Johnny Bond Biography

Johnny Bond Biography

 Johnny Bond was a popular country music entertainer of the 1940s through the 1960s and is a member of the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. Bond got his first break working for Jimmy Wakely in the late 1930s and went on to join Gene Autry's Melody Ranch in 1940. He also acted on occasion in films like Wilson and Duel in the Sun and was later a regular on the 1950s country music television series Town Hall Party. He is best known for his 1947 hit "Divorce Me C.O.D.", one of his seven top ten hits on the Billboard country charts. In 1965 at age 50 he scored the biggest hit of his career with the comic "Ten Little Bottles" which spent four weeks in the #2 position. Bond's other hits include "So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed" (1947), "Oklahoma Waltz" (1948), "Love Song in 32 Bars" (1950), "Sick Sober and Sorry" (1951) and "Hot Rod Lincoln" (1960). He died of a heart attack in 1978, at the age of 63.

 Johnny Bond had several successful facets to a career that lasted over 30 years. As a member of the Jimmy Wakely Trio and as a session musician, he was an important support musician in dozens of B Westerns, working alongside Wakely, Tex Ritter, and Johnny Mack Brown. As a songwriter, he was responsible for several compositions that became country standards, including "Cimarron," "I Wonder Where You Are Tonight," "Conversation With a Gun," "Tomorrow Never Comes," and "I'll Step Aside," which became hits for everyone from Billy Vaughn & His Orchestra to Johnny Rodriguez. He also contributed mightily to the recorded music of Wakely, Ritter, and other country stars of the 1940s and 1950s. And his own recordings -- which included work with such luminaries as Merle Travis -- were popular from the 1940s onward, and included several hits, but it wasn't until the 1960s that he had the biggest record of his career, "Ten Little Bottles."