He may have been born to cotton farmers, but Charlie Rich certainly had musical influences around him. His parents performed gospel music at their church, and a black sharecropper man taught him to play blues piano. This would explain his eclectic musical styles he would perform throughout his entire career. In 1956, he and his wife moved to Memphis where he would write songs and perform R&B and jazz in the clubs. From 1958 until the late 1960's, he signed with four different record labels in a row trying and failing to find hits. Each label wanted him to try out a different style like soul, traditional country and rock & roll. In 1967, Epic Records took a chance on him, even though he had a trail of unsuccessful songs up to that point. His new producer got him to try the “Nashville Sound”, a style popular at the time for smooth strings and orchestras. This was finally the key to get him hits, and he certainly made up for lost time. His album sold millions, he got multiple hits, he got the nickname “Silver Fox” and he won ACM, CMA and Grammy awards. He had a stretch of popular songs for a couple years, then caused an incident at the 1975 CMA awards that turned some people off. That quickly slowed down his success, though he would still get a few more hits into the 1980’s. But by 1981, he decided to retire and just live off of what he had made up to that point. He passed away in 1995, but his legacy should be enough to someday welcome him to the Hall Of Fame.

Although Charlie Rich was best known for his hits in the early 70’s when he was a “Countrypolitan” superstar, a closer look at Charlie Rich’s career saw an artist who was a true Country artist who blended other genres like Soul, Jazz and Rockabilly effortlessly in some of his lesser known work. Despite the mass success he enjoyed, Rich became pigeonholed to that success and seemed disinterested in creating original material by the decade’s end. A true rebel, the “Silver Fox” was massively successful, though had he wanted to he would have achieved even greater fame.