Randy Travis

Randy Bruce Traywick (born May 4, 1959), known professionally as Randy Travis, is an American country music and gospel music singer and songwriter, as well as a film and television actor.

Randy Bruce Traywick was born May 4, 1959, in Marshville, North Carolina.

He is the second of six children to Bobbie Traywick (née Tucker) and Harold Traywick.

Harold Traywick worked as a meat packer and also built houses.

He also enjoyed listening to country music such as Ernest Tubb and Patsy Cline, in addition to singing, playing guitar, and writing his own songs.

By the time Randy was eight years old, his father would send him and his brothers to the house of a friend named Kate Magnum, who would teach him and his brothers Ricky and David how to play guitar.

Harold also constructed a stage behind the family house, where he would invite friends over to hear his sons sing.

Randy and Ricky performed publicly for the first time in 1968 at a talent show held at the local elementary school; while the brothers did not win, they continued to perform at local talent shows, with David later joining to accompany them on bass guitar.

Randy dropped out of school in the ninth grade.

As a teenager, he committed a number of criminal offenses.

These included reckless driving after he crashed Ricky's car in a cornfield, breaking into a church to hold a party, driving under the influence, resisting arrest, and stealing knives and watches from a local store.

On his seventeenth birthday, Randy was arrested for public intoxication and faced imprisonment.

In 1977, the Traywicks entered a talent competition held in Charlotte, North Carolina, after hearing an advertisement for it on the radio.

The grand prize for the contest was $100 cash and a recording session.

The contest consisted of eight semi-final audition rounds held every Tuesday at Country City USA, a nightclub co-owned by Randy's then-future wife, Mary Elizabeth "Lib" Hatcher.

At the performance, Randy played rhythm guitar and sang, while Ricky played lead guitar.

However, Ricky had to drop out of the competition partway through as he has to serve time at a youth detention center, leaving Randy to continue as a solo act.

Randy ended up winning the competition.

After doing so, he began to hold a conversation with Hatcher about his then-impending arrest charges for hot-wiring a neighbor's truck.

Hatcher and disc jockey John Harper, who also worked at the club, chose to represent Randy in court, which led to him serving probation and coming under the custody of the Hatchers in lieu of a jail sentence.

Additionally, Hatcher employed Randy as a singer at Country City USA.

During this time, Hatcher advised him on his singing and performance.

Harold would attend Randy's performances in this timespan, but was later banned from the club after altercations with patrons.

Hatcher booked a number of country music singers to perform at her club as a means of making connections with country music executives in Nashville, Tennessee.

One such singer, Joe Stampley, agreed to produce a session for Traywick in Nashville.

Active since 1979, he has recorded 20 studio albums and charted 50 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, including sixteen that reached the number-one position.

Travis's commercial success began in the mid-1980s with the release of his album Storms of Life, which sold more than four million copies.

Travis followed up his successful debut with a string of platinum and multi-platinum albums.

Travis is noted as a key figure in the neotraditional country movement, a return to more traditional sounds within the genre following the country pop crossovers of the early 1980s.

He is considered an influence on later generations of country singers, and is noted for his baritone singing voice.

Nearly all of his albums were produced or co-produced by Kyle Lehning, with frequent co-writing credits from Travis, Paul Overstreet, Don Schlitz, and Skip Ewing.

By the mid-1990s, Travis saw a decline in his chart success.

Despite his charges, Don Cusic noted in the 1990 book Randy Travis: The King of the New Country Traditionalists that his parents still supported him, as they would pay his bail and support him in court whenever he was arrested.

In 1997, he left Warner Bros. Records for DreamWorks Records; he moved to Word Records for a series of gospel albums beginning in 2000 before moving back to Warner at the end of the 21st century's first decade.

Travis sold over 25 million records and has won seven Grammy Awards, eleven ACM Awards, eight Dove Awards, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Since surviving a near-fatal stroke in 2013, which severely limited his singing and speaking ability, he has released archival recordings and made limited public appearances.

James Dupré has toured singing his songs with Travis's road band.

Travis also holds several film and television acting roles, including the television movies Wind in the Wire and A Holiday to Remember, episodes of the television series Matlock, and the Patrick Swayze movie Black Dog.

In 2016, Travis was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.

Major songs of his include "On the Other Hand", "Forever and Ever, Amen", "I Told You So", "Hard Rock Bottom of Your Heart", and "Three Wooden Crosses".