George Strait Biography

If there's one guy performing now who's got guaranteed entry into the Country Music Hall Of Fame, it's George Strait. Strait doesn't live in Nashville, and he rarely grants interviews. Instead, he just steadily puts out quality country albums at the rate of one about every 10 months. He's survived the Urban Cowboy fallout and the rise of rockin' country without drastically altering his style of music, a vision that's rooted in the classic Texas sounds of Bob Wills and Lefty Frizzell.







Born May 18, 1952, in Poteet, Texas, Strait started a country band in the late '70s after leaving the army. He recorded briefly for Dallas's D Records, but had his first national hit, "Unwound," with MCA in 1981. He has remained with MCA ever since, topping the singles chart more than two dozen times and selling about 40 million albums. A recent count ranked his boxed set, Strait Out Of The Box, as one of the three best-selling sets of all time (with Led Zeppelin and Bruce Springsteen). Strait was a regular award-winner from 1985 to 1990, when he had 11 consecutive number one singles: He won the Country Music Association's Entertainer Of The Year twice, Male Vocalist twice, and Album Of The Year (Does Fort Worth Ever Cross Your Mind) once during that period. In 1992, he starred in the film Pure Country, and then in 1996 he returned to the CMA winner's circle, taking top album (Blue Clear Sky), single ("Check Yes Or No"), and male vocalist honors from the CMA. He has remained a big winner ever since, scooping up Album Of The Year (for Carrying Your Love With Me and Male Vocalist Of The Year honors in 1997, the Male Vocalist Of The Year award again in 1998, and the Vocal Event Of The Year award in 2000 for his duet with Alan Jackson, "Murder On Music Row." In 1998, Strait launched his hugely successful annual allstar tour, the George Strait Country Music Festival, which culminated in the early 2003 release of his first live album, For The Last Time--Live From The Astrodome. 

Today's young male country singers may try to sound like George Jones or Merle Haggard, but they all model themselves after Strait. And Strait invariably outclasses them all. "Sometimes you wonder," USA Today critic David Zimmerman once wrote, "Is country music getting worse or is Strait just getting better and better?"