Lefty Frizzell: The Honky-Tonk Life of Country Music's Greatest Singer

Growing up in rural Texas, the son of an itinerant oil-field worker, Frizzell (1928-1975) taught himself to play the guitar and learned to sing by imitating his idol, Jimmy Rodgers. By the time he was 19, he had a following, a wife and a baby and a six-month jail sentence for rape. A few years later, he rocketed to fame with ``If You've Got the Money, I've Got the Time,'' ``Lost Love Blues'' and other songs he composed and performed in his unique sliding, yodeling vocal style. Naive about managers and contracts, unable to handle money, women or liquor, he had a roller-coaster career in which fantastic highs were followed by periods of poverty and depression. Cooper, an editor for the Country Music Foundation, builds on interviews with Frizzell's late wife and his children to chronicle the sad life of a popular singer and composer who revolutionized country music and died physically and emotionally exhausted, broke and alienated from his family. Photos not seen by PW. (Aug.)