685 Hank Thompson (1925-2007) and his Brazos Valley Boys “The Wild Side of Life” 1952

“Hank Thompson and his Brazos Valley Boys were the most commercially successful Western swing band of the fifties and sixties. Much of their material, however, had a more mainstream country approach and could well be called honky-tonk. In his late teens, Thompson broadcast as a singer-guitarist over the local station WACO in a show called Hank the Hired Hand. After wartime service in the navy, he returned to Waco to work on KWTX and formed the first Brazos Valley Boys to play dances around central Texas. ‘Wild Side of Life’, which shared the melody of Roy Acuff’s ‘Great Speckled Bird’ and sparked Kitty Wells’ answer song ‘It wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’, was his first No. 1” (The Faber Companion to 20th Century Popular Music, 2001). 

Hank Thompson and his Brazos Valley Boys “The Wild Side of Life”