Harlan Howard, who died on March 3rd aged 74, liked to say "country music is three chords and the truth". He was better qualified than most to speak on the subject, for he was one of the genre's great lyricists. With a catalogue of more than 400 compositions, and songs in the country charts from the 1950s to the 1990s, he earned the soubriquets, "the dean of Nashville songwriters" and "the Irving Berlin of country music".
He was born in Detroit, and, as a boy in Michigan, listened to the broadcasts of the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville, particularly those featuring the singer Ernest Tubb; he soon began writing country songs patterned on those of Tubb and singer-songwriter Floyd Tillman.
He joined the US army in 1947, and a stint as a paratrooper gave him time to learn the guitar. At weekends, he would hitch from the camp, in Georgia, to Nashville in order to attend the Opry.
In 1955, he settled in Los Angeles, a city that offered both a flourishing country-music scene and opportunities for day jobs. Between shifts as a forklift operator, he turned out sometimes as many as six songs a day. The country artists Johnny Bond and Tex Ritter encouraged his writing, and bought some of his work.
In 1959, Charlie Walker's recording of Pick Me Up On Your Way Down gave Harlan Howard his first hit, followed by Heartaches By The Number, recorded in the country idiom by Ray Price, and for the pop market by Guy Mitchell.
In 1960, he and his wife Jan, an up-and-coming country singer, moved to Nashville. "At the time, there were only a handful of songwriters feeding this fiery furnace," he recalled. "Every record label had 30 great singers on its roster, all looking for hits. We all made each other write better." This was the era of writers like Willie Nelson, Mel Tillis, and Boudleaux and Felice Bryant, and of producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley - the beginning of "the Nashville sound". Harlan Howard quickly made his mark with I Fall To Pieces, written jointly with Hank Cochran and given a dramatic treatment by Patsy Cline.
In the early 1960s, he was unstoppable. At one point, he had 15 songs in the country top 40, a feat since unmatched. Billboard recognised him as the leading country songwriter in both 1961 and 1962. Among his hits were Busted, recorded by Ray Charles, I've Got A Tiger By The Tail (Buck Owens, and Ray Charles again), Life Turned Her That Way, She's A Little Bit Country and No Charge. Waylon Jennings also recorded several dozen of his songs.
In 1973, he was elected to the Nashville Songwriters' Hall Of Fame, but for him much of that decade was, as he described it later, "burn-out time".
His reputation was revived in the early 1980s with new songs for John Conlee, Reba McEntire and the Judds, and maintained into the 1990s by Pam Tillis and Patty Loveless, whose 1994 recording of Blame It On Your Heart won him a BMI award for song of the year. In 1997, he was voted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
He is survived by his fifth wife, Melanie, and three children from his different marriages. He also adopted a son.
Harlan Howard: born 1927; died,March 2002