Next to my mother one of the greatest persons to ever have been born and raised in Oklahoma is Hoyt Axton.
[Hoyt died in 1999, too young at age 61, having had a severe stroke four years earlier. Let his life be a warning to anyone that is tempted to try cocaine...it severely damages the heart muscle...I've heard more than one doctor claim that he can tell in an autopsy if a person has used cocaine even just once from the condition of the heart muscle.]
Here's a playlist I've chosen from favs. that also are high quality uploads....enjoy.
...one that he wrote...
Hoyt Axton - "Wild Bull Rider"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3kxMS1gPP8&feature=share
...another that he wrote...
Hoyt Axton - "Della And The Dealer"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BQZ3gt7hUI&feature=related
...and another He wrote...a beautiful tune, one of my very favs...
Hoyt Axton - "Evangelina" [The Rose in the Desert of Old Mexico]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRTcZJtxPzk
..and still another that he wrote...
"Flash of Fire" - Hoyt Axton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2ipTabxaZo
"Good Lookin' Child" - Hoyt Axton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYfb-D38qQs&feature=related
Hoyt Wayne Axton ~ "The Pusher"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2yeMaDpcos
...and for those of you on drugs...the 'Druggie Version'...toke up!
Hoyt "Whereinthehe77amI?" Axton ~ "The Pusher"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXQt6OksZTg&feature=related
You can roll your own
and you can own a Rolls
but don't roll your own Rolls...
"Roll Your Own" - Hoyt Axton
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LP1_ZkpYAPk&feature=related
I've written the following about Hoyt.
Hoyt Axton was born on March 25, 1938, in Duncan, Oklahoma. His mother, Mae Boren Axton, co-wrote Elvis's smash hit, Heartbreak Hotel, with Tommy Durden, giving Elvis his first major hit record. His mother Mae is a Nashville legend and was also a school teacher,mother of two sons and wife to their father, John T. Axton, also a teacher and high school athletics coach. Hoyt once said about his childhood: "Every weekend at our house we either won, lost or got rained out."
Under his father's encouragement and training Hoyt became a "Full Sixty Minute...", a "Full Hour..."...Football Player" at Robert E. Lee High in Jacksonville, Florida, playing both offense and defense. He was big and He was d@mn good and he made All State and won a football scholarship to Oklahoma State University.
His mother, Mae made sure that he was also instructed in the arts by making Hoyt take classical piano lessons until his preference for the guitar surfaced. Interestingly, Hoyt credited his music career to his father much as he did to Mae: Hoyt said about his father: "He was a singer and he loved to sing, although never professionally, probably never performed on a stage in his life, but he had this wonderful baritone voice, and he sang all the time. So I learned to love singing from my father and to love songwriting from my mother..."
In the late-fifties, Hoyt left college to join the Navy, where he served about an aircraft carrier. He became set on pursuing a musical career during his service, for when he got out but also he kept athletically fit while in the Navy by boxing. He recounted once about another sailor who had broken his nose with a sucker punch one day while they were standing in the chow line. "I didn't even spill my applesauce," Hoyt said at onetime and professed, "That to this day I don't have a 'flight' mechanism." Hoyt went after the other man on the spot. They were quickly broken up, however a "Grudge Match" was arranged by his Commanding Officer, in the "Ring".
Hoyt once said about the 'Match": "I knocked him down three times in 56 seconds of the first round. He finally took off his gloves, climbed out of the ring, picked up a folding chair and struck a threatening pose. I motioned for him to come on back in the ring with it, but he didn't." Hoyt went on to become the Heavyweight Champion of a task force of 35 ships.
As he had decided and planned he got out of the Navy in 1961, and he went straight into the music business, writing and performing folk tunes in keeping with those times. He wasn't all 'Folk' music oriented though. He would always have some rhythm and blues, blues and rock numbers in his repetoire. After a short stint in Nashville, Hoyt headed for California> He caught his break the following year in 1962 while playing the San Francisco coffee-house circuit. His attention demanding style, and rich voice, set him apart from the sort of college boy/girl looking...stiff clean cut style of all the other 'Folk Singers' of the early 60s were affecting. Hoyt didn't affect any 'style', he just was. He was a folk singer for ten years and then bust out of that mold.
He probably would have become a much larger success had he not made a few unwise choices in contractual affairs as to his recording label [which was a Jazz label] and his various management difficulties.
He also became quite popular as an actor and narrative voice over in a films and television.
I believe he was part Native American and did hear so as to that fact years ago when I was a young man but I can't find confirmation of that. I assume he probably was. Everybody in my moms family tree in Oklahoma is to some degree, actor James Garner was, Will Rogers was...I imagine even Mickey Mantel was to a small degree.
ptv
