It spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard country music chart in 1955.
The song idea came to Joe Allison while watching a gangster movie starring a young John Derek.
Allison explained, "All through this picture he said, 'I want to die young and leave a good-looking corpse.'
It struck me as a good idea for a song, so I wrote 'Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young.'
I didn't write it for anybody, but when Ken Nelson heard it, he said, 'We'll do that with Faron Young.