From:   "Dik de Heer"  
Date:  Sun Sep 15, 2002  2:03 am
Subject:  Born To Be With You : Roy Acuff
 
ROY ACUFF (By Alain Dormoy)

Born Roy Claxton Acuff, 15 September 1903, Maynardsville, Tennessee
Died 23 November 1992, Nashville, Tennessee.

The first country music artist to become famous after the death of
Jimmie Rodgers, Acuff was a major influence on younger singers like
Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell and George Jones. He was a bridge
between the rural old time music era and the modern era of singers
backed by amplified bands. He became such an institution during WW II
that his name often equalled those of Frank Sinatra and Benny Goodman
in popularity polls among service men. The legend has it Japanese
soldiers in the Pacific would try to psych American soldiers out by
yelling: "To hell with Roosevelt! To hell with Roy Acuff!"

Like Jimmie Rodgers, he worked on a medicine show, in which he
developed his skills as a fiddler and learned a lot about show
business in general, gimmicks, tricks and the way to work an audience.
These skills led him to get a job on Knoxville's WROL with a band
named "The Tennessee Crackerjacks", later to become "The Crazy
Tennesseans". They mostly played poorly paid local gigs over East
Tennessee until their career took off in 1936: Roy and one of his
fellow band member paid 50$ to a young college student named Charley
Swain to write down the words to an unusual gospel song he had been
performing as a part time radio singer and which Roy liked. He was not
going to use the song in the area any longer so he took the offer. The
song was called "The Great Speckled Bird". Acuff sang it on WROL
and that led the band to a record deal with the American Recording
Company. When they sang that same song on the Opry in 1938, so
many letters poured in that it did not take long for the Opry management
to realise they had found a new star. They asked that the band be renamed
The Smoky Mountain Boys, finding it more dignified than The Crazy
Tennesseans. They first tried to do Western swing but Roy much
preferred "Mountain sound" over "Western sound", which led three
members of the band to leave. That preference was also an issue in
Hollywood, where Roy made 7 films, resolutely refusing to turn his
outfit into a cowboy band, as directors were asking.

From 1950 on, he only had three modest hits but he was permanently
on the Grand Ole Opry until the time of his death in 1992, thus going
on influencing country music as a defender of old traditions and
performers. Moreover, he had been the co-founder in 1942, with song-
writer Fred Rose, of the Acuff-Rose publishing company. It became
a very profitable operation with the success of Bob Wills and Acuff
himself during WW II. After the war it had continued success with
Curly Fox & Texas Ruby, Eddy Arnold and Paul Howard. In 1946 Hank
Williams started publishing songs regularly through Acuff-Rose and
signed an exclusive contract with it in '48. Later, Acuff-Rose were
responsible for bringing Boudleaux and Felice Bryant to Nashville and
helped to develop such songwriters and singers as The Everly Brothers,
Marty Robbins, Don Gibson, John D. Loudermilk, Roy Orbison, Mickey
Newbury, Eddy Raven, and Dallas Frazier.
Acuff was elected the first living member of the Country Music Hall Of
Fame in 1962.

Representative recordings:
The Essential Roy Acuff / 1936-1949 (Columbia/Legacy,1992).
Biography: Elizabeth Schlappi, Roy Acuff, the Smoky Mountain Boy.
Gretna, LA : Pelican, 1978 (2nd edition 1993).
Autobiography: Roy Acuff with William Neely, Roy Acuff's Nashville :
the life and good times of country music. New York : Putnam, 1983.