“Tennessee Waltz” has words by Redd Stewart and music by Pee Wee King, bandleader of the Golden West Cowboys, in which Stewart played. It was written in 1946 and copyrighted in 1948. As the two men told it, they were driving to a show when Bill Monroe’s “Kentucky Waltz” came on the radio, and they wondered why Tennessee had no waltz of its own. Stewart wrote the words on an unfolded matchbook in his truck, and King worked out the melody. The original lead sheet they made once they reached Nashville was given to the University of Tennessee in 2013.
The song is a lament. Its singer is dancing with his sweetheart to the Tennessee Waltz when he spots an old friend and introduces the two. While they waltz together, the friend steals her away, and the singer is left remembering that night and the tune the band was playing.
Cowboy Copas made the first recording, at the King studio in Cincinnati in April 1947. Pee Wee King’s band, with Stewart singing, recorded it at RCA Victor’s studio in Chicago on 2 December 1947, and their record (Victor 20-2680, with “Rootie Tootie”) was released first, on 25 January 1948. Copas’s King 696 followed on 28 February. Both made Billboard’s country top ten that year, King’s at No. 3 and Copas’s at No. 6.
Patti Page recorded it on 14 October 1950 for Mercury (5534) as the B-side of “Boogie Woogie Santa Claus,” overdubbing her own harmony part. Her “The Tennessee Waltz” spent nine weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s pop chart. In 2024 the Library of Congress added her record to the National Recording Registry. Tennessee adopted the song as an official state song in 1965.
Emmylou Harris recorded it for Cimarron (1981). IIIrd Tyme Out sang it in concert at the Mountain Arts Center in Prestonsburg, Kentucky, on 21 May 1997, for Live at the MAC (Rounder CD 0413, 1998). Russell Moore sang lead, with Steve Dilling, Ray Deaton and Wayne Benson singing harmony, and Moore on guitar, Dilling on banjo, Benson on mandolin, Mike Hartgrove on fiddle and Deaton on bass.
