Alton Delmore

He was born on 25 December 1908 in Elkmont, Limestone County, just south of the Tennessee line, the eighth child of Charlie and Mary Williams Delmore, tenant farmers. An aunt and uncle, Molly and Will Williams, taught him to read and play music, and he grew up in the shape-note gospel tradition of songbooks and singing schools; his mother wrote gospel songs, and some of his first efforts were written with her. As a teenager he learned guitar, fiddle and mandolin. Having seen a four-string tenor guitar in a vaudeville show, he found one for Rabon, eight years his junior, and the combination of his flat-top guitar and Rabon’s tenor guitar under soft, close harmony became the brothers’ sound. From the mid-1920s they sang at local events and fiddling contests, and by 1930 Alton was writing to radio stations and record companies asking for auditions.

Columbia recorded them in Atlanta on 28 October 1931, “Got the Kansas City Blues” and “Alabama Lullaby,” a record that sold about five hundred copies. In the spring of 1933 Alton’s request for an audition at WSM was answered by Harry Stone, and the brothers joined the Grand Ole Opry; that year they began recording for Victor’s Bluebird label, and Alton turned to writing new songs. Their first Bluebird sessions, in Chicago on 6 and 7 December 1933, produced “Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar,” credited to Alton alone, and “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” credited to both brothers, and by 1936 the Opry reported that they were its most popular act. They toured and recorded with Uncle Dave Macon and, from 1936, with the fiddler Arthur Smith, cutting “Beautiful Brown Eyes” with him at the Hotel Charlotte in Charlotte, North Carolina, in August 1937. Although the Delmores usually switched harmony parts, Alton generally sang the lead.

Disputes with the Opry’s management over touring led them to leave WSM in 1938, and after a run of radio jobs from Raleigh to WAPI in Birmingham, where they stayed until 1942, they recorded for Decca, starting in New York on 11 September 1940 with a session that included “Old Mountain Dew.” By 1943 they had landed at WLW in Cincinnati, where Alton organized a gospel quartet, the Brown’s Ferry Four, with Merle Travis and Grandpa Jones. During the Second World War he served in the Navy, and afterwards the brothers, back in Cincinnati, recorded for Syd Nathan’s King label, adding electric guitar, bass and Wayne Raney’s harmonica; the Brown’s Ferry Four recorded gospel sides for King as well. “Hillbilly Boogie” was cut in Hollywood in January 1946 with Travis on guitar, “Freight Train Boogie” in Cincinnati on 2 October 1946, and “Blues Stay Away from Me,” credited to the brothers with Raney and Henry Glover, at King’s studio on 6 May 1949. More than a hundred artists have recorded that song, from the Louvin Brothers and Gene Vincent to the Band and k. d. lang.

In the late 1940s the brothers moved from city to city, from Memphis and Chattanooga to Del Rio, Texas, and finally Houston, where they broke up the act; Alton wanted to write songs full time. Their last King session together was in 1952, and on 29 August that year Alton recorded four more sides for King with Red Turner and Raney but without his brother. Rabon died on 4 December 1952. Alton went on recording for independent labels, among them a 1959 single for Linco, “Good Times in Memphis” and “Thunder Across the Border,” and then left music. He settled in Huntsville, Alabama, where he worked for the post office, taught guitar and wrote short stories and an autobiography, Truth Is Stranger than Publicity, which he completed with his son Lionel. He died on 8 June 1964, aged 55. King issued two volumes of Delmore Brothers recordings, In Memory, that August and September, and the Country Music Foundation published his autobiography in 1977.

• 1971: Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame (the Delmore Brothers)
• 1989: Alabama Music Hall of Fame
• 2001: Country Music Hall of Fame
• 2007: Grammy Hall of Fame, “Blues Stay Away from Me”
• 2014: IBMA Distinguished Achievement Award (the Delmore Brothers)