Slim Whitman Artistfacts

January 20, 1923 - June 19, 2013
Ottis "Slim" Whitman, Jr. was born in Tampa, Florida on January 20, 1923. Whitman was a promising baseball player, and it was only the intervention of the Second World War, which resulted in his enlistment in the US Navy, that steered him to a singing career instead.
Whitman's first big break came when talent manager Colonel Tom Parker heard him singing on the radio and offered to represent him. Signed with RCA Records, he was billed as "the cowboy singer Slim Whitman" and performed on the legendary Louisiana Hayride after releasing his first single in 1948. A few years later Parker discovered a young singer called Elvis Presley and the future King of Rock 'n' Roll served as Whitman's opening act for a short time.
Whitman began a run of hits in the early '50s with "Love Song of the Waterfall" and " Indian Love Call" then scored a #1 hit in the UK pop charts with "Rose Marie in 1955." The song dominated the top spot in Britain for 11 weeks, a record that would stand for 36 years. until Bryan Adams’ "(Everything I Do) I Do It For You," spent 16 weeks at the summit.
As one of the first Country artists to tour the UK and the rest of Europe, Slim Whitman was largely responsible for introducing country music to audiences across the Atlantic. However his concentration on the European market marred his US chart career.
"Rose Marie" proved to be his only UK #1 single but Whitman came back so strongly in the mid-70s that two of his albums topped the British charts. The second one 1977's Red River Valley, made him at the time the oldest act at 53 to top the UK chart with an album of new material.
In 1979, Whitman produced an American TV commercial to support a release of a greatest hits compilation titled All My Best. It went on to be the best-selling TV-marketed record in music history, with almost 1.5 million units sold. Just For You followed in 1980, with another commercial. The TV albums made Whitman for a brief spell a household name in America for the first time in his career helped along by Johnny Carson's many jokes on the subject. Whitman subsequently offered several other hits collections through direct TV marketing.
Whitman was introduced to a new generation when his rendition of "Indian Love Call" saved the planet Earth by causing the heads of invading Martians to explode in the 1996 film Mars Attacks!
Whitman was an influence on two of The Beatles. Paul McCartney cited seeing a poster of him as the inspiration for re-stringing his guitar to play left-handed and George Harrison recalled that Whitman was the first person he ever saw playing a guitar.

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