Live Fast, Love Hard, Die Young was Faron Young's first number one song and his fifth consecutive top ten hit. It spent three weeks at the top of the Billboard country music charts in 1955. "This was a tune I detested," Faron said. "Ken Nelson made me record this song. I put it out and it was a big, big hit. Then I got to liking it."
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.'"
"Live Fast, Love Hard: The Faron Young Story" is the 2007 biography written by Diane Diekman and published by the University of Illinois Press.
