Johnny Rodriguez

Born in Sabinal, Texas, in 1951, Johnny Rodriguez grew up roughly ninety miles from the Mexican border and went on to become one of country music’s steadiest hitmakers throughout the 1970s. His older brother Andres, an avid country fan, gave him a guitar at age seven, and Rodriguez was already performing regularly by his teenage years. At sixteen he served as captain of his high-school football squad, yet the death of his father from cancer sent him into a downward spiral that produced four arrests within two years. During a subsequent jail sentence, Texas Ranger Joaquin Jackson overheard him singing and arranged an introduction to promoter Happy Shahan, who hired Rodriguez as a singing stagecoach driver at Alamo Village Amusement Park for 1970 and 1971. There he caught the attention of Tom T. Hall and Bobby Bare, who brought him to Nashville and added him to Hall’s Storytellers troupe. Shortly afterward he signed with Mercury and issued his first single, “Pass Me By (If You’re Only Passing Through),” in early 1973; it reached the Top Ten and inaugurated a streak of fourteen consecutive singles that also charted. The follow-ups “Ridin’ My Thumb to Mexico” and “You Always Come Back (To Hurting Me)” both ascended to number one. In 1974 he scored Top Five entries with “Dance With Me (Just One More Time)” and “We’re Over,” along with the chart-topping “That’s the Way Love Goes.” The next year proved even stronger: “I Just Can’t Get Her Out of My Mind,” “Just Get Up and Close the Door,” and “Love Put a Song in My Heart” all reached the summit. Between 1976 and 1977 further Top Five successes arrived in “I Couldn’t Be Me Without You,” “I Wonder If I Ever Said Goodbye,” and “Desperado,” yet he and Mercury parted company in 1979. He then moved to Epic, where “Down the Rio Grande” returned him to the Top Ten that same year, though a prolonged commercial drought soon followed. A pair of 1983 releases, “Foolin’” and “How Could I Love Her So Much,” brought him back into the Top Ten for the final time. His last appearance on the charts came in 1988 with the Top Twenty single “I Didn’t (Every Chance I Had)” on Capitol. During the 1990s he issued two honky-tonk-oriented albums, Run for the Border (Intersound, 1993) and You Can Say That Again (Hightone, 1996).