Wesley Tuttle, a singer and recording artist who helped popularize country and western music in Southern California in the 1940s and ’50s on such television programs as “Town Hall Party,” died Monday. He was 85.
Mr. Tuttle died of heart failure Monday in a nursing home in Los Angeles.
Known for his versatility, which ranged from a hard hillbilly sound to smooth western vocals, Mr. Tuttle signed with Capitol Records in 1944.
In 1945, his “With Tears in My Eyes” spent four weeks at the top of Billboard’s country chart. He also had other hits in 1945 and ’46, with “Detour,” “I Wish I Had Never Met Sunshine” and “Tho’ I Tried.”
He returned to the Top 20 list in 1954 with “Never,” which he sang as a duet with his wife, Marilyn, a former member of the western backup group the Sunshine Girls.
During the 1940s, he sang in nearly a dozen B-westerns starring Tex Ritter, Johnny Mack Brown, Russell Hayden, Jimmy Wakely and others.
Mr. Tuttle also had the distinction of being one of the singers who did the yodeling for the dwarfs in Walt Disney’s 1937 animation classic “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”
