Randy Travis

Randy Travis is an American country singer, songwriter, and actor whose four-decade career produced one of the American country-music bodies of work of the late 1980s and 1990s. He was born Randy Bruce Traywick on May 4, 1959, in Marshville, North Carolina. He started singing in local Charlotte-area country bars at age 14 and was discovered by Charlotte club owner-and-manager Lib Hatcher in 1976. He moved to Nashville with Hatcher in 1981 to pursue a country-music career.

His Warner Bros. Nashville signing came in 1985, and the 1986 debut album Storms of Life sold over 5 million copies worldwide — the first country debut album to sell over 1 million copies in its first year. The album produced four Hot Country Songs top-10 singles, including the Hot Country Songs #1 "On the Other Hand" and "Diggin' Up Bones." The 1986–1990 commercial peak made Travis one of the foundational figures of the late-1980s American "new traditionalist" country movement (alongside Reba McEntire, George Strait, Dwight Yoakam, and Ricky Skaggs).

His 1987 second album Always & Forever sold over 7 million copies worldwide and produced four Hot Country Songs #1 singles, including "Forever and Ever, Amen." The 1980s and 1990s sequence of Travis albums produced over 16 Hot Country Songs #1 singles. He won six Grammy Awards across his career.

His career was shaped by his July 7, 2013 stroke, which left him with severe aphasia (the loss of language-production ability). He was comatose for several weeks following the stroke. His post-stroke recovery has been limited, though he has appeared at country-music awards events and at the 2016 Country Music Hall of Fame induction (where he sang a brief verse of "Amazing Grace" — his only public singing performance since the 2013 stroke). He has continued to be a recurring American country-music cultural figure with substantial support from his wife Mary Davis (whom he married in 2015).

His name Randy is the English short form of Randall or Randolph (both from Old Germanic Rand meaning "shield"). Randy has been continuously among the most-popular American boys' names for decades.