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What To Know
- Clint Eastwood, known primarily for his acting and directing, pursued a parallel music career rooted in his early love of jazz and piano, releasing his first album in the early 1960s though it failed to achieve commercial success.
- Despite limited chart impact as a solo artist, Eastwood found musical recognition with notable performances in films like Paint Your Wagon and achieved a No. 1 country hit in 1980 with “Bar Room Buddies,” a duet with Merle Haggard.
- Later in his career, Eastwood shifted focus to composing and scoring music for his own films, earning accolades such as an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music in 2007.
For most of us, Clint Eastwood is an Oscar-winning director and actor, best known for the Western films that made him a household name. But what many fans may not even realize is that he tried his hand at a music career at one point in his life. Eastwood grew up surrounded by music, trained early as a pianist, and was particularly drawn to jazz. In fact, he planned a life in music before he became an actor.
How did Clint Eastwood begin his music career?
After graduating from high school, Eastwood seriously considered studying music theory. By the late ’50s, while building his acting career at Universal, he was also training vocally at the studio’s talent school. When Rawhide became a hit in 1959, and Eastwood broke out as Rowdy Yates, recording music seemed like a natural next step.
That led to his first album, Rawhide’s Clint Eastwood Sings Cowboy Favorites, released on the Cameo label in the early ’60s. The album featured classic Western and American standards like “San Antonio Rose” and “Don’t Fence Me In.” The record failed to chart, and despite promotional appearances and touring efforts, it never gained commercial traction. In 1963, producer Kal Mann bluntly told him he would never make it big as a singer.
Eastwood continued anyway. During breaks from filming Rawhide, he toured rodeos, state fairs, and festivals, sometimes alongside castmate Paul Brinegar and singer Sheb Wooley. Although it still didn’t bring him fame for his music, he released several singles in the early ’60s, including “Unknown Girl of My Dreams.”
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For years, Eastwood largely kept singing separately from his films, until Paint Your Wagon in 1969 forced the two together. Cast alongside Lee Marvin in the musical western, Eastwood sang “I Talk to the Trees,” a performance that has since become one of the film’s most remembered scenes. In the next decade, he recorded his own version of “Burning Bridges” for Kelly’s Heroes, even as the Mike Curb Congregation’s version became the hit.
Then, unexpectedly, Eastwood reached the height of his chart success in 1980 with “Bar Room Buddies,” a duet with Merle Haggard that went to No. 1 on the country charts in both the U.S. and Canada. That same year, he recorded “Beers to You” with Ray Charles, tied to the success of Any Which Way You Can, though it did not match the chart performance of his earlier duet.
By the early ’80s, Eastwood’s relationship with music shifted again. In Honkytonk Man, he played a traveling country singer suffering from tuberculosis. While the film received generally positive reviews, its songs were less warmly received, including “No Sweeter Cheater Than You,” which earned a Razzie nomination. Around this time, Eastwood increasingly focused on composing rather than performing, particularly as he began scoring his own films.
Over the decades that followed, Eastwood wrote or co-wrote scores for films including Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Changeling and Hereafter, and co-wrote the end-credits song for Gran Torino. His passion for jazz never faded, and in 1997, he released Eastwood After Hours: Live at Carnegie Hall, documenting a jazz concert he hosted. In 2007, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Music degree from Berklee College of Music.