Happy Birthday to Country Music Hall-Of-Famer Tennesee Ernie Ford (1919-1991), who would have been 90 years old today. Throughout his legendary career spanning over 50 years, Ernie Ford's early successes as a radio personality led to his signing with Capitol Records in 1949. Through 1976, he released a total of eighty-three albums on the label and literally scores of single records, including his classic version of Merle Travis' timeless anthem to the working man, Sixteen Tons. At the time of it's release, the fastest selling single in Capitol's history.
A sparsely arranged coal-miner's lament that Travis wrote in 1946, "Sixteen Tons" is based on his own family's experience in the mines of Muhlenberg County, Kentucky. Its fatalistic tone contrasted vividly with the sugary pop ballads and the rock and roll just starting to dominate the charts at the time:
"You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go;
I owe my soul to the company store..."
Watch it below...
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