Ron White

Comedian Ron White, seldom spotted without a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other, carved out a path that carried him from cassette bins at truck stops to arena stages and motion pictures, all while answering to the nickname “Tater Salad.” The story attached to that moniker began in Fritch, TX, when White offered an arresting officer a flippant claim that he had previously broken the law under the alias “Tater Salad”; the officer accepted the statement and entered it on the record. White later clarified that the phrase had simply been picked up during Navy service, yet he has continued to let the anecdote circulate because a quick-witted persona has anchored his routines since the mid-’90s, when he issued a series of recordings for the Laughing Hyena label and its “Trucker Humor!”-branded releases aimed at highway travelers.

In 2000 he teamed with longtime associates Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, and Larry the Cable Guy for a run of shows that became known as the Blue Collar Comedy tour and filled venues across more than 90 cities through 2003. That same year saw the release of Drunk in Public, his first album to appear outside the truck-stop circuit, on the Hip-O imprint. Two feature films and two collective albums followed for the Blue Collar group, yet White remained the sole member who did not join the Blue Collar TV series. Instead he maintained an independent touring schedule, traded cigarettes for cigars onstage, hosted the short-lived variety program The Ron White Show in 2005, and delivered the 2006 album You Can't Fix Stupid on the Image label. That project earned a Grammy nomination for Best Comedy Album, sharing the category with the Blue Collar release One for the Road. In 2009 White moved to the Capitol roster and issued Behavioral Problems.