Country Music Hall of Famer Jean Shepard dead at 82Trailblazer Jean Shepard, a Country Music Hall of Fame member, a member of the Grand Ole Opry for more than 60 years and one of traditional country music’s greatest, feistiest advocates, died Sunday at the age of 82.
“She’s one of those people who opened doors,” Opry announcer and WSM DJ Eddie Stubbs said in late 2015. “There were some she had to push open and some others she had to kick her way through.”
Shepard was a pioneer for women in country music. Her 1956 LP, “Songs of a Love Affair,” featuring songs about a marriage broken up by adultery, was one of the genre's first concept albums, and other gutsy, forthright recordings such as “Act Like a Married Man” helped to pave the way for artists like Loretta Lynn.
Ollie Imogene Shepard was born Nov. 21, 1933 in Pauls Valley, Okla. The daughter of sharecroppers, Shepard — and her nine siblings — grew up singing in the church and was drawn to the music of Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys. She grew up in a home without electricity or running water. Every year, her parents saved their pennies to afford a new battery for their AM radio. Shortly before her eleventh birthday, the Shepard family moved to Visalia, Calif., about 100 miles north of Bakersfield.
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In November of 1955, Shepard got the best birthday present a young country singer could ask for when, at 22, she was invited to join the Grand Ole Opry. She was one of three women who were Opry members at that time: the other two were Wells and Minnie Pearl. During the 1950s, she also became a cast member of the program “Ozark Jubilee,” where she met Hawkshaw Hawkins, the man who would become her husband. The two singers toured together and, in November 1960, they married on the stage of a Wichita, Kansas auditorium. In 1961, Shepard gave birth to son Don Robin.
Hawkins died in the March 5, 1963 plane crash that also claimed the lives of Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas, leaving Shepard a widow, eight months pregnant and raising a toddler. Just weeks after the death of her husband, she gave birth to Harold Franklin Hawkins II. Her fellow Opry members rallied around her, and WSM president Jack DeWitt told her that her job would be waiting when she was ready to return.
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Throughout her career, Shepard was an outspoken opponent of pop-country music.
“Today’s country is not country, and I’m very adamant about that,” she told The Tennessean in 2015. “I’ll tell anybody who’ll listen, and some of those who don’t want to listen, I’ll tell them anyway. ... Country music today isn't genuine.”
Shepard was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2011. At the press conference announcing that year's inductees, Hall of Famer Brenda Lee said that this induction was “way too long in coming. She busted down the doors.”
On Nov. 21, 2015, the Grand Ole Opry celebrated Shepard’s 60th anniversary as a member; she was the only female member to have reached the six-decade mark. At the time of her death, Shepard was the longest-running member of the Opry, and had appeared on the show into her 80s. She was also a published author, having released her engaging memoir, “Down Through the Years,” in 2014.
Shepard leaves behind Benny Birchfield, her devoted husband of nearly 50 years, three sons and several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
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