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You would not know it walking through Corsicana today. But this Navarro County town in North Texas produced one of the most imitated voices in country music history.
William Orville Frizzell was born here on March 31, 1928, the eldest of eight children. His father worked the oil fields — the same gushing Texas earth that had upended the state’s economy and attracted workers from across the South. The Frizzells were an oilfield family, which meant they were also a family in motion. Soon after William’s birth, they moved to El Dorado, Arkansas. But Corsicana was the ground he came from.
As a boy, William was called Sonny. Later, he’d be Lefty — a name that stuck, by legend, from a neighborhood fight, though his label’s publicity men probably had something to do with its durability. What mattered more was what he heard on the phonograph. His greatest early influence was Jimmie Rodgers, “The Blue Yodeler” — the Singing Brakeman from Mississippi who wove yodels and blues into country music and became its first superstar. Frizzell listened to Rodgers’ records obsessively as a boy and began singing professionally before his teens.
The Sound North Texas Built
Corsicana sits about 55 miles south of Dallas in the rolling farmland of Navarro County. It was the site of the first major commercial oil discovery in Texas in 1894 — a fact that shaped everything about the economy and the people who worked it. The Frizzells were part of that world: practical, hard-working, always following the work.
But Lefty Frizzell followed sound. His vocal style — long, sliding syllables where he held a word until he decided to let it go — was unlike anything else in country music. Merle Haggard said it plainly: “No one could handle a song like Lefty. He would hold on to each word until he finally decided to drop it and pick up the next one. Most of us learned to sing listening to him.” George Jones, Willie Nelson, and Roy Orbison all said the same.
That voice began in Corsicana. It belongs to Texas. And it still moves through country music like a current that never quite stops running.
