He was an early editor of Rolling Stone magazine and a passionate advocate for country music.

Chet Flippo launched his music journalism career during Rolling Stone's formative years, and helped bring country music to the rock-and-roll mainstream.

"Chet was a fierce advocate for country music long before country was cool," said CMT president Brian Philips, characterizing Flippo's reporting for Rolling Stone in the 1970s as "the kind of no-holds-barred music journalism that doesn't exist anymore, anywhere."

Flippo, who most recently served as editorial director at CMT and CMT.com, died Wednesday at a Nashville hospital after a long illness. He was 69.

Flippo was born October 21, 1943, in Fort Worth, Texas, and began his career writing for Rolling Stone when he still working on a master's degree in journalism at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1974, when Rolling Stone was still based in San Francisco, Flippo became its New York bureau chief. He was named senior editor when the magazine permanently moved operations to New York in 1977.

"Chet was there virtually from the beginning and remained throughout Rolling Stone's golden years," said Jann Wenner, the magazine's founding editor and publisher who remains head of its parent company, Wenner Media. "Chet was very much inside the Rolling Stone family at that time, and was well-loved by several writers and editors."

One of those was Paul Scanlon, who was Flippo's managing editor. Scanlon said that while Flippo was a versatile music writer, he was most passionate about country music's convergence with rock. "He was the only person paying attention to county at first," said Scanlon. "His first cover story was on (Texas country-rocker) Doug Sahm, and in 1973, he wrote a story called Country Music: The Rock and Roll Influence.'"

Groundbreaking events

Scanlon recalled when Flippo sat in on the recording sessions for one of country and rock's most groundbreaking events, The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's influential 1972 album Will The Circle Be Unbroken. It was a jam session that would have been unheard of only a few years earlier: long-haired rock musicians collaborating with such country royalty as Roy Acuff, Maybelle Carter, Jimmy Martin, Merle Travis, Earl Scruggs and others. "That was one of the most fired-up times I ever saw Chet," said Scanlon. "He and (his wife) Martha even got to sing on the chorus to Will the Circle Be Unbroken."

In 1976, Flippo penned the liner notes for another groundbreaking album that fused rock with country, kicking off the so-called outlaw country movement — Waylon Jennings and Willie Nelson's "Wanted! The Outlaws." The record became the first country album to sell a million copies.

"I had many great conversations with that pleasant fellow," said Ed King, the Nashville-based former Lynyrd Skynyrd guitarist who crafted the distinctive riffs for that band's classic song, Sweet Home Alabama.

After leaving Rolling Stone in 1980, Flippo wrote numerous books on music, beginning with Your Cheatin' Heart: A Biography of Hank Williams in 1981. An anthology of his writing, Everybody Was Kung-Fu Dancing: Chronicles of the Lionized and the Notorious, was published by St. Martin's Press a decade later. Flippo wrote for other publications in his career, including The New York Times and Texas Monthly, and penned scripts for VH1 and CMT.

Flippo moved to Tennessee in 1991, serving as a journalism lecturer at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville for three years before relocating to Nashville, where he worked for Billboard from 1994 until 2000. He joined CMT the following year and has made his mark in Music City among industry leaders and musicians alike.

Flippo's wife, Martha, died in December, and by all accounts, he never recovered from the loss. "If you knew Chet and you knew how much he loved Martha, it does not seem quite so surprising that he has gone to join her so soon," said Philips.

Survivors include sister Shirley Smith of Brandon, Fla., and brothers Bill Flippo of Saginaw, Texas, and Ernest Flippo of Abbington, Mass.