Among twentieth-century country artists, and especially among the women in that field, few assembled a catalog as timeless as Jean Shepard’s. Her singing embodied the genre in its purest form, yielding a first Top Ten entry in 1953 and a final one almost exactly twenty years afterward; in the years between, she issued a steady stream of memorable sides for Capitol Records, every one of them animated by honky-tonk energy no matter the theme.
One of ten children born to an Oklahoma sharecropper, Shepard spent her formative years in Visalia, California, roughly one hundred miles north of Bakersfield. While still a teenager she launched her professional life as the bassist in the Melody Ranch Girls, an all-female ensemble founded in 1948. A few years later Hank Thompson heard her and, impressed by her abilities, arranged a Capitol contract that placed her under the guidance of his own producer, Ken Nelson.
Her initial chart entry arrived in 1953 as Ferlin Husky’s duet partner on the hit “A Dear John Letter” and its follow-up, “Forgive Me John.” The pair subsequently toured together. In 1955 she scored her first solo Top Ten single with “A Satisfied Mind,” whose B-side, “Take Possession,” reached number 13. Later that year another Top Ten release appeared in the double-sided hit “Beautiful Lies”/“I Thought of You.” Those successes earned her an invitation to join the Grand Ole Opry in 1956; the same year she also became a regular on Red Foley’s Ozark Jubilee and recorded Songs of a Love Affair, widely regarded as country music’s first concept album, whose dozen tracks trace the dissolution of a marriage by infidelity.
Nearly a decade passed after “Beautiful Lies” before Shepard returned to the Top Ten. During the interim she managed only two additional Top 40 entries—“I Want to Go Where No One Knows Me” (number 18, 1958) and “Have Heart, Will Love” (number 30, 1959)—yet Cash Box still named her Top Female Singer of 1959. The dry spell stemmed largely from her steadfast honky-tonk style at a moment when country-pop dominated the marketplace.
In 1963 her husband, Hawkshaw Hawkins, perished in the same plane crash that claimed Patsy Cline. The following year Shepard reentered the Top Ten with “Second Fiddle (To an Old Guitar),” inaugurating a run of further successes. Between 1965 and 1970 she accumulated fifteen Top 40 singles, among them the Top Ten collaborations and solo releases “I’ll Take the Dog” (a 1966 duet with Ray Pillow), “If Teardrops Were Silver” (1966), and “Then He Touched Me” (1970). Hits continued into the 1970s, though with diminishing frequency; her final chart single, 1978’s “The Real Thing,” peaked at number 85.
Once her hitmaking era ended, Shepard recorded far less often yet maintained a steady presence at the Grand Ole Opry and continued to tour, especially in the United Kingdom, where she retained a devoted following. She was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2011 and published her autobiography, Down Through the Years, in 2014. Two years later she died at the age of 82.
