Ed Bruce, the country singer-songwriter behind the worldwide hit “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” died on Friday aged 81.
His publicist announced his death, in Tennessee, from natural causes.
William Edwin Bruce Jnr was born on December 29, 1939, in Keiser, Arkansas, and raised in nearby Memphis, Tennessee.
A pioneer of outlaw country music, Bruce wrote hits for himself and popular songs for other musicians in the 1960s and early ‘70s, but his star rose with “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys,” which he wrote with his then wife, Patsy.
Bruce’s version of the song reached the Top 20 on the country chart, and a cover by Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings proved a massive, chart-topping hit in the winter of 1978.
