The Country Classics
Hawkshaw Hawkins “Lonesome 7-7203″ was number 1 for four weeks
Hawkshaw Hawkins was married to Jean Shepard. He was killed in a plane crash along with Patsy Cline and Cowboy Copas in 1963. He also had a tremendous hit with “Lonesome 7-7203″, and one of our readers pointed out that he was not included in The Country Classics after our first eighteen months. That was an oversight and it will be corrected now.
Hawkshaw Hawkins recordings are in my record library from back in the early 60’s and late 50’s, as are Jean Shepard records. The song is one of my favorites and I don’t know how I overlooked it.
Beginning in 1954, Hawkins was a regular performer on ABC Radio and TV’s Ozark Jubilee in Springfield Missouri. Since I am just north of Springfield I wrote about the Ozark Jubilee. Springfield is also where Hawkshaw met Jean Shepard.
In 1962 he recorded his biggest hit, “Lonesome 7-7203″. It first appeared on the Billboard country chart as a March 2, 1963 release, three days before Hawkins died. The song was absent from the charts for the two weeks following his death, but re-appeared on March 23 and spent 25 weeks on the chart, four of them at number one.
I remember turning the radio up when they played the song, and waited patiently until they played it again. Hawkshaw Hawkins has a pretty voice, so smooth and mellow, and some of it escaped us when we listened to AM radio, especially on those small bakelite radios or clock radios. It made very little difference, however, and the song was such a hit. We never tired of it.
1963 was the same year Buck Owens scored a #1 hit with “Act Naturally” and Johnny Cash went to #1 with “Ring Of Fire”. It seems like it was just yesterday. Buck came right back with “Love’s Gonna Live Here” which stayed at #1 for sixteen weeks. Hawkshaw Hawkins was right there too with “Lonesome 7-7203″.
As an interesting side note I was living in Los Angeles in 1963. The city was still small enough to have the old alphabetic and numeric telephone numbers. We had a “granite” prefix, so our number was GR7-xxxx. Lonesome 7-7203 would have appeared as LO7-7203. Phone numbers were usually not strictly numeric until the mid-1960s. From the 1920s until then, most urban areas had “exchanges” of two letters, followed by numbers.
Today Lonesome 7-7203 would be dialed as 567-7203 and perhaps you know someone with that telephone number.
In 2013 Hawkshaw Hawkins’ song “Lonesome 7-7203 will be fifty years old. It is as popular today as it was when it went to #1 on the country music charts in 1963. Today it is our featured song of the day.
Related posts:
- Remembering Kitty Wilson and the Loudermilks
- 4 country songs had a lock on number 1 in 1960
- Honky Tonks & Heartaches Playlist #39
- Once a Day by Connie Smith sets 1964 record
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