Born in Colt, Arkansas in 1932, Charlie Rich grew up surrounded by the whole panorama of southern music, from the white gospel music he heard with his parents at church, to the country music they listened to on the Grand Ole Opry, to the blues piano he learned from a black sharecropper named C.J. on his father's farm. In the early days Rich was hired as a session player at Sun Records in Memphis where he also played local bars and wrote songs with his wife Margaret Ann. He went on to have big hits with "Lonely Weekends", "Mohair Sam", "The Most Beautiful Girl" and "Behind Closed Doors". The last two both hit number one helping him win a Grammy Award and the CMA's Male Vocalist of the Year award. Such early 70's triumphs were the high-water mark for the man who was by then called "the Silver Fox". Troubles followed, caused at times by drinking and at times by excessive honesty. At the 1975 CMA awards show, on national television, Rich opened the envelope for Entertainer of the Year (won by Rich himself in 1974), saw that John Denver had won, whipped out his Zippo and set the offending document ablaze. In his later years Rich settled on a farm near Benton and recorded mostly jazz songs at his home recording studio. Charlie Rich died in 1995.