Leon Payne
Musician · 1917–1969 · Alba, Texas
Best known for
Songwriter
Leon Payne — billed throughout his career as “the Blind Balladeer” — was a Texas singer-songwriter whose catalog includes the honky-tonk standard “Lost Highway” (a 1949 Hank Williams hit) and the country ballad “I Love You Because.” Blind from early childhood, he wrote hundreds of songs in a career that ran from the late 1930s until his death and that placed him among the most-covered Texas songwriters of the postwar era.
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- Born Leon Roger Payne on June 15, 1917, in Alba, Texas; blind in one eye at birth and lost the sight in the other in early childhood.
- Attended the Texas School for the Blind from 1924 to 1935, where he learned multiple instruments.
- Began performing publicly on KWET radio in Palestine, Texas, in 1935.
- Briefly toured with Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys in 1938.
- Recorded his own composition “Lost Highway” for the Nashville-based Bullet label in October 1948; Hank Williams covered it the following year, and the song became a country standard.
- Wrote “I Love You Because,” later a hit for Jim Reeves and Johnny Cash; “They’ll Never Take Her Love From Me,” another Hank Williams cut; and “You’ve Still Got a Place in My Heart.”
- Died of a heart attack in San Antonio, Texas, on September 11, 1969, at age 52.