#1. Booking AARON NEVILLE! Get Answers & Fast Service.

Genre:

Style: Adult Contemporary, Pop-Soul, New Orleans R&B, Early R&B, Pop, Country-Soul

Decades Active:

He loved it all, which is why he still sings it all.
Aaron was embraced by Nashville when he made
George Jones’ "The
Grand Tour" the title song to his second A&M album. "I
grew up going to the movies watching Roy Rogers and Gene Autry,"
admits Aaron. I was a big Hank Williams fan, and later on I loved Patsy
Cline. I was a cowboy. I used to yodel and everything."

There’s also a tip of the hat to an old favorite of
Aaron’s, Bill Withers. In the early Seventies, when Bill Withers had his
biggest hits, Aaron was at a low point in his career. He’d been making
records since the early sixties, and had a couple of hits including
"Over You" and of course, "Tell It Like It Is." But
like virtually every other great New Orleans musician of the time, he
wasn’t the one making money off his success. Instead, he had to work on
the docks, in the steel mills, wherever else he could get a job that
paid the bills.

But he still sang when he had the chance – and in
the small clubs where he appeared, he would perform Withers’ classic
hits "Ain’t No Sunshine" and "Use Me."

This is a man who used prayers to St. Jude – the
patron saint of lost causes – to get him through the years when it
seemed as if his vocal gifts might not be enough to rescue him from the
dead-end life of many of his friends. Faith sustained Aaron when his
musical and personal fortunes were at their lowest, and it sustained him
after he rejoined his three brothers on the infectious "Wild Tchoupitoulas" album in 1976.

It would be thirteen more years, several acclaimed but
unsuccessful albums as the
Neville Brothers, and countless prayers before the breakthrough: first the
Neville Brothers masterful 1989 album "Yellow
Moon," then Aaron’s four duets with longtime fan
Linda Ronstadt on her double platinum "Cry
Like a Rainstorm, Howl Like The Wind," then his first solo
album on A&M records, "Warm
Your Heart."

Two albums, four Grammy Awards and a couple Rolling
Stone magazine critics’ poll victories later, Aaron remembers what it
took to get him here – and so he ends each of his albums with some
sort of hymn.

With every new album, Aaron Neville carries on
the legacy of the greats who influenced him, and sings for the friends
and relatives who didn’t make it through the obstacles and the family
that has stood behind him. The open, generous heart, at the core of his
music is tattooed with the names, emblems, and dreams of those who came
before, those who didn’t make it this far, those who needed his music in
the past and will need it in the future.

"They’ve been with me almost all my life, since I
was a teenager," he says of his visible tattoos, the ones that
adorn his face, his arms, his body. "And they’ll be there
forever." So will his music.

Hits include: