American country music star Eddy Arnold has died aged 89. His health has been deteriorating in recent months, particularly since the death of his wife of 66 years in March, and since injuring his hip in a fall the same month.
Arnold was a big star in the country genre, achieving no less than 28 number ones in the US country charts during his career, and also enjoying quite a bit of crossover success, with numerous hits in the US pop charts, and even a top ten hit in the UK, with his 1966 song 'Make The World Go Away'. A pioneer of the so called Nashville Sound, his influence can be seen in many subsequent country artists, and in particular Kenny Rogers.
After rising to fame in the 1940s, and enjoying success on both TV and in film at the end of that decade, Arnold's career began to falter in the fifties, and he started to look for projects outside the performing arena. But in the sixties he went through a revival, mainly by changing his look and musical style a little (dinner suit instead of cowboy suit, strings instead of fiddles), giving him appeal beyond the traditional country market. Although a controversial move within the country faithful, it made Arnold popular among the growing urban population of America, and arguably helped create new interest in the whole country genre among that demographic.