ON HIS 45TH BIRTHDAY, THE MAN WHO SANG “BORROWED ANGEL” CLOSED THE DOOR OF HIS TENNESSEE HOME AND NEVER WALKED BACK OUT……. Mel Street did not sound like a man pretending to hurt. He came out of Grundy, Virginia, started singing young, worked real jobs, and spent years nowhere near the clean part of Nashville. Before the records, he had been a radio tower electrician. Later, he ran an auto body shop in West Virginia. Then the voice started finding its way out……. By the late 1960s, Mel was hosting a television show in Bluefield. In 1969, he recorded “Borrowed Angel” for a small regional label. It did not arrive with a big machine behind it. It had to travel the hard way — station by station, listener by listener, until a larger label picked it up. In 1972, the song broke through. Then came more hits: “Lovin’ on Back Streets,” “I Met a Friend of Yours Today,” “Smokey Mountain Memories.” The kind of records that made cheating sound less like scandal and more like a man losing the fight inside his own chest……. But offstage, the fight was getting worse. Depression. Alcohol. Pressure. A career that was moving, but not saving him. On October 21, 1978, his birthday, Mel Street died at his home in Hendersonville, Tennessee. George Jones sang at his funeral. The singers who knew heartbreak for a living came to bury one of the men who had been singing it too close to the bone.
admin Introduction MEL STREET SANG “BORROWED ANGEL” LIKE HEARTBREAK WAS ALREADY INSIDE HIM — THEN HE DIED ON HIS 45TH BIRTHDAY. Some country singers perform pain. Mel Street sounded like he…