- Recorded with legendary guitar player Hank Garland on some of his biggest country hits including, "Oh, Lonesome Me" (1958), "Blue Blue Day" (1958) and "Sea Of Heartbreak".
- Elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2001.
- His best known hits (both as a singer and songwriter) included "Sweet Dreams" (1956), "Oh Lonesome Me" (1958's No. 1 song of the year); "Blue Blue Day" (also 1958), and "Woman Sensuous Woman" (1972).
- His best-known song was the flip side to "Oh Lonesome Me" ... "I Can't Stop Loving You." Legend has it he recorded the song after no one else would. After he made it a hit, many people wanted to record the song, including Kitty Wells, Conway Twitty and most notably, Ray Charles.
- Prolific singer and songwriter in the 1950s and 1960s.
- Gibson's music touched on both traditional country and highly produced country-pop, which is part of the reason he had such a broad audience. For nearly a decade after his first hit single, "Sweet Dreams," in 1956, he was a reliable hitmaker, and many of his songs have become country classics -- they have been covered by a wide range of artists, including Patsy Cline, Ray Charles, Kitty Wells, Emmylou Harris, Neil Young, and Ronnie Milsap.
- He dropped out of school in the second grade.
- His song "I Can't Stop Loving You", has been recorded by over 700 artists, most notably by Ray Charles in 1962.
- Gibson recorded a series of successful duets with Dottie West in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the most successful of which were the Number two country hit "Rings of Gold" (1969) and the top 10 hit "There's a Story Goin' Round" (1970). West and Gibson released an album together in 1969, titled Dottie and Don.
- Roy Orbison was a fan of Gibson's songwriting, and in 1967, he recorded an album of his songs simply titled Roy Orbison Sings Don Gibson.
- "Oh Lonesome Me" set the pattern for a long series of other RCA hits. "Blue Blue Day", recorded prior to "Oh, Lonesome Me" was a number 1 hit in 1958. Later singles included "Look Who's Blue" (1958), "Don't Tell Me Your Troubles" (1959), "Sea of Heartbreak" (1961); "Lonesome No. 1", "I Can Mend Your Broken Heart" (1962), and "Woman (Sensuous Woman)", a number one country hit in 1972.
- Gibson was inducted into the North Carolina Music Hall of Fame in 2010.
- His father, a railroad worker, died when Gibson was just two years old.
- Gibson was hopelessly shy all through life, defensive about his appearance -- to the point where, as a boy or a young man, he would avoid walking into places that were too crowded -- and also about his voice, which was characterized by a very bad stutter while he was growing up.
- His first band was called Sons of the Soil, with whom he made his first recording for Mercury Records in 1949.
- Located in Cleveland County, North Carolina, The Don Gibson Theater opened on November 2009 in historic uptown Shelby. Originally constructed in 1939, the renovated art deco gem features an exhibit of the life and accomplishments of singer-songwriter Don Gibson, an intimate 400-seat music hall, and adjoining function space that can accommodate up to 275 people. The theater showcases a busy schedule of premier musical performances. Past performers have included Marty Stuart, Pam Tillis, Tom Paxton, Ralph Stanley, Vince Gill, Ricky Skaggs, John Oates and Gene Watson.
- His mother remarried in the early '40s, when Don Gibson was still a boy -- by that time, the family survived as sharecroppers, but even as a boy the youngest Gibson hated farming, and as he grew older he made the decision to get as far away from it as possible.
- He wrote and recorded "Sweet Dreams", a song that would become a major 1963 crossover hit for Patsy Cline.
- Gibson's wide appeal was also shown in Neil Young's recorded version of "Oh Lonesome Me" on his 1970 album, After the Gold Rush, which is one of the few songs Young has recorded that he did not write.
- Don Gibson was born in Shelby, into a poor working-class family.
- Successful as Gibson was as a recording artist, he was even more influential as a composer -- by the mid-'60s, RCA Victor was issuing albums built on his recordings going all the way back to 1957, and even MGM and Columbia got into the act in 1965, plundering the dozen Gibson songs each that they had in their vaults.
- In 1957, he journeyed to Nashville to work with producer Chet Atkins and record his self-penned songs "Oh Lonesome Me" and "I Can't Stop Loving You" for RCA Victor. The afternoon session resulted in a double-sided hit on both the country and pop charts.
- He recorded several duets with Sue Thompson, among these being the Top 40 hits, "I Think They Call It Love" (1972), "Good Old Fashioned Country Love" (1974) and "Oh, How Love Changes" (1975).
- During the late '60s, he suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction, but he cleaned up in the early '70s, which led to a comeback in 1971.
- Gibson was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1973.
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