Steven Fromholz, a Texas-based singer-songwriter who had worked with Stephen Stills and Michael Nesmith, died on Jan. 19 as a result of a hunting accident. He was 68.
According to the Dallas News, Fromholz was hunting with his girlfriend at the Flying B Ranch near Eldorado when his rifle slipped out of its case and discharged when it hit the ground. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.
In 1969, Fromholz and Dan McCrimmon, working under the name Frummox, released ‘Here to There,’ which, along with albums by Jerry Jeff Walker and Michael Martin Murphy, is widely considered to have birthed the Outlaw Country movement of the ’70s. After that, he briefly toured with fellow Texas native Stephen Stills’ band Manassas, but he left in November 1971, before they entered the studio.
“What I saw, I didn’t like after I’d spent some time with it,” he told Jan Reid in ‘The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock.’ “I didn’t like the ego hassles, and I didn’t like the craziness – it wasn’t my kind of craziness. I’m as crazy as anybody else, but it wasn’t my kind of shot. I was heavily into cocaine and I was getting real sick . . . My skin was turning green.”
Fromholz signed to Michael Nesmith’s Countryside label a few years later and recorded ‘How Long Is the Road to Kentucky.’ But the album was shelved on the eve of its release due to a shakeup at its distributor Elektra Records and has never been released.
His biggest commercial success came in 1976, when Willie Nelson recorded one of his songs, ‘I’d Have to Be Crazy,’ for his album ‘The Sound in Your Mind.’ The track, on which Fromholz sings harmony, went to No. 2 on Billboard’s country chart.
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