterculture.^[11]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Wooley became a regular on the television series Hee Haw and wrote the theme song for that long-running series. On Hee Haw he often appeared as the character Ben Colder, playing him as a drunken country songwriter.^[10] Outside of Hee Haw, Wooley released music and performed as Ben Colder, although he would still sing under his own name as well.^[10] Wooley continued to tour internationally and make personal concert appearances until his death in 2003. Wooley recorded his last written song just four days before he died.

Wooley was married five times. His first wife was Melva Miller, whom he married in 1940. Six years later he married Edna Talbott Bunt in Fort Worth, Texas. His third wife was Beverly Irene Addington. He and Beverly remained together for 19 years and adopted one daughter, Chrystie Lynn. Then, in 1985, he married Deanna Grughlin and then his manager Linda Dotson, who already had a daughter, Shauna.^[15][16][17]

Wooley was diagnosed with leukemia in 1996, which forced him to retire from public performing in 1999.^[18] He died of the illness at the age of 82 at the Skyline Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 16, 2003. He was entombed in Hendersonville Memory Gardens in Hendersonville, Tennessee.^[19]

Wooley was the recipient of numerous awards over the years for his accomplishments as a singer, actor, and writer for both comedic and dramatic productions. In 1968 he received the Country Music Association's Comedian of the Year Award.^[20] He also received the 1992 Songwriter of the Year, two Golden Boot Awards, and he won the Western Heritage Award for nine consecutive years in recognition of his film and television work in Westerns.^[5]