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Mac Wiseman

Musician · 1925–2019 · Crimora, Virginia · Also a recording artist
Best known for Lead Vocals Guitar

Mac Wiseman was one of bluegrass music’s founding voices, a warm, clear tenor whose smooth phrasing earned him the enduring nickname “The Voice with a Heart.” An original member of Flatt & Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys and later a singer and guitarist in Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, he went on to a long solo career that bridged bluegrass, folk, and mainstream country, and he sat at the founding tables of two industry institutions—the Country Music Association and the International Bluegrass Music Association. His combination of traditional repertoire, popular instinct, and organizational leadership made him a rare figure who shaped the music both onstage and behind the scenes.

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  • Born Malcolm Bell Wiseman on May 23, 1925, in Crimora, Virginia, he contracted polio as an infant and spent stretches of his childhood bedridden, learning guitar and absorbing the old ballads and hymns his mother sang and kept in handwritten notebooks—a repertoire he would draw on for the rest of his life.
  • He studied briefly at the Shenandoah Conservatory of Music (then in Dayton, Virginia) and broke into professional music as a radio disc jockey at WSVA in Harrisonburg, Virginia, work that sharpened both his ear for song selection and his instincts for reaching an audience.
  • His first significant job came as upright bassist and singer with Molly O’Day’s Cumberland Mountain Folks in the mid-1940s, placing him alongside one of the most respected traditional country acts of the era.
  • In early 1948, when Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs left Bill Monroe to strike out on their own, Wiseman became an original member of their Foggy Mountain Boys, singing and playing guitar on the group’s earliest Mercury sessions.
  • By 1949 he had joined Bill Monroe’s Blue Grass Boys, recording for Columbia on sides including “Can’t You Hear Me Callin’” and “Travelin’ This Lonesome Road,” making him one of the few musicians to work at the source of the music with both of its architects.
  • He was a fixture on early bluegrass radio, appearing on WCYB’s Farm and Fun Time in Bristol—a proving ground for the first generation of the music—before launching his own band, the Country Boys, which headlined Richmond’s Old Dominion Barn Dance on WRVA beginning in 1953.
  • In 1951 he signed with Randy Wood’s Gallatin, Tennessee–based Dot Records and cut “’Tis Sweet to Be Remembered,” a signature record that established him as a solo star and remained associated with him for decades.
  • Through the 1950s his Dot catalog mixed bluegrass with pop-leaning material—among them “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” (1955), which reached the country Top Ten, along with readings of “Love Letters in the Sand” and “I Wonder How the Old Folks Are at Home”—often backed by fiddle-and-guitar arrangements distinct from the banjo-driven norm.
  • His up-tempo “Jimmy Brown the Newsboy” (1959) became one of his biggest chart records, climbing into the country Top Five and cementing his reputation as an interpreter who could carry a traditional song onto national radio.
  • Beyond performing, Wiseman ran Dot’s country A&R operation and helped manage the label’s West Coast office in the late 1950s, giving him a producer’s and executive’s view of the business at a formative moment.
  • In 1958 he was among the founders of the Country Music Association, serving as its first secretary-treasurer; he became the organization’s last surviving co-founder, a testament to how early and how deeply he was woven into Nashville’s institutional history.
  • He recorded for Capitol Records in the early 1960s, and in 1965 cut the ghost-story ballad “Bringing Mary Home,” a song pitched to him by the Country Gentlemen, which he issued on his own Wise Records label; from 1966 to 1970 he directed the WWVA Jamboree in Wheeling, West Virginia, one of the major barn-dance radio programs.
  • He kept recording prolifically across labels and generations, reuniting with Lester Flatt on well-received 1970s duet albums such as Lester ‘n’ Mac and later joining songwriter John Prine for the standards collection Standard Songs for Average People (2007).
  • Wiseman helped found the International Bluegrass Music Association in 1985 and was elected to its Hall of Honor (now the Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame) in 1993, formal recognition from the community whose founding era he had helped define.
  • The National Endowment for the Arts named him a National Heritage Fellow in 2008—the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts—and in 2014 he was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in its Veterans Era category, a rare dual honor spanning both fields.
  • He remained active into his nineties, releasing Songs From My Mother’s Hand (2014), drawn from his mother’s old song notebooks, and the autobiographical I Sang the Song (Life of the Voice with a Heart) (2017), before his death in Nashville on February 24, 2019, at age 93, closing one of the last direct links to bluegrass’s first generation.

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