Who sings young love

NASHVILLE — Sonny James, a genial crooner of the 1960s and ’70s with 26 No. 1 country hits to his credit, died here on Monday. He was 87.

His death was announced on his website.

Nicknamed the Southern Gentleman for his affable manner and stylish mode of dress, Mr. James was best known for his 1956 hit, “Young Love,” a romantic ballad accompanied by acoustic guitar and doo-wop harmonies that topped the country and pop charts. It was the first of his No. 1 country singles. (It also became a No. 1 pop hit recorded by the actor Tab Hunter in January 1957.)

Several of Mr. James’s subsequent records reached the country Top 10, but he didn’t have another No. 1 country single until 1964, when he released the romantic ballad “You’re the Only World I Know.” It was a turning point: Twenty-one of his next 25 singles also went to No. 1, including 16 in a row from 1967 to 1972, many of them similar professions of young love.

All but the last of these were, like “Young Love,” released by Capitol Records, and virtually all were recorded in the smooth, sophisticated style of the reigning Nashville Sound, popularized by Jim Reeves and Patsy Cline.

But unlike other exponents of the Nashville Sound, who were drawn to material written expressly for the country market, Mr. James often recorded versions of recent pop and rhythm and blues hits, like Roy Orbison’s “Only the Lonely,” from 1960, and the blues singer Jimmy Reed’s “Bright Lights, Big City,” from 1961.

Mr. James’s versions of both of those hits reached the top of the country chart during his late-’60s-to-early-’70s streak of consecutive No. 1’s. So did his versions of the soul singer Brook Benton’s “Endlessly” and the blues crooner Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Since I Met You, Baby.”

“I always tried to do material that fit me,” Mr. James told Country Weekly magazine in 1995. “We’d do a variety of material — ballads, up-tempo and even bluesy songs — but I stayed the same. I tried to give the fans the kind of songs they had come to expect. I think that was the reason I had such success.”

Mr. James said he had been motivated to record R&B in part as a way to introduce songs that were popular among African-Americans to his mostly white, mainstream country music audiences — his hope being to promote amity between whites and blacks at a time of widespread racial turmoil in the United States.

Mr. James began recording versions of R&B hits around the time Nat King Cole died, in 1965. Cole was one of America’s few black singing stars, and Mr. James had admired his crooning style. The two had become friends. Several photos on Mr. James’s website show the two collaborating in the Capitol Records studios in Hollywood.

Mr. James was born James Hugh Loden on May 1, 1928, in rural Hackleburg, Ala., northwest of Birmingham. His parents, Archie and Della Burleson Loden, worked a 300-acre farm where, supported by three tenant families, they raised cotton, corn and other crops.

Mr. James’s parents played music and sang, as did his older sister Thelma, with whom young “Sonny” appeared on the radio as a child. By the time he was a teenager, he was an accomplished guitar and fiddle player who had won a number of local fiddle contests.

Mr. James went on to perform as a solo artist on the radio broadcasts “Louisiana Hayride” from Shreveport, La., and the “Big D Jamboree” from Dallas. In 1952, after serving in the Army during the Korean War, he moved to Nashville, where he signed a recording contract with Capitol. He played fiddle on the label’s releases by bluegrass acts like Jim & Jesse.

Ken Nelson, Mr. James’s producer at Capitol, was the one who urged him to adopt the stage name Sonny James, arguing that it would be easy for people to remember. The two men collaborated on a handful of Top 20 hits before Mr. James broke through with “Young Love.”

With sales of more than three million copies, the record became one of the most popular singles of 1957, finding success among teenage and young adult fans of rock ’n’ roll and rockabilly music in a way that leading country singers like Eddy Arnold and others had failed to do.

Before long, Mr. James earned a spot as host on “Ozark Jubilee,” a weekly show broadcast on ABC-TV from Springfield, Mo. He began singing on network TV variety shows, including Ed Sullivan’s. And he appeared in several Hollywood movies, including “Nashville Rebel” and “Las Vegas Hillbillys,” both of them from 1966, the latter starring Jayne Mansfield.

During his streak of consecutive No. 1 hits — a feat surpassed in the history of country music only by the vocal group Alabama — Mr. James was named the No. 1 Country Male Artist of the Decade (the 1960s) by Record World magazine. He was given a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame in 1961 and joined the Grand Ole Opry the next year. In 1967, with the singer Bobbie Gentry, he hosted the first Country Music Association awards show.

Mr. James also had success as a producer, overseeing the recording of, among other songs, Marie Osmond’s “Paper Roses,” a No. 1 country hit and No. 4 pop hit in 1973. He had his final hit as a performer, with a single called “A Free Roamin’ Mind,” before retiring because of throat problems in 1983.

He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2006.

Mr. James is survived by his wife, the former Doris Shrode.

“Young Love” spent the better part of six months on the country and pop charts. But as Mr. James told the music historian Dave Samuelson in an interview excerpted on Mr. James’s website, it might have had even greater success if Capitol Records had been better prepared to meet public demand for the record.

“It caught the people in merchandising off guard,” he explained, adding: “They didn’t want to overpress before any record was released. The song surprised everybody, it hit so fast.”