Biography
One of the most inventive and free-spirited figures ever to shape American music, Jack Clement built an exceptionally broad career as a singer, songwriter, producer, engineer, and publisher while collaborating with an astonishing range of artists that stretched from Louis Armstrong, Doc Watson, and Frank Yankovic to U2, Johnny Cash, and Townes Van Zandt. Born in 1931 in Whitehaven, Tennessee, as the son of a choir director, he first performed professionally during his U.S. Marine Corps service from 1948 to 1952, appearing with the Stonemans, Roy Clark, Jimmy Dean, and the Tennessee Troupers. In 1953, shortly after leaving the service, he teamed with mandolinist Buzz Busby to form the bluegrass duo Buzz and Jack, the Bayou Boys.
Following a period of college study, Clement moved to Memphis and, together with Slim Wallace, launched Fernwood Records, capturing sessions in Wallace’s garage. Impressed by material from those 1956 recordings, Sam Phillips brought Clement onto the Sun Records staff as engineer, producer, and occasional performer. Over the next three years Clement became a principal architect of the classic Sun sound, shaping landmark tracks by Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and Charlie Rich before departing in 1959 to establish his own Summer Records label, which quickly collapsed even as the Fernwood imprint endured.
Thereafter often known as Cowboy Jack, Clement became a sought-after producer for major labels, notably collaborating with Chet Atkins at RCA. In 1961 he and Bill Hall founded the publishing firm Hall-Clement Music, and the following year he placed the company’s song “She Thinks I Still Care” with George Jones; the track reached number one on the country chart in 1962 and remained Jones’s signature recording. A 1964 telephone call from Johnny Cash resulted in Clement’s horn arrangement for the hit “Ring of Fire.” Beginning in 1968 he produced a series of albums for Townes Van Zandt. In 1970 he opened the state-of-the-art 16-track Jack Clement Studios in Nashville, which promptly scored a hit with Ray Stevens’s “Everything Is Beautiful.”
During the 1970s Clement worked with Don Williams and Waylon Jennings, among others, and in the 1980s he again recorded Johnny Cash as well as John Hartford. In 1988 U2, a band Clement had never heard of, asked him to produce sessions at the original Sun Studios; after friends persuaded him to accept, the project yielded the album Rattle and Hum. Entering the new century he performed in a trio with Billy Burnette and Shawn Camp before focusing on solo releases, issuing Guess Things Happen That Way in 2004 and both Connect Set and Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan in 2005. Shout! Factory reissued the latter title in 2007 together with Cowboy Jack Clement’s Home Movies. Clement died of liver cancer at his Nashville home on August 8, 2013, at the age of 82.
Following a period of college study, Clement moved to Memphis and, together with Slim Wallace, launched Fernwood Records, capturing sessions in Wallace’s garage. Impressed by material from those 1956 recordings, Sam Phillips brought Clement onto the Sun Records staff as engineer, producer, and occasional performer. Over the next three years Clement became a principal architect of the classic Sun sound, shaping landmark tracks by Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, and Charlie Rich before departing in 1959 to establish his own Summer Records label, which quickly collapsed even as the Fernwood imprint endured.
Thereafter often known as Cowboy Jack, Clement became a sought-after producer for major labels, notably collaborating with Chet Atkins at RCA. In 1961 he and Bill Hall founded the publishing firm Hall-Clement Music, and the following year he placed the company’s song “She Thinks I Still Care” with George Jones; the track reached number one on the country chart in 1962 and remained Jones’s signature recording. A 1964 telephone call from Johnny Cash resulted in Clement’s horn arrangement for the hit “Ring of Fire.” Beginning in 1968 he produced a series of albums for Townes Van Zandt. In 1970 he opened the state-of-the-art 16-track Jack Clement Studios in Nashville, which promptly scored a hit with Ray Stevens’s “Everything Is Beautiful.”
During the 1970s Clement worked with Don Williams and Waylon Jennings, among others, and in the 1980s he again recorded Johnny Cash as well as John Hartford. In 1988 U2, a band Clement had never heard of, asked him to produce sessions at the original Sun Studios; after friends persuaded him to accept, the project yielded the album Rattle and Hum. Entering the new century he performed in a trio with Billy Burnette and Shawn Camp before focusing on solo releases, issuing Guess Things Happen That Way in 2004 and both Connect Set and Shakespeare Was a Big George Jones Fan in 2005. Shout! Factory reissued the latter title in 2007 together with Cowboy Jack Clement’s Home Movies. Clement died of liver cancer at his Nashville home on August 8, 2013, at the age of 82.
Albums
