Early childhood curriculum: REMEMBER ME, BY T TEXAS TYLER

The charismatic singer and songwriter T. Texas Tyler was a successful figure from the late 40s credited until the mid-50s, often help to popularize the sentimental country "recitation" - a narrative composition partly or completely spoken by the artist -- - 1948 with his massive hit "Deck of Cards." He was born David Luke Myrick in Mena, AR, and from childhood aspired to become a country performer. As a young man, Tyler moved to Rhode Iceland, to his brother, who was stationed agoit while serving in the Navy. He got his start working in radio in the early '30s and spent much of the decade touring and carrying on the radio, creating his stage name by combining the names of cowboy crooners Tex Ritter and Tom Tyler. His travels took him as far as Newport, Rhode Iceland and Los Angeles. While performing in Charleston, WV, 1939, along with Tyler fiddler Clarence Clere to form Slim and Tex. They remained together playing radio stations in West Virginia until 1942, whenTyler landed a spot on the Shreveport, LA, radio station and consistent talent factory KWKH. Tyler served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After his release in 1946, Tyler went to Southern California and began to appear daily on the radio in Long Beach and Los Angeles. Its proximity to the new labels, the mushrooms were in Southern California helped to continue his career, and he signed with the small but growing Pasadena label Four Star. Soon he had several chartsextends widely performed country songs of the day: "Filipino Baby" (1946), followed by "Remember Me" and Jack Guthrie's "Oklahoma Hills." Tyler had to sell the largest single investment in 1948 with the enormously popular "Deck of Cards", which reached the top three to continue to year, and spawned numerous imitators. The piece had been perhaps an older pedigree than any other country in the repertoire, like poems in which a soldier uses a deck of cards as a series of religious symbols foundfrom the Middle Ages. Tyler follows the smash with a different speech: The tear wrenchingly sentimental Mary Jean Shurtz composition "Dad Gave My Dog Away." His popularity led to a posting in New York City's Carnegie Hall, and in 1949 he sang a song in the Western Horsemen of the Sierras. Later that year he had a Top Ten hit with a cover of Hank Williams' "My Bucket's Got A Hole In It". Tyler got his own television show, Range Round Up, in Los Angeles, and in theEarly 50s, he prefers an upbeat, popular style in which sung phrases were frequently introduced by a hearty, guttural blow. He had two more big hits in 1953, "Courtin 'in the Rain", and then went into a personal and professional crisis with the advent of rock & roll. A marijuana possession arrest in Texas slowed his career, but many of his recordings were in the newly popular format of the LP album collection. He signed with the label Starday and performed several times on the Grand Ole Opry.In the 50 years he was a gospel singer and Assembly of God minister, the recording of the all-gospel album, The Great Texan, for King in 1960. Tyler spent most of the 1960s touring and preaching, he recorded a gospel album for Capitol, a secular state Starday album (sensational new hits by T. Texas Tyler, 1964), and three independently produced gospel albums he sold at his revivals . After the death of his first wife, Claudia, 1968, married and settled in TylerSpringfield, MO, where he preached at a local community and also occasionally played. "The man with a million friends" died in the spring of 1972 of stomach cancer. ~ James Manheim, All Music Guide