Biography
Born on 19 March 1952 in Savannah, Georgia, country performer John Brannen grew up under his mother’s care in Charleston, South Carolina. Drawn to both movement and melody, he spent a year traversing the Caribbean by boat, stopping at harbors to perform in neighborhood venues. Upon returning to Charleston he entered the group Wheat Ridge, where Waylon Jennings’ recordings sparked his embrace of country music. Contracts followed with Capitol Records and subsequently Apache, the latter issuing his first album, 1988’s Mystery Street; when those deals collapsed he worked for a year as a manual laborer. Songwriter and producer David Malloy then placed him on Mercury Records, overseeing the 1993 major-label release John Brannen. Brannen possesses an expansive vocal range that reaches Roy Orbison’s upper register, yet he remains without a charting single on the US country charts.