Vernon Dalhart
Best known for
Lead Vocals
Vernon Dalhart was the trained tenor who, in 1924, cut what became country music’s first million-selling record and in doing so proved to the record industry that rural “hillbilly” songs could sell in enormous numbers. Born Marion Try Slaughter, he was among the most prolific recording artists of the acoustic era, and his breakthrough helped launch commercial country music as a genre.
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- Born Marion Try Slaughter on April 6, 1883, on a ranch near Jefferson, in East Texas. His stage name combined the names of two Texas towns, Vernon and Dalhart, near which he had worked cattle as a teenager in the 1890s.
- After his family moved to Dallas, he studied voice at the Dallas Conservatory of Music, then relocated to New York around 1910 to pursue an operatic career, taking tenor roles in stage productions including H.M.S. Pinafore and Madama Butterfly.
- He broke into records in the late 1910s, cutting sides for Edison and Columbia; his Edison recording career followed an audition arranged with Thomas Edison’s company. Over roughly 1916–1924 he made more than 400 recordings of light classical and popular dance-band material.
- In 1924 he recorded “The Wreck of the Old 97” backed with “The Prisoner’s Song” for the Victor Talking Machine Company. Released in November 1924, the disc became country music’s first million-selling record and redirected his career toward rural and sentimental material.
- The session pairing was backed by guitarist Carson Robison, Dalhart’s frequent collaborator, with Lou Raderman on viola. Dalhart said he learned “The Prisoner’s Song” from his cousin Guy Massey, under whose name he copyrighted it.
- He followed with other hits of the mid-1920s such as “The Runaway Train” (1925), and recorded a staggering volume of material—thousands of sides issued under scores of pseudonyms across many labels, making him a one-man recording industry of the 1920s.
- In the late 1920s he worked as the Vernon Dalhart Trio alongside Carson Robison and singer-instrumentalist Adelyne Hood.
- His popularity faded in the 1930s as musical tastes changed; his final recording session came in 1939, after which he never recorded again. He later settled in Bridgeport, Connecticut, working outside music, including as a night clerk at a hotel.
- He died of a coronary occlusion on September 14, 1948, in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and was buried at Mountain Grove Cemetery there.
- Recognition came posthumously: he was elected to the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1970 and to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1981.
