George McCormick
George McCormick was a guitarist and singer from Smith County, Tennessee, who played on the Grand Ole Opry for forty-seven years, from 1951 until he retired in 1998. He played guitar for Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper and on the Louvin Brothers’ sessions of 1956 and 1958, was a member of Porter Wagoner’s Wagonmasters, and made records of his own for MGM.
He was born on 16 June 1933 and moved to Nashville at fourteen to play music and work at the radio station WLAC. In 1951 he began his Opry career singing and playing with Martha Carson, and his first records were made under the name George Mack with Big Jeff Bess and his Radio Playboys, for Dot in 1952. Over the years he played guitar and bass and sang lead, tenor, baritone and harmony.
Fred Rose produced his first MGM session at Castle Studio on 22 August 1953, with Chet Atkins on lead guitar, Ray Edenton, Jerry Byrd on steel, Lightnin’ Chance and Tommy Jackson, which produced “Fifty-Fifty Honky Tonkin’” and “Don’t Add an Ex to Your Name.” The same band was back in December for “The Sundown Train” and “Flutter Bug,” and on 1 July 1954 Hank Williams’s old Drifting Cowboys, Sammy Pruett, Don Helms, Cedric Rainwater and Jerry Rivers, backed him on “Gold Wedding Band.” His last MGM session, in April 1957 with Wesley Rose producing, gave him “The Blues Moved In This Morning.”
In May 1956 he was one of the two guitarists, with Paul Yandell, behind Charlie and Ira Louvin on the Capitol sessions, produced by Ken Nelson, that produced “Knoxville Girl,” “In the Pines” and “Cash on the Barrel Head,” and he was back in August 1958 for “Satan Is Real” and “The Christian Life,” singing harmony on some of the Louvins’ songs as well. Wilma Lee and Stoney Cooper’s radio shows of 1957, issued on LP in 1985, have him on rhythm guitar and vocals, on songs such as “Wildwood Flower.” He also worked on the Opry with Jim Reeves and Grandpa Jones.
He later joined the band on The Porter Wagoner Show, the syndicated television program that began in 1960, alongside Mack Magaha on fiddle and Buck Trent on banjo, and he also worked with Dolly Parton. He recorded albums of Hank Williams songs for a budget label around 1962 and for Reader’s Digest in 1963, and between 1968 and 1970 he made singles for the Stop label with Pete Drake producing, among them “Big Wind.” He died on 5 February 2018 in Cookeville, Tennessee, at the age of eighty-four.
