Watch Eddy Arnold sing

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In a career spanning more than a half a century, Eddy Arnold was one of country music’s most enduring and prolific hitmakers. The weight of statistics alone makes impressive reading: between 1945 and 1983 he had 145 songs in the American charts, including 28 number ones. But more than that, his longevity meant that he came to personify, perhaps more vividly than any other performer, the growth of country music from its rural, folk-based hillbilly traditions to the modern world of urban Nashville panache. It was a musical journey which in turn reflected profound changes in American society.

With his warm, smooth, crooning voice, not unlike a countrified Bing Crosby or Dean Martin, he was well placed to make the transition from “the Tennessee plowboy” to pop star, as his cowboy hats and check shirts gave way to a tuxedo. Yet despite the change of image he never totally lost touch with his roots, and the lonesome cowboy ballad Cattle Call remained his signature tune. Other hits ranged from the sentimental I Wish I Had a Girl Like You, Mother to such heartbreaking weepies as Make the World Go Away and I’ll Hold You in My Heart (Til I Can Hold You in My Arms). He was still performing well into his eighties to audiences that had come to span three or four generations of country music fans.

Born Richard Edward Arnold in Henderson, Tennessee, in 1918 into a large farming family, he took an early interest in music after a cousin lent him a Sears Roebuck Silvertone guitar, which he learnt to play with the help of an itinerant musician. He was soon playing along to records by the “singing cowboy” Gene Autry and pop crooners such as Bing Crosby, and was also an enthusiastic singer in church and at school.

This rural idyll was rudely interrupted when his father died in 1929 and the family farm was auctioned to pay off creditors. Early victims of the Great Depression, the Arnold family became sharecroppers and, to help the family survive, at 12 Arnold took a job with an undertaker and began singing at barbecues and local dances for a dollar a night. By 17 he was singing in the honky-tonks of nearby Jackson and had made his first radio appearance. Within a year he had left home to pursue a life as a professional musician and was working farther afield in Memphis and St Louis.

His break came in 1942 when he was hired to sing with Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys at the Grand Ol’ Opry in Nashville. By 1943 he was a solo star at the Opry, which billed him as “Eddy Arnold, the Tennessee plowboy and his guitar”. A recording contract with RCA Victor followed. One of his first recordings was Cattle Call (a song he would later revisit) and his early style was very much in the “singing cowboy” mode, with simple, sparse arrangements that put his gentle voice and personality to the fore.

His first big hit came in 1946 with That’s How Much I Love You and under the astute management of the formidable Colonel Tom Parker, who would later go on to oversee Elvis Presley’s career, by the end of the decade he had become one of the biggest names in country music. His first number one, What Is Life Without Love, came in 1947 and was followed before the decade was out by It’s a Sin, I’ll Hold You in My Heart, Don’t Rob Another Man’s Castle, Anytime, Molly Darling and Bouquet of Roses.

In 1948 he left the Opry and set about making the transition from radio to screen. He appeared in the films Hoedown and Feudin’ Rhythm (both 1950) and was given his own television show, Eddy Arnold Time, which ran on all three of the main American networks. The direction in which he was moving was clear. Country was moving uptown and in 1953 Parker booked him for a season in Las Vegas, a move he would later replicate with Presley.

His music, too, began to change and in 1956 he re-recorded Cattle Call in New York with the Hugo Winterhalter Orchestra, the once simple cowboy song given a new and lush pop arrangement by Charles Grean, who had previously worked with the Glenn Miller Orchestra. Some of his old country fans disliked the new style, but it helped Arnold to find a new audience as he rebranded himself as an urban sophisticate, albeit one careful not to forget the God-fearing rural background from which he had come.

Working with the producer Chet Atkins and such top session men as the pianist Floyd Cramer, Arnold’s recordings in the 1960s came to personify the new pop-country sound of Nashville often called “countrypolitan”. His voice had grown mellower, too, and among his big hits of the period were such smooth love songs as Make the World Go Away, What’s He Doing in My World and Then You Can Tell Me Goodbye. Leaving the honky-tonks far behind, he took to playing venues such as Carnegie Hall in New York with a symphony orchestra, and there were more cabaret shows in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe.

Yet he was also astute enough not to ignore the changes that were taking place in country music and in 1970 he turned to Lee Hazlewood to produce the splendid album Standing Alone, which included songs by a new breed of contemporary writers straddling country and rock such as Steve Young and John Stewart.

After almost 30 years with RCA he briefly jumped ship in the mid-1970s and recorded for MGM Records. But by 1975 he had returned to his original label to record the evocative hit single Cowboy, which recalled his origins as the Tennessee plowboy. When he reached his sixties he toyed with the idea of retirement but he soon concluded that inactivity did not agree with him. The early 1980s found him back in the studio recording further hits Let’s Get It While the Gettin’s Good and That’s What I Get for Loving You and he carried on touring and recording for another 20 years and more. In 1999 he even returned to the charts with a new version of Cattle Call sung as a duet with LeAnn Rimes, 54 years after his first chart hit.

In 2005 he released the album After All These Years, at 87. “I’d retired and I didn’t even know if I could still sing,” he said. “Then I started exercising the voice and found out that I could still do it a little.”

Among his many honours, he was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1966 and became the Country Music Association’s Entertainer of the Year in 1967, the inaugural recipient of an award that has become the most important in country music. In 2000 the White House presented him with the National Medal of Arts, and in 2005 he was honoured with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. He donated his career-long collection of records, photos, books, awards and memorabilia to the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in 2003.

A gentle man but one who held fast to firm moral principles, unlike many of his fellow country stars he eschewed drink and drugs and was married to his wife Sally for more than 60 years. She died in March. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

Eddy Arnold, country singer, was born on May 15, 1918. He died on May 8, 2008, aged 89