George Strait has 60 number-one songs, more than any artist in any genre
No musician of any style has topped the charts as often as George Strait: 60 number ones, 44 of them on Billboard's country list. Yet the Texan grew up playing Beatles songs in a garage band and barely listened to country radio, preferring the news and the farm report.
Strait was born in Poteet, Texas, on May 18, 1952, and raised in nearby Pearsall, where his father taught junior high maths and kept a 2,000-acre cattle ranch near Big Wells. After his parents divorced when he was in fourth grade, he and his older brother Buddy stayed with their father and spent weekends and summers working cattle. In a family footnote, he is a second cousin of Jackie Bezos, Jeff Bezos's mother.
His first band, the Stoics, took its cues from the British Invasion. Country reached him mostly through live shows in Texas towns and singers such as Merle Haggard and Bob Wills. He eloped with his high school sweetheart, Norma Voss, marrying in Mexico in December 1971, and joined the Army as a finance clerk that year. Stationed in Hawaii, he auditioned for an Army country band called Rambling Country. After leaving the service as a corporal in 1975 he earned an agriculture degree in San Marcos, ranching by day and gigging at night with his band Ace in the Hole.
Former MCA executive Erv Woosley became his manager and got him a major-label deal. His debut single for MCA, Unwound, was a modest hit in 1981, and Fool Hearted Memory went to number one a year later. That spare, cowboy-rooted sound, arriving when Nashville favoured pop crossover, is credited with launching the neotraditional movement, and critics took to calling him the King of Country Music.
The numbers since are enormous: 33 gold or platinum albums, an RIAA record, and more than 70 million records sold in the US. Only one of his 16 Grammy nominations turned into a win, for Troubadour in 2009. His 2014 farewell show at AT&T Stadium drew 104,793 people, and in 2024 he played to more than 110,905 at Kyle Field, a US record for a single-act ticketed concert.
Source: George Strait
