Carpenter and Top 10 country music star
Hal Ketchum, a onetime carpenter who became a leading country singer in the 1990s, with several Top 10 hits, including Small Town Saturday Night, died Nov. 23 at his home in Comal County, Tex., of complications from dementia. He was 67.
His music career started when he planned to restore a house in New Braunfels, Tex., not knowing the town had one of Texas’s oldest dance halls. “The first night in our house,” Ketchum said in 1992, “I heard music that sounded like Bob Wills,” a key figure in Western swing. “I thought maybe the house was haunted until I went outside and heard it coming from across the river.”
He drove over and discovered Gruene Hall ( pronounced “green”), with the band Asleep at the Wheel keeping Western swing alive. Ketchum became a fixture there, both as a performer and as a carpenter.
He also began appearing at Sunday showcases for aspiring songwriters. Mentored by key figures including Lyle Lovett and Jerry Jeff Walker, Ketchum quickly developed as a songwriter and a performer.
He moved to Nashville, where he sold some songs to established performers, including Trisha Yearwood and Leann Rimes, but his demo recordings were so polished he was signed to a contract by Curb Records.
He had an “aching, vergeof- a- teardrop” tenor voice, the Los Angeles Times said.
Ketchum soon had a gold album, with more than 500,000 copies sold. By 1992, he was touring and even had bit parts in Hollywood movies. He was named a member of Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry in 1994. Country Music magazine in 1994 said Ketchum’s performances had “palpable intimations of fear, helplessness, desire, compulsion and confusion … just beneath the music’s seemingly placid surface.”
In 1997, after years of drug and alcohol abuse, Ketchum sought treatment. The next year, he was diagnosed with acute transverse myelitis, and had to relearn how to walk and play guitar. In 2003, he was diagnosed with MS.
Hal Michael Ketchum was born April 9, 1953, in Greenwich, N.Y. During his teens, he played banjo in bluegrass bands and drums in rock bands. Ketchum’s live appearances often had a sharper, rock- and- roll- flavoured edge than his sometimes syrupy Nashville recordings.
He moved back to the Texas in 2008 and gave his final performances in 2018, finishing up where he started: at Gruene Hall.