About Randy Travis
Randy Bruce Traywick , known professionally as Randy Travis, is an American country music and gospel music singer and songwriter, as well as a film and television actor. Active since 1979, he has recorded over 20 studio albums and charted over 50 singles on the Billboard Hot Country Songs charts, including sixteen that reached the number-one position.
Travis's commercial success began in the mid-1980s with the release of his album Storms of Life, which sold more than four million copies. Travis followed up his successful debut with a string of platinum and multi-platinum albums. By the mid-1990s, Travis saw a decline in his chart success. In 1997, he left Warner Bros. Records for DreamWorks Records; he signed to Word Records for a series of gospel albums beginning in 2000 before transferring back to Warner at the end of the 21st century's first decade. Travis sold over 25 million records and has won seven Grammy Awards, eleven ACM Awards, eight Dove Awards, and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In 2016, Travis was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Major songs of his include "On the Other Hand", "Forever and Ever, Amen", "I Told You So", "Hard Rock Bottom of Your Heart", and "Three Wooden Crosses".
Travis is noted as a key figure in the neotraditional country movement, a return to more traditional sounds within the genre following the country pop crossovers of the early 1980s. He is considered an influence on later generations of country singers, and is noted for his baritone singing voice. Nearly all of his albums were produced or co-produced by Kyle Lehning, with frequent co-writing credits from Travis, Paul Overstreet, Don Schlitz, and Skip Ewing. Since surviving a near-fatal stroke in 2013, which severely limited his singing and speaking ability, he has released archival recordings and made limited public appearances. James Dupré has toured singing his songs with Travis's road band. In 2024, Travis released "Where That Came From", his first studio recording since his stroke, where his voice was re-created using artificial intelligence.
Travis also holds several film and television acting roles, including the television movies Wind in the Wire and A Holiday to Remember, episodes of the television series Matlock, and the Patrick Swayze movie Black Dog.
Randy Bruce Traywick was born May 4, 1959, in Marshville, North Carolina. He is the second of six children to Bobbie Traywick and Harold Traywick. Harold Traywick worked as a meat packer and also built houses. He also enjoyed listening to country music such as Ernest Tubb and Patsy Cline, in addition to singing, playing guitar, and writing his own songs. By the time Randy was eight years old, his father would send him and his brothers to the house of a friend named Kate Magnum, who would teach him and his brothers Ricky and David how to play guitar. Harold also constructed a stage behind the family house, where he would invite friends over to hear his sons sing. Randy and Ricky performed publicly for the first time in 1968 at a talent show held at the local elementary school; while the brothers did not win, they continued to perform at local talent shows, with David later joining to accompany them on bass guitar.
Randy dropped out of school in the ninth grade. As a teenager, he committed a number of criminal offenses. These included reckless driving after he crashed Ricky's car in a cornfield, breaking into a church to hold a party, driving under the influence, resisting arrest, and stealing knives and watches from a local store. On his seventeenth birthday, Randy was arrested for public intoxication and faced imprisonment. Despite his charges, Don Cusic noted in the 1990 book Randy Travis: The King of the New Country Traditionalists that his parents still supported him, as they would pay his bail and support him in court whenever he was arrested.
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