Where is boxcar willie buried

Gangsters Politicians Sports Figures. Boxcar Willie was perhaps the most successful invented character in the history of country music.

With his kitschy persona and stage act — highlighted by his amazingly accurate impersonation of a train whistle — Willie played into the stereotype of the lovable, good-natured hobo who spent his life riding the rails and singing songs.

Since his popularity had more to do with his image than his music, it makes sense that he was massively successful in England, where he personified Americana. However, Willie loved the railroads and kept running away to ride the trains when he was a child. In his early twenties, he served in the Air Force. After he left the service, he continued to sing in clubs and radio shows.

In , he decided to risk everything he had on one final chance at stardom. He moved to Nashville and developed the Boxcar Willie character, using his song as the foundation. During that performance, he was spotted by Drew Taylor, a Scottish booking agent. Taylor brought Boxcar Willie over to England for a tour, where he was enthusiastically received. By he was again performing professionally, even appearing on his own daily television show in Lincoln, Nebraska, but it would be another 15 years before his transformation into Boxcar Willie; a personal and angry response to the influx into country music of middle-of-the-road acts like John Denver and Olivia Newton-John.

In , whilst working at George Jones's Possum Hollow Club in Nashville, he was spotted by a Scottish promoter, Drew Taylor, who booked him for the first of four tours over the next 18 months. It was on the strength of these that he was invited to perform at Wembley in Following his "sudden" rise to superstardom, Boxcar Willie became a regular visitor to these shores and began to receive greater attention back home.

He was among the nominees for the Country Music Association's Horizon Award that year and more importantly was invited to join the cast of Nashville's Grand Ole Opry, thus fulfilling a lifelong dream. On its stage he performed alongside several of his idols, notably the Opry stalwart Roy Acuff, and continued to appear there until quite recently. In he enjoyed an effective cameo as a jailbird hobo in the Patsy Cline biopic Sweet Dreams. A series of best-selling albums, among them Last Train To Heaven , for which he received a gold disc, continued to prove that there was a demand for traditional no-frills country music, but paradoxically it was the emergence of new traditionalists like Randy Travis and the Sweethearts of the Rodeo in the mid-Eighties which was to see his music marginalised.

They too looked back, but in a progressive way, managing to avoid the element of pastiche and a over-readiness to resort to cover versions which marked the poorest of Boxcar Willie's work.

He continued to record but his albums, including Falling in Love and The Spirit of America , were met with both critical and commercial indifference. In he moved to Branson, Missouri, a small town in the Ozarks, which subsequently became something of an entertainment Mecca.

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