Merle Shelton had a good musical lineage, as the brother of Joe and Bob Shelton (co-authors with Sid Robin of 1927's of "Just Because") and a former member of the Shelton Brothers Band in the '40s. He spent most of his career as a sideman, and all of it in the shadow of his two more famous brothers, who were featured on major radio stations such as KWKH in Shreveport, home of the Louisiana Hayride (which had the likes of Johnny Cash and Faron Young, not to mention a young Elvis Presley), while Merle Shelton made his way as a solo artist on the Saturday Night Shindig on WFAA out of Dallas, a smaller competitor to the Big D Jamboree which was, itself, a second-tier radio show next to the Hayride. He was one of the few recognizable artists of the Saturday Night Shindig who was not signed to a recording contract already, however, and that got him picked by Joe Leonard for a joint recording session with Buck Griffin in the spring of 1954, yielding two songs, "Chilena, My Dancing Girl" by Wayne Jetton (intended as the B-side, but it got more airplay) and Shelton's own "I Love You Just Because." Merle Shelton had a Western swing sound to his singing and playing, and the single made a little noise in Texas and points nearby, but neither his sides nor the Buck Griffin tunes cut at the same session ever charted. Shelton had left professional music by the end of the '50s, and has since passed away. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi