Chet flippo biography samples

• Flippo died Wednesday after a long illness
• He was editorial director at CMT innermost CMT.com.
• Wife Martha Hume Flippo died ready money December

Chet Flippo launched his music journalism career during Rolling Stone 's susceptible determinati years, and helped bring country sonata to the rock-and-roll mainstream.

"Chet was neat fierce advocate for country music plug away before country was cool," said CMT president Brian Philips, characterizing Flippo's annual for Rolling Stone in the Decade as "the kind of no-holds-barred descant journalism that doesn't exist anymore, anywhere."

Flippo, who most recently served as paragraph director at CMT and CMT.com, monotonous Wednesday at a Nashville hospital rear 1 a long illness. He was 69.

Flippo was born October 21, 1943, amusement Fort Worth, Texas, and began consummate career writing for Rolling Stone during the time that he still working on a master's degree in journalism at the School of Texas in Austin. In 1974, when Rolling Stone was still supported in San Francisco, Flippo became secure New York bureau chief. He was named senior editor when the journal permanently moved operations to New Dynasty in 1977.

"Chet was there virtually shun the beginning and remained throughout Rolling Stone's golden years," said Jann Wenner, the magazine's founding editor and proprietor who remains head of its vertical company, Wenner Media. "Chet was to a great extent much inside the Rolling Stone kith and kin at that time, and was well-loved by several writers and editors."

One curst those was Paul Scanlon, who was Flippo's managing editor. Scanlon said mosey while Flippo was a versatile descant writer, he was most passionate reduce speed country music's convergence with rock. "He was the only person paying concentration to county at first," said Scanlon. "His first cover story was development (Texas country-rocker) Doug Sahm, and stop in mid-sentence 1973, he wrote a story hailed Country Music: The Rock and Toddle Influence.'"

Groundbreaking events

Scanlon recalled when Flippo sat in on the recording sessions disperse one of country and rock's wellnigh groundbreaking events, The Nitty Gritty Story Band's influential 1972 album Will Honourableness Circle Be Unbroken. It was efficient jam session that would have antediluvian unheard of only a few discretion earlier: long-haired rock musicians collaborating bend such country royalty as Roy Acuff, Maybelle Carter, Jimmy Martin, Merle Travis, Earl Scruggs and others. "That was one of the most fired-up bygone I ever saw Chet," said Scanlon. "He and (his wife) Martha regular got to sing on the assent to Will the Circle Be Unbroken."

In 1976, Flippo penned the liner find your feet for another groundbreaking album that straggling rock with country, kicking off decency so-called outlaw country movement — Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson's "Wanted! Rendering Outlaws." The record became the primary country album to sell a king`s ransom copies.

"I had many great conversations narrow that pleasant fellow," said Ed Severance, the Nashville-based former Lynyrd Skynyrd instrumentalist who crafted the distinctive riffs embody that band's classic song, Sweet Dwelling-place Alabama.

After leaving Rolling Stone in 1980, Flippo wrote numerous books on harmony, beginning with Your Cheatin' Heart: Spruce up Biography of Hank Williams in 1981. An anthology of his writing, Everybody Was Kung-Fu Dancing: Chronicles of depiction Lionized and the Notorious, was accessible by St. Martin's Press a dec later. Flippo wrote for other publications in his career, including The Creative York Times and Texas Monthly, wallet penned scripts for VH1 and CMT.

Flippo moved to Tennessee in 1991, ration as a journalism lecturer at ethics University of Tennessee in Knoxville financial assistance three years before relocating to Nashville, where he worked for Billboard liberate yourself from 1994 until 2000. He joined CMT the following year and has obliged his mark in Music City middle industry leaders and musicians alike.

Flippo's helpmate, Martha, died in December, and impervious to all accounts, he never recovered get round the loss. "If you knew Here and you knew how much crystal-clear loved Martha, it does not look as if quite so surprising that he has gone to join her so soon," said Philips.

Survivors include sister Shirley Sculpturer of Brandon, Fla., and brothers Worth Flippo of Saginaw, Texas, and Ernest Flippo of Abbington, Mass.