The Delmore Brothers

They were born in Elkmont, in Limestone County, the sons of tenant farmers: Alton on 25 December 1908 and Rabon on 3 December 1916. They grew up with shape-note songbooks and singing schools. Their mother wrote gospel songs, and some of Alton’s first songs were written with her. As a teenager Alton learned guitar, fiddle and mandolin, and after seeing a tenor guitar in a vaudeville show he got one for Rabon, who until then had played fiddle and standard guitar. From the mid-1920s the brothers sang as a duo at local events and fiddling contests, and they built their soft style around the new microphones and radio.

Columbia recorded them in Atlanta on 28 October 1931: “Got the Kansas City Blues” and “Alabama Lullaby,” their only Columbia record, which sold about five hundred copies. In the spring of 1933 WSM’s Harry Stone gave them an audition for the Grand Ole Opry, and they were soon among its most popular acts; by 1936 the Opry reported that they were the most popular act on the show. Their first Bluebird sessions, in Chicago on 6 and 7 December 1933, produced “Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar,” “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” “I’ve Got the Big River Blues” and “Blue Railroad Train.” They toured and recorded with Uncle Dave Macon, and in 1936 they teamed with the fiddler Arthur Smith. At the Hotel Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina, on 17 February 1936 they recorded “The Nashville Blues” and, as the Arthur Smith Trio, “There’s More Pretty Girls Than One”; “Beautiful Brown Eyes” followed at the same hotel in 1937.

Disagreements with the Opry’s management over bookings and touring led them to leave the show in the late 1930s. Their last Bluebird session took place in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on 5 February 1939, and they then worked radio in Raleigh, North Carolina, and at WAPI in Birmingham, where they stayed until 1942. Decca recorded them in New York on 11 September 1940, a session that produced “Old Mountain Dew,” “In the Blue Hills of Virginia” and “When It’s Time for the Whippoorwill to Sing,” and again on 16 July 1941. During the Second World War Alton served in the Navy and Rabon worked at the Wright Aircraft plant near Cincinnati.

After the war they settled in Cincinnati, on WLW, and by 1945 they were recording for Syd Nathan’s King label. In 1943 Alton had organized a gospel quartet, the Brown’s Ferry Four, with Merle Travis and Grandpa Jones, and it recorded for King as well. With King the brothers added blues and boogie to their songs, along with electric guitar and the harmonica of Wayne Raney. “Hillbilly Boogie” was cut in Hollywood in January 1946, with Travis and Louis Innis on guitars, and “Freight Train Boogie” at the Herzog studio in Cincinnati on 2 October 1946, with Raney, Roy Lanham and Jethro Burns. “Blues Stay Away from Me” was recorded at King’s Cincinnati studio on 6 May 1949, with Zeke Turner on guitar and Raney and Lonnie Glosson on harmonicas. It was later recorded by the Louvin Brothers, the Everly Brothers, Johnny Burnette’s Rock and Roll Trio, Gene Vincent and Doc Watson, among others; Watson had listened to the Delmores as a boy and played their songs in his early duets with his brother Linney.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s the brothers kept moving: to Memphis, Chattanooga, Jackson, Mississippi, Athens, Alabama, Covington, Kentucky, Fort Smith, Arkansas, Del Rio, Texas, and finally Houston, where the act broke up. Their last King sessions were in Cincinnati in 1952, and Rabon died on 4 December 1952, the day after his thirty-sixth birthday. Alton went on recording for independent labels for a time, then settled in Huntsville, Alabama, where he taught guitar and turned to writing prose. He died on 8 June 1964. He left some one thousand songs and most of an autobiography, Truth Is Stranger than Publicity, which the Country Music Foundation published after his death.

• 1971: Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame
• 1989: Alabama Music Hall of Fame
• 2001: Country Music Hall of Fame
• 2007: Grammy Hall of Fame, “Blues Stay Away from Me” (King, 1949)