Jimmie Driftwood
Musician · 1907–1998 · Mountain View, Arkansas
Best known for
Songwriter
Jimmy Driftwood was an Ozark schoolteacher and folklorist whose 1936 classroom song “The Battle of New Orleans” — written to engage students who weren’t reading their history textbooks — became a 1959 Johnny Horton No. 1 country and pop hit and won that year’s Grammy for Song of the Year. He wrote some six thousand songs across his career and helped establish Mountain View, Arkansas, as a folk-music tourist destination through the Rackensack Folklore Society.
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- Born James Corbett Morris on June 20, 1907, in the West Richwoods settlement near Mountain View, Stone County, Arkansas.
- Took the stage name Driftwood from a family joke his grandfather had played on his grandmother about a bundle of sticks.
- Worked as a schoolteacher in Arkansas; married former student Cleda Johnson in 1936.
- Wrote “The Battle of New Orleans” in 1936 to engage students in his American-history class.
- Signed his first record deal in 1957 after a Nashville publisher heard him.
- Johnny Horton’s 1959 recording of “The Battle of New Orleans” spent ten weeks at No. 1 country and six weeks at No. 1 pop, and won the 1959 Grammy for Song of the Year.
- Established the Rackensack Folklore Society in Mountain View to preserve and present local Ozark string-band music; the society’s public concerts grew into the Ozark Folk Center.
- Wrote more than 6,000 country and folk songs across his life, of which roughly 300 have been recorded by other artists.
- Died in Mountain View, Arkansas on July 12, 1998.
