Lefty Frizzell changed the way country music was sung. His relaxed, sliding, behind-the-beat phrasing — bending and stretching a single syllable until it ached — became one of the most imitated vocal styles in the music, and its echoes reach into bluegrass through every singer who ever leaned on a word the way Lefty did.

A Texan who had boxed a little and learned his trade in honky-tonks, Frizzell signed with Columbia Records in 1950 and broke through almost immediately. Many of his early sides were cut at Jim Beck's studio in Dallas, with the producer Don Law overseeing — and his first releases were a sensation. "If You've Got the Money I've Got the Time," "I Love You a Thousand Ways," "Always Late (With Your Kisses)," "Mom and Dad's Waltz": at one point in 1951 Frizzell had four singles in the country Top Ten at once, a feat almost unmatched.

Frizzell was a honky-tonk singer, not a bluegrass musician, and his records used electric guitars and a dance-hall beat. But his influence on bluegrass is real and specific. His honky-tonk ballads and waltzes became cover material for bluegrass duet singers, and "Long Black Veil," which he introduced in 1959, turned into an outright standard of the genre. More than that, the Frizzell vocal style — that loose, expressive, syllable-bending delivery — seeped into the singing of countless country and bluegrass vocalists who came after.

His career cooled in later years, and he died in 1975, only forty-seven. But the singles he cut in his Columbia prime reset the country vocabulary, and bluegrass speaks a little of that dialect still.

Session details drawn in part from the Bluegrass Discography.