Harlan Howard was one of the most prolific country song writers. He was born in 1927 in Detroit, Michigan. He was brought up on a farm and like most country children one of the few entertainments available was listening to the Grand Old Opry on the radio. He loved the music and started to write his own songs at an early age. He left school early, already and eventual joined the US army.
After his time in the army, he began to write songs and worked at various jobs, to earn a living while he tried to get them sold. He's famous for defining country music as "three chords and the truth." It was a simple form of music, but what made it special was that it was about the truth of human life and emotion......It was about ordinary people and their problems and stories....
In the late 1950s after a few years of struggle, Harlan began to sell songs that were successful. His first hit was Pick Me Up on Your Way Down, a jaunty love song about a girl who mixes with the rich but will return to her old lover when they fail her.... . He then had another success when Ray Price had a big hit with Heartaches by the Number. He moved to Nashville in 1960 and signed a writing contract and had a great deal of success in the 1960s. He was married more than once and one of his wives was the country singer Jan Howard...
He understood music and loved country, because it was a truthful take on ordinary people's lives, about the problems that they had, not big ones but little ones like loving someone who didn't return your love, poverty and worrying about your children, infidelity, divorce, heartache and pain... Another of his big hits was Busted which was recorded by Johnny Cash, about a man who is falling into poverty...and one of his greatest songs was the Patsy Cline number I Fall to Pieces.
He lived in Nashville and died there in 2002.
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