“Fireball Mail” began as a song. Fred Rose, the Nashville songwriter who went into publishing with Roy Acuff in 1942, wrote it under his pen name Floyd Jenkins. Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys recorded it on 28 May 1942 at the CBS studio of radio station KNX in Hollywood, with Art Satherley producing. The same session produced “Wreck on the Highway,” and OKeh coupled the two sides on OKeh 6685. On the record Acuff sang, with Lonnie Wilson on guitar, Brother Oswald Kirby on dobro, Jess Easterday on mandolin, Rachel Veach on banjo and Velma Williams on bass. The lyric watches a steam train go past, burning coal and hugging the rails, while the engineer makes up time on the run to Dallas.
Several later recordings kept the vocal. Mac Wiseman recorded it at Castle Studio in Nashville in September 1954 with twin fiddles, Tommy Jackson and Dale Potter, and in 1961 Dot used it as the title song of Mac Wiseman Sings Fireball Mail. Bill Monroe sang it at a Nashville session on 26 March 1969, with Kenny Baker and Red Hayes on fiddles, and Decca released it that October on the flip side of “With Body and Soul.” Jim & Jesse included it on their 1969 Epic album We Like Trains, and the Osborne Brothers cut it in 1972 with Bobby Osborne singing lead.
On 11 August 1960 at Bradley’s studio in Nashville, Flatt & Scruggs recorded it without a vocal as a banjo feature for Earl Scruggs, with Lester Flatt on guitar, Curly Seckler on mandolin, Buck Graves on dobro and Jake Tullock on bass. The track appeared in February 1961 on Foggy Mountain Banjo, a Columbia LP of banjo instrumentals, with the writer credit given as F. Rose. Bill Emerson also recorded it as a banjo piece in the early 1960s, on budget LPs that gave it other titles: “Horseshoe Blues” on Mount Vernon and “Rainbow Blues” on Coronet. Dobro players have recorded it too, among them Josh Graves on his 1980 Vetco album Playing It Simple.
