Cowboy Jack Clement life and biography

John Henderson Clement was an American singer, songwriter, and a record and film producer.

"Cowboy" Jack Clement has scored major musical success as a songwriter, producer, recording studio pioneer, publisher, artist and executive. He was born April 5, 1931, in Whitehaven, Tenn., near Memphis and enlisted in the Marines as a teenager. After four years of service, he toured in a bluegrass band, then returned to Memphis in 1954. He found work at Sun Records and worked at the mixing board for recording sessions with Roy Orbison, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Charlie Rich and Jerry Lee Lewis. Another Sun artist, Elvis Presley, even opened for Clement at the Memphis club The Eagle's Nest. In those years, he wrote two of Cash's most enduring songs, "Ballad of a Teenage Queen" and "Guess Things Happen That Way."

After being fired by Sam Phillips at Sun, he moved to Nashville to work for Chet Atkins, then relocated to Beaumont, Texas. There, he met George Jones and convinced him to cut the song, "She Thinks I Still Care." In 1965, Clement returned to Nashville and financed a demo by then-unknown Charley Pride and persuaded Atkins to sign him to RCA. Clement also wrote Pride's first two hits, "Just Between You and Me" and "I Know One," and produced Pride's first 13 albums for the label.

Clement launched the solo career of Don Williams through his JMI record label, a project that also introduced Allen Reynolds as a record producer. Reynolds later produced Garth Brooks, Crystal Gayle, Emmylou Harris, Bobby Bare and Kathy Mattea. In addition, Clement was Townes Van Zandt's first publisher, and Bob McDill also wrote for Clement's publishing company. Clement released his own album, All I Want to Do in Life in 1978.

Beyond country music, Clement produced three tracks for U2's Rattle and Hum sessions in Memphis and also produced an album for Louis Armstrong. In other ventures, he built four of Nashville's leading studios, produced a cult classic horror film and made perhaps the world's first music video on Don Williams in 1972, nine years before MTV launched.

Clement now operates out of his spacious Nashville home -- with a fully equipped studio upstairs, a pool in the side yard, hammock out back and all the rooms wired for filming. Inside he juggles the sessions he's producing on Eddy Arnold, soundtrack work with T Bone Burnett for the new Johnny Cash film, Walk the Line, the Robert Gordon-led film crew documenting his life, reading selections from his work-in-progress autobiography and training Eugene, "the world's smartest cat."

He issued the album Guess Things Happen That Way in 2004. On August 8, 2013, Cowboy Jack Clement died at his home in Nashville, Tennessee. He had suffered from liver cancer. He had two children, a daughter, Alison, also a singer and writer, and a son, Niles, an engineer and photographer.

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