Merle Travis
Best known for
Guitar
Songwriter
Lead Vocals
Merle Travis was a guitarist, songwriter, and singer whose syncopated thumb-and-finger picking—still called “Travis picking” wherever guitarists gather—reshaped American roots music and left a direct imprint on Chet Atkins, Doc Watson, and generations after. A son of the Kentucky coal country, he was also one of country’s sharpest songwriters, author of “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon,” and a quiet catalyst of the solid-body electric guitar. He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1977.
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- Merle Robert Travis was born November 29, 1917, in Rosewood, in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky, and grew up amid the mines and string-band traditions of the region. His distinctive picking descended from local players Mose Rager and Ike Everly, who in turn had absorbed the style from Black guitarist Arnold Shultz—a lineage Travis proudly credited throughout his life.
- He turned professional in the mid-1930s, and in 1937 fiddler Clayton McMichen hired the young guitarist for the Georgia Wildcats. Travis soon joined the gospel-flavored Drifting Pioneers, who landed at powerhouse station WLW in Cincinnati, where he became a fixture on the “Boone County Jamboree” alongside Grandpa Jones and the Delmore Brothers.
- With Jones and the Delmores he formed the gospel quartet the Brown’s Ferry Four, cutting nearly four dozen sides for Cincinnati’s King Records between 1946 and 1952. An early Travis–Jones King single was issued under the pseudonym “the Sheppard Brothers” to sidestep WLW’s restrictions on outside recording.
- Signing with the young, Hollywood-based Capitol Records in 1946, he broke through as a hitmaker with a run of his own novelty-tinged compositions—“Cincinnati Lou,” “No Vacancy,” the chart-topping “Divorce Me C.O.D.,” “So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed,” and “Three Times Seven”—two of them reaching number one on the country charts in 1946 and 1947.
- In 1947 Capitol released Folk Songs of the Hills, a four-disc 78-rpm album on which Travis accompanied himself on solo guitar. Conceived as a portrait of his coal-mining home, it introduced “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon,” two songs that would outlive nearly everything else in the era’s catalog.
- “Sixteen Tons” became a cultural phenomenon when Tennessee Ernie Ford took it to number one in 1955, selling in the millions; “Dark as a Dungeon” grew into a folk standard, later recorded by Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton, and countless others during the 1960s revival.
- Around 1948 Travis sketched a design for a solid-body electric guitar and had it built by Los Angeles craftsman Paul Bigsby—a single-cutaway instrument with all six tuners on one side. It is widely cited as an influence on Leo Fender’s epochal Broadcaster/Telecaster, and the original now resides in the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.
- He was a mainstay of West Coast country broadcasting, appearing on the “Hollywood Barn Dance” and, through the 1950s, the televised “Town Hall Party.” In 1953 he stepped onto the big screen in the Best Picture winner From Here to Eternity, playing and singing “Re-Enlistment Blues.”
- His instrumental artistry was showcased on albums such as The Merle Travis Guitar (1956) and Walkin’ the Strings (1960), records later awarded five-star ratings and prized by guitarists as touchstones of the fingerstyle tradition.
- The folk and country-rock revivals brought fresh attention: in 1962 he guested with Flatt and Scruggs at Carnegie Hall, and in 1972 he was among the elder statesmen featured on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s landmark Will the Circle Be Unbroken.
- He was inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970. In 1974 his duet album with Chet Atkins, The Atkins–Travis Traveling Show, won the Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance. Travis’s influence ran so deep that Atkins named his daughter Merle in his honor, and Doc Watson named his son Merle after him as well.
- Battling long stretches of alcohol and drug trouble and married several times, Travis nonetheless remained one of the most admired musicians of his generation. In the mid-1960s he relocated to Nashville, joined the Grand Ole Opry, and formed a lasting friendship with Johnny Cash.
- He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1977, honored for both his songwriting and his revolutionary guitar style.
- Travis died of a heart attack on October 20, 1983, at his home in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. His ashes were scattered at a memorial erected in his honor near Drakesboro, in the Muhlenberg County hills that shaped his music.
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Merle TravisPlayed on recordings with Merle Travis
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Flatt & ScruggsPlayed on recording with Flatt & Scruggs
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Merle Travis and Grandpa JonesPlayed on recording with Merle Travis and Grandpa Jones
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The Nitty Gritty Dirt BandPlayed on recording with The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
