Connie Smith
Although she's been singing professionally since the early 1960s, when she was still in her early 20s, Connie Smith still possesses one of the most powerful, agile and recognizable voices in country music. Her exposure to audiences via recordings has been very much an on-and-off affair, but she has maintained a presence through her regular appearances on the Grand Ole Opry, of which she has been a member since 1971. Constance June Meador was born Aug. 14, 1941, in Elkhart, Ind. One of 14 children in a poor family that moved often, she grew up in West Virginia and Ohio. She married young and was starting a family when, in 1963, she won a talent contest in Ohio that brought her to the attention of singer-songwriter Bill Anderson. Impressed by what he heard, Anderson persuaded her to come to Nashville, where RCA Records signed her the following year. With Bob Ferguson acting as her producer, Smith cut several songs in the first RCA sessions, among them Anderson's tear-stained "Once a Day." Released as Smith's first single, "Once a Day" entered the Billboard charts on Sept. 26, 1964, and went on to seize the No. 1 spot. And there it remained for eight consecutive weeks. It would be the only chart-topper of Smith's career, but she had a string of singles that came close, including such Top 5 and Top 10 fare as "Then and Only Then," "If I Talk to Him," "Nobody but a Fool (Would Love You)," "Ain't Had No Lovin'," "The Hurtin's All Over," "Cincinnati, Ohio," "Just One Time," "If It Ain't Love (Let's Leave It Alone)" and "Ain't Love a Good Thing." Smith was a fixture on the country charts through the 1970s (she switched from RCA to Columbia in 1973). Starting in the late 1960s, as career and family pressures mounted, she became increasingly obsessed with religion, insisting in her contract with Columbia that she be allowed to record one gospel album a year. During the 1980s, she concentrated primarily on raising her children. However, she returned briefly to the charts (at No. 71) in 1985 on Epic Records with the single "A Far Cry From You," written by the promising young songwriter Steve Earle. She attempted another comeback in 1998 with the Warner Bros. album Connie Smith, but it attracted little notice. In 1996, RCA released The Essential Connie Smith, a 20-cut CD that contains most of her biggest hits, plus the crowd-inciting "How Great Thou Art." She married country star Marty Stuart, her fourth husband, on July 8, 1997.