During the 1970s, Clark frequently guest-hosted for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show and enjoyed a 30-million viewership for Hee Haw. Clark was highly regarded and renowned as a guitarist, banjo player, and fiddler. He was skilled in the traditions of many genres, including classical guitar, country music, Latin music, bluegrass, and pop. He had hit songs as a pop vocalist (e.g., "Yesterday, When I Was Young" and "Thank God and Greyhound"), and his instrumental skill had an enormous effect on generations of bluegrass and country musicians. He became a member of the Grand Ole Opry in 1987, and, in 2009, was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He published his autobiography, My Life in Spite of Myself, in 1994.\n', '

Clark was born April 15, 1933, in Meherrin, Virginia. He was one of five children born to Hester Linwood Clark and Lillian Clark (Oliver). His father was a tobacco farmer. He spent his childhood in Meherrin and New York City, his father having moved the family to take jobs during the Great Depression. When Clark was 11 years old, his family moved to a home on 1st Street SE in the Washington Highlands neighborhood of Washington, D.C., after his father found work at the Washington Navy Yard. Clark\'s father was a semi-professional musician who played banjo, fiddle, and guitar, and his mother played piano. The first musical instrument Clark ever played was a four-string cigar box with a ukelele neck attached to it, which he picked up in elementary school. Hester Clark taught his son to play guitar when Roy was 14 years old, and soon Clark was playing banjo, guitar, and mandolin.[a] "Guitar was my real love, though," Clark later said. "I never copied anyone, but I was certainly influenced by them; especially by George Barnes. I just loved his swing style and tone." Clark also found inspiration in other local D.C. musicians. "One of the things that influenced me growing up around Washington, D.C., in the \'50s was that it had an awful lot of good musicians. And I used to go in and just steal them blind. I stole all their licks. It wasn\'t until years later that I found out that a lot of them used to cringe when I\'d come in and say, \'Oh, no! Here comes that kid again.\'" As for his banjo style, Clark said in 1985, "When I started playing, you didn\'t have many choices to follow, and Earl Scruggs was both of them." Clark won the National Banjo Championship in 1947 and 1948, and briefly toured with a band when he was 15.\n', '

Clark was very shy, and turned to humor as a way of easing his timidity. Country-western music was widely derided by Clark\'s schoolmates, leaving him socially isolated. Clowning around, he felt, helped him to fit in again. Clark used humor as a musician as well, and it was not until the mid 1960s that he felt confident enough to perform in public without using humor in his act.\n', '

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