Roy Acuff

Roy Claxton Acuff was born on 15 September 1903 in Maynardville, Union County, Tennessee, the third of five children of Ida Florence (Carr) and Neill Acuff. His father farmed, served as the town’s postmaster and pastor of its Baptist church, and played the fiddle; his mother played the piano. Roy absorbed folk ballads and fiddle tunes from neighbors and kin, hymns from traveling singing-school teachers and the records of early country artists. In 1919 the family moved to Fountain City, a suburb of Knoxville, where he lettered in football, basketball and baseball at Central High School. After graduating in 1925 he turned down a scholarship to Carson-Newman College, worked odd jobs, including railroad “call boy,” and played semiprofessional baseball. A tryout for the minor-league Knoxville Smokies in 1929 ended when the after-effects of a sunstroke caused him to collapse, and he was sidelined for most of 1930. While he recovered he practiced on his father’s fiddle, learning from the records of Fiddlin’ John Carson and Gid Tanner that his father gave him.

In 1932 he joined Doc Hower’s medicine show for a tour of the Tennessee and Virginia mountains, selling Mocatan Tonic. With no microphones on the show he learned to sing loud enough to carry over a crowd, and from the banjo player Clarence Ashley, who worked in the same troupe, he learned “The House of the Rising Sun” and “Greenback Dollar.” By 1934 he was playing in Knoxville with the guitarist Jess Easterday and the Hawaiian guitarist Clell Summey as the Tennessee Crackerjacks, on WROL and on WNOX’s Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round, and back at WROL in 1935 an announcer named the band the Crazy Tennesseans. His singing of “The Great Speckled Bird” became so popular that W. R. Calaway of the American Record Corporation brought the band to Chicago, where it recorded at the Furniture Mart Building from 20 to 23 October 1936, with Acuff singing, Easterday on guitar, Summey on Dobro, Red Jones on bass and Sam Hatcher on harmonica. “The Great Speckled Bird” was cut on the first day and “Wabash Cannonball” on the second, though Acuff did not sing the lead on that first “Wabash.” To fill out a twenty-side commitment the band also cut two ribald songs, issued under the name the Bang Boys. The records came out on ARC’s budget labels, among them Vocalion and Conqueror; after a further session in Birmingham, Alabama, in March 1937, the band and ARC parted over a contract dispute.

The Opry’s George D. Hay had turned Acuff down several times before the promoter J. L. Frank took up his cause. A guest spot in 1937 led nowhere, but on 5 February 1938 his “Great Speckled Bird” brought in sacks of fan mail, and two weeks later he was offered a regular place on the show. WSM’s Harry Stone wanted a new band name, since “Crazy Tennesseans” might be heard as a slight on the state and confused with the advertiser Crazy Water Crystals, and Frank suggested the Smoky Mountain Boys. Harry and David Stone put Acuff at the center of the Opry’s budding star system and pushed “Wabash Cannon Ball” as his trademark song. When his band quit early in 1939, he hired Pete Kirby, known on stage as Brother Oswald, Lonnie Wilson and Jake Tindell, and later that year the banjo player and singer Rachel Veach. Acuff’s strong lead singing over Kirby’s Dobro and high harmony gave the band its sound. From October 1939 Acuff headlined the Prince Albert Show, the Opry’s NBC network segment, which made him a national star, and in the spring of 1940 he and the band went to Hollywood to appear with Hay and Uncle Dave Macon in the film Grand Ole Opry, the first of several pictures that included O, My Darling Clementine (1943), Night Train to Memphis (1946) and Home in San Antone (1949).

His records for Columbia’s labels in these years became his best known. Sessions in Saginaw, Texas, on 11 and 12 April 1940, with Wilson, Oswald, Veach and Easterday, produced “Come Back Little Pal,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “The Precious Jewel,” and a session at radio station KNX in Hollywood on 28 May 1942 produced “Wreck on the Highway,” his reworking of Dorsey Dixon’s “I Didn’t Hear Nobody Pray,” along with “Fireball Mail” and “Night Train to Memphis.” Fast-selling songbooks, hits issued on Columbia’s OKeh label, growing crowds on the road and the films raised his income to about $200,000 in 1942.

The songbooks also led to his most lasting business. Acuff-Rose, founded with Fred Rose and incorporated on 13 October 1942, began with $25,000 of Acuff’s money, which was never touched, and drew on Rose’s skill as a songwriter, editor and talent scout. The firm signed Hank Williams in September 1946, had its first major pop hit with Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz” in 1950, and went on to publish songs by Pee Wee King, Don Gibson, Felice and Boudleaux Bryant, the Everly Brothers and Roy Orbison. In 1953 Acuff and Fred and Wesley Rose founded Hickory Records, and in 1959 Acuff and Wesley Rose formed the Acuff-Rose Artists Corporation, a booking agency.

In the late 1940s the honky-tonk of Ernest Tubb and the smoother country of Eddy Arnold began to eclipse Acuff’s older sound, though his music stayed popular. In April 1946 he left the Opry and the Prince Albert Show after a dispute with the management, toured the West and made films; with less national exposure, demand for his appearances fell off, and he came back to host the Opry’s Royal Crown Cola segment. In Hollywood on 28 January 1947 he recorded the version of “Wabash Cannon Ball” on which he sings the lead, at the same session as “(Our Own) Jole Blon,” which reached number four on the country chart. “Waltz of the Wind” went to number eight in 1948, and “Tennessee Waltz,” recorded at Castle Studio in Nashville on 15 January 1949, to number twelve. In 1948 he was the Republican nominee for governor of Tennessee; he drew large crowds but lost to Gordon Browning, who took 67 percent of the vote. That year he also opened a resort at Dunbar Cave, near Clarksville, where he performed regularly, and in 1949 he took an Opry troupe to U.S. military bases in Europe, the first of many tours abroad that later took him to Alaska, Korea, Japan, the Caribbean, Australia and the Mediterranean.

Through the 1950s he recorded for Capitol, Decca and MGM, and from 1957 for Hickory, where “Once More” reached number eight in 1958. His records sold a steady but modest 25,000 or so a year, and when road receipts also fell in the late 1950s and early 1960s he briefly added a snare drum and electric guitar to the band before going back to an all-acoustic sound. In 1963 Hickory issued Roy Acuff Sings American Folk Songs, with “Shut Up in the Mines at Coal Creek” and “Little Rosewood Casket,” and Hand Clapping Gospel Songs. After a car crash near Sparta, Tennessee, in 1965 that also badly injured his band member Shot Jackson, he began to speak of retiring from the road, though he kept making appearances.

The folk revival of the 1960s brought him a following on the college circuit, and in 1971 he took part in the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s sessions for Will the Circle Be Unbroken, a three-record album released in 1972 with Maybelle Carter, Merle Travis and Doc Watson among the other guests. In 1974 “Back in the Country” and “Old Time Sunshine Song,” written by the Acuff-Rose writer Eddy Raven, reached the charts. When the Opry moved from the Ryman Auditorium to the new Opry House at Opryland on 16 March 1974, he counted the opening night among the high points of his career; President Richard Nixon was the honored guest and joined him on stage. Opryland opened a Roy Acuff Theatre in 1979. He also appeared on Hee Haw and television specials, but the Opry remained his showcase: in his last years he lived in a house on the Opryland grounds and played the show each weekend. He died in Nashville on 23 November 1992 and is buried in Spring Hill Cemetery there.

• 1962: Country Music Hall of Fame, its first living member
• 1988: Golden Plate Award, American Academy of Achievement
• 1991: National Medal of Arts
• 1991: Kennedy Center Honors, the first given to a country music performer