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Hank Thompson
Hank Thompson
Background information
Birth name	Henry William Thompson
Born	September 3, 1925(1925-09-03)
Origin	Waco, Texas, USA
Died	November 6, 2007 (aged 82)
Genre(s)	Country Western Swing
Occupation(s)	Singer and Songwriter
Instrument(s)	Electric Guitar
Years active	1946 – 2007
Website	www.hankthompson.com
Members
Country Music Hall of Fame Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
Former members
Grand Ole Opry
Notable instrument(s)
Electric Guitar

Henry "Hank" William Thompson (September 3, 1925 – November 6^[1], 2007) was a country music entertainer whose career spanned seven decades. He sold over 60 million records worldwide.

Thompson's musical style, characterized as Honky Tonk Swing, was a mixture of fiddles, electric guitar and steel guitar that featured his distinctive, gravelly baritone vocals.

His backing band, The Brazos Valley Boys, was voted the #1 Country Western Band for 14 years in a row by Billboard Magazine. The primary difference between his music and that of Bob Wills was that Thompson, who used the swing beat and instrumentation to enhance his vocals, discouraged the sort of intense instrumental soloing from his musicians that Wills openly encouraged.

He was interested in music from an early age and won several amateur harmonica contests. He decided to pursue his musical talent after serving in the U.S. Navy in World War II as a radioman and studying electrical engineering at Princeton University. His first single was "Whoa Sailor" in 1946 for Blue Bonnet Records.

1952 brought his first #1 disc, "The Wild Side of Life", which contained the memorable line "I didn't know God made honky-tonk angels" (which inspired the Kitty Wells answer song, "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels"). Other hits followed in quick succession in the 1950s and 1960s.

Although not as prominent in later decades, he remained an active and respected performer in the field, finding new audiences as a result of the resurgence of a harder-edged sound in country music.

From 1947 to 1965, he recorded for Capitol Records, then joined Warner Bros. Records, where he remained from 1966 through 1967. From 1968 through 1980, he recorded for Dot Records and its successors, ABC Dot and MCA Records. In 2000 he released a new album Six Decades on the Hightone label closer in sound to his older Capitol material, unlike the slicker Nashville Sound that permeated most of his Dot material.

Hank Thompson was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1989 and was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1997.

Thompson continued limited touring, mostly in the West and Southwest, until shortly before he became ill. Often, he worked with a reconstituted version of the Brazos Valley Boys that included a few original members.

On November 1, 2007 Hank Thompson canceled the rest of his 2007 "Sunset Tour" and retired from singing, two days after being released from a Texas hospital and diagnosed with aggressive lung cancer. He went into hospice care in Fort Worth, Texas. Thompson's last performance was on October 8, 2007 in Waco, Texas, his birthplace. He died a month later from lung cancer.

According to his spokesman Tracy Pitcox, who is also president of Heart of Texas Records, Thompson requested that no funeral be held. On November 14, a "celebration of life," open to both fans and friend, took place at Billy Bob's Texas, a Fort Worth, Texas country & western nightclub that bills itself as "The World's Largest Honky Tonk". ^[2]

• Academy of Country Music
• List of country musicians
• Country Music Association
• List of best-selling music artists
• Inductees of the Country Music Hall of Fame (1989 Inductee)

• Rumble, John. (1998). "Hank Thompson". In The Encyclopedia of Country Music. Paul Kingsbury, Editor. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 536-7.

• Official Website
• at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum
• Obituary in The Times, 16 November 2007
• Hank Thompson - Obituary and public tribute