Lee Hazlewood recorded for Jamie Rec ords under his own name and also as Mark Robinsion (the name of his son and a family name.) This Lee Hazlewood bio is excerpted from the liner notes to The Twang Gang (Jamie CD 4017).
Lee Hazelwood was born in Oklahoma in 1929 and raised in Texas, where his father worked in the oil fields, Hazlewood soaked up the country-swing music of the Texas plains. After his Army discharge at the end of the Korean conflict in 1953, he went to broadcasting school under the G.I. Bill in Los Angeles. In June 1954, Hazlewood started his professional career as a disc jockey at KCKY in the small cotton-farming town of Coolidge, Arizona, south of Phoenix. That’s where he first met the young Duane Eddy and enlisted him to help him write songs after his daily air shift.
As a novice composer, Hazlewood needed someone to help create and write out the music for the songs in his head. Soon he was driving Eddy and his friend Jimmy Delbridge (later Dell) to perform at the Saturday night live music shows at Madison Square Garden in downtown Phoenix. There, Hazlewood met others working in the music business and quickly realized that Phoenix would be a better base for his talents. Fate soon intervened when, after being fired from KCKY, he got an offer from the country-formatted KRUX in the Phoenix area. Once there, Hazlewood started his Viv Records and Debra publishing company in 1955 to record and publish his songs with popular local singers Jimmy Johnson, Jimmy Spellman and Loy Clingman.
At this same time, he also started collaborating in the studio with the young and talented guitarist Al Casey, whom he made his musical director. Casey was a member of The Sunset Riders, which backed all the performers at the weekly local Madison Square Garden shows that were also broadcast on radio and television.
