Getting started in the music industry was hard work for Johnny Horton, but at least it proved to be less disheartening than being an Alaskan fisherman. After growing up the poor son of a sharecropping family in East Texas in the 1920s and 1930s, Johnny Horton attended college off and on and eventually moved to Alaska to fish the chilly Bering Sea. His mother had taught him to play the guitar as a young boy, and while Horton was in Alaska he penned several songs and played regularly as a pastime. Horton lost interest in fishing, moved back to Texas and on a whim he entered a talent contest there, won it, and began touring around the nation entering similar radio contests. It wasn't too long before Horton was noticed by record labels, and after signing with a few under the wing of disgraced manager Fabor Robinson, Horton (who had been billing himself as "The Singing Fisherman") eventually landed a contract with Mercury Records, a label with which Horton would release several of his early albums.

The early albums were a hard sell, mostly because Elvis's pulsing hips and pouting lips were distracting folk and country fans and converting them to rock and roll. Johnny Horton worked a regular gig on the Louisiana Hayride in the early ‘50s. It was on the Hayride that he met up with Hank Williams, who would help coach Horton to the most successful peaks of his career. The start of Johnny Horton's rise to fame came when he dropped Mercury and went over to Columbia Records, which helped to make "Honky Tonk Man" a hit. Selling albums was never Horton's specialty, so he toured extensively and released a number of noteworthy singles, most of them pushing forth rockabilly, a genre that had yet to be mined for its full potential.

Johnny Horton received notoriety for several "saga songs," folksy ballads of a historical significance, the most famous of which was 1959's "The Battle of New Orleans." Horton died tragically in November of 1960, cutting short a career that had many downs and many more ups, but one that still hadn't reached an apex.