HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER

Slim Whitman's peak success - when he set a UK chart record that stood for 36 years - came just before the 50s rock'n'roll explosion, which may be why this American country star isn't as acclaimed as he might be. Jack Watkins yodels his praises...

- Jack Watkins

In the analogue era of the UK singles chart, a song enjoying an unusually long stay at No 1 invariably drew press speculation as to whether it could beat Slim Whitman's record-breaking 11 weeks on top with Rose Marie from July to October 1955. When Bryan Adams surpassed it with (Everything I Do) I Do It For You in 1991, he asked Whitman to fly over from the States and duet with him at his Wembley show. Whitman duly obliged but joked that “it jarred my insides out”.

To most of the Wembley audience, he'd have been a hazy figure from the dim and distant past. But even in his pomp, he eluded facile categorisation. When Whitman did two weeks at the London Palladium in 1956, the programme billed him as “America’s Famous Western Singing Star.” His two biggest British hits (Rose Marie was quickly followed by Indian Love Call) were westernised reworkings of songs from a 1920s Rudolf Friml operetta, Rose Marie, with weeping steel guitars. He opened the show with his rapid yodelling spectacular, I’m Casting My Lasso Towards The Sky. He'd tuck into a romantic ballad but wasn’t a tuxedoed smoothie. He had a three-octave voice but was no Johnnie Ray-style belter. Handsome and moustachioed, with his rhinestone-encrusted suits and shirts, black and white wing-tip shoes and ebony, jewel-studded guitar, he cut a striking figure.

A shy man with a nervous stutter since childhood, as his 1956 tour wound round Britain, a Glasgow critic noted, “He stumbles around the stage looking like a lost Gary Cooper.” The jazz writers who dominated the British music press of the day and hated rock and skiffle also sneered at Whitman. James Asman in Record Mirror, puzzled by the public’s infatuation with Lonnie Donegan, bracketed him with “third-rate pseudo-hillbilly singer” Whitman.