Born Donald Eugene Gibson in Shelby, North Carolina, Gibson got his start with a local band called the Sons of the Soil on Shelby station WOHS. In 1949, he made his first recording with them: a Mercury side called “Automatic Mama.” By 1952 he had gotten a job at Knoxville’s WNOX and was recording for Columbia. His recordings for this label were not commercially successful, but he was discovering he had a knack for songwriting. 

By 1955, Gibson had written his first masterpiece, “Sweet Dreams,” later to a hit for Gibson, Faron Young, and Patsy Cline. It won him a songwriter’s contract with Acuff-Rose Publications and a recording deal with MGM. Then, in 1957, while living in a trailer park north of Knoxville, he wrote his other two career-defining songs on the same day: “Oh Lonesome Me” and “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” (The latter would eventually be recorded more than 700 times by singers in many music genres and sell more than thirty million records worldwide.)

In 1957, Gibson traveled back to Nashville to record “Oh Lonesome Me” for RCA. He and producer Chet Atkins decided to abandon the traditional steel guitar and fiddle and use a new sound featuring only guitars, a piano, a drummer, upright bass, and background singers. It became one of the first examples of what would be called the Nashville Sound and won Gibson a #1 hit; it also set the pattern for a long series of other RCA hits, including “Blue Blue Day” (1958), “Who Cares” (1959), “Sea of Heartbreak” (1961), and “Rings of Gold” (1969). Not only have Don’s songs been recorded by such stars as Elvis, Neil Young, Ronnie Milsap, Emmylou Harris and countless others, but “I Can’t Stop Loving You” has today been recorded more than 700 times and has been played on the radio over four million times. In all, Don continued to receive royalties throughout his life for over 150 of his compositions.