Dottie West

DOTTIE WEST d1991. American country music singer and songwriter. Along with her friends and fellow recording artists Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn, she is considered one of the genre's most influential and groundbreaking female artists. Dottie West's career started in the 1960s with her Top 10 hit, "Here Comes My Baby Again" which won her the first Grammy Award for Best Female Country Vocal in 1965. Throughout the 1960s, she was one of the few female country singers working in what was then a male-dominated industry. In the early 1970s, she wrote a popular commercial for the Coca-Cola company, titled "Country Sunshine" which reached No2 on Billboard's Hot Country Singles in 1973. In the late-70s, she teamed up with Kenny Rogers for a series of duets which took her career to new highs, earning Platinum selling albums and No1 records for the very first time. In the mid-1970s, her image and music underwent a metamorphosis, bringing her to the very peak of her popularity as a solo act and reaching No1 for the very first time on her own in 1980 with "A Lesson In Leavin". She died aged 58 in September 1991 during an operation caused by injuries sustained in a freak car accident a week previously.