The second youngest of ten children, born in Sabinal, Texas, Johnny Rodriguez was "discovered" in
jail.In his rabble-rousing
youth, he was arrested for helping his friends steal and barbecue a
goat.To pass the time in the
hoosegow, he would sing.A
Texas Ranger was so enamoured of his voice, he
put him in touch with a promoter by the name of Happy Shahan,
who hired him to be a stagecoach-riding, singing cowboy at an amusement
park called The Alamo Village.Bobby
Bare and Tom T. Hall happened to be there and encouraged Johnny to move to Nashville.He had $14 in his pocket when he got
there.He would soon have a
string of 14 consecutive top ten hits.Hall hired him to play lead guitar in his band, and a year later
helped him land a record deal with Mercury.It proved to be a lucrative
arrangement for both parties as Johnny Rodriguez was a hit-making machine
in the '70s.His first
single, "Pass Me By", charted as high as #9, while his debut
album, Introducing Johnny Rodriguez,
rocketed to #1.In 1973, he was
honoured with the Billboard Trendsetter Award for
being the first Latin American country singer to capture the imagination of
the national public.Television
offers followed, including a stint on the half-hour cop drama, Adam-12, and a guest appearance on The Dating Game.In 1979, Rodriquez left Mercury for
Epic Records.It was a marriage
of moderate hits that ended seven years later.An even more abbreviated run with
Capitol yielded less than stellar results.By the 1990s, Rodriguez's
recording career was running on fumes.An incident in 1998 put his career woes into perspective when he was
charged for the murder of one of his friends, whom he thought was a
burglar.A year later, a jury
acquitted him, saying he acted in self-defense, as defined by Texas law.In the last twenty-five years,
Rodriguez has released twenty-six albums and charted forty-five times, and has
toured extensively, including appearances in all fifty of the United
States, and an international itinerary that includes Belgium, Canada,
England, France, Germany, Guam, Japan, Mexico, Poland, South Korea, Spain,
and Switzerland.He is
scheduled to be inducted into the Texas Country Music Hall of Fame on 18th
August 2007.
Johnny
Rodriguez recordings
Release Me
(Eddie Miller/W.S. Stevenson/Dub Williams/Robert Yount)
Ridin' My
Thumb To Mexico
(Johnny Rodriguez)
He's Not
Entitled To Your Love (S. Davis/S. Hogan/B. Whitlock)
