Roy Acuff

THC marker along Maynardville Highway (TN-33) in Maynardville, Tennessee, near where Acuff was born

Acuff was born on September 15, 1903[5] in Maynardville, Tennessee,[6] to Ida (née Carr) and Simon E. Neill Acuff, the third of their five children. Roy Acuff is of English ancestry, and his ancestors came to North America during the colonial era, settling in the mountains of Virginia and the Carolinas.[7][8] The Acuffs were a fairly prominent family in Union County. Roy's paternal grandfather, Coram Acuff, had been a Tennessee state senator, and his maternal grandfather was a local physician. Roy's father was an accomplished fiddler and a Baptist preacher, his mother was proficient on the piano, and during Roy's early years the Acuff house was a popular place for local gatherings. At such gatherings, Roy would often amuse people by balancing farm tools on his chin. He also learned to play the harmonica and jaw harp at an early age.[9][10]

In 1919, the Acuff family relocated to Fountain City (now a suburb of Knoxville), a few miles south of Maynardville.[9] Roy attended Central High School, where he sang in the school chapel's choir and performed in "every play they had."[11] His primary passion, however, was athletics. He was a three-sport standout at Central and, after graduating in 1925, was offered a scholarship to Carson-Newman University but turned it down. He played with several small baseball clubs around Knoxville, worked at odd jobs, and occasionally boxed.[4]

In 1929, Acuff tried out for the Knoxville Smokies, a minor-league baseball team then affiliated with the New York Giants (now the San Francisco Giants).[10][11] A series of collapses in spring training following a sunstroke, however, ended his baseball career. The effects left him ill for several years, and he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1930.[9] "I couldn't stand any sunshine at all," he later recalled.[11] While recovering, Acuff began to hone his fiddle skills, often playing on the family's front porch after the sun went down. His father gave him several records of regionally renowned fiddlers, such as Fiddlin' John Carson and Gid Tanner, which were important influences on his early style.[11]

In 1932, Dr. Hauer's medicine show, which toured the southern Appalachian region, hired Acuff as one of its entertainers.[9] Acuff began his career as a blackface performer.[12][13] The purpose of the entertainers was to draw a large crowd to whom Hauer could sell patent medicines (of suspect quality) for various ailments.[10] While on the medicine show circuit, Acuff met the legendary Appalachian banjoist Clarence Ashley, from whom he learned "The House of the Rising Sun" and "Greenback Dollar", both of which Acuff later recorded.[14] As the medicine show lacked microphones, Acuff learned to sing loud enough to be heard above the din, a skill that would later help him stand out on early radio broadcasts.[10]

In 1934, Acuff left the medicine show circuit and began playing at local shows with various musicians in the Knoxville area, where he had become a celebrity and fixture in local newspaper columns.[15] That year, the guitarist Jess Easterday and the Hawaiian guitarist Clell Summey joined Acuff to form the Tennessee Crackerjacks, which performed regularly on the Knoxville radio stations WROL and WNOX (the band moved back and forth between stations as Acuff bickered with their managers about compensation).[9] Within a year, the group had added the bassist Red Jones and changed its name to the Crazy Tennesseans after being introduced as such by a WROL announcer named Alan Stout.[11] Fans often remarked to Acuff how "clear" his voice was coming through over the radio, important in an era when singers were often drowned out by string band cacophony.[10] The popularity of Acuff's rendering of the song "The Great Speckled Bird" helped the group land a contract with ARC, for which they recorded several dozen tracks (including the band's best-known track, "Wabash Cannonball") in 1936.[10] Needing to complete a 20-song commitment, the band recorded two ribald tunes—including "When Lulu's Gone"—but released them under a pseudonym, the Bang Boys.[16] The group split from ARC in 1937 over a separate contract dispute.[10]

In 1938, the Crazy Tennesseans moved to Nashville to audition for the Grand Ole Opry. Although their first audition went poorly, the band's second audition impressed Opry founder George D. Hay and producer Harry Stone, and they offered the group a contract later that year. On Hay and Stone's suggestion, Acuff changed the group's name to the Smoky Mountain Boys, referring to the mountains near where he and his bandmates grew up.[10] Shortly after the band joined the Opry, Clell Summey left the group and was replaced by the dobro player Beecher (Pete) Kirby—best known by his stage name Bashful Brother Oswald—whom Acuff had met in a Knoxville bakery earlier that year.[10] Acuff's powerful lead vocals and Kirby's dobro playing and high-pitched backing vocals gave the band its distinctive sound. By 1939, Jess Easterday had switched to bass to replace Red Jones, and Acuff had added the guitarist Lonnie "Pap" Wilson and the banjoist Rachel Veach to fill out the band's lineup. Within a year, Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys rivaled the long-time Opry banjoist Uncle Dave Macon as the troupe's most popular act.[10] In the same period, he was initiated to the Masonic Lodge of East Nashville No. 560.[17][2][18]

In spring 1940, Acuff and his band traveled to Hollywood, where they appeared with Hay and Macon in the motion picture Grand Ole Opry. Acuff appeared in several subsequent B-movies, including O, My Darling Clementine (1943), in which he played a singing sheriff; Night Train to Memphis (1946), the title of which comes from a song Acuff recorded in 1940; and Home in San Antone (1949), in which he starred with Lloyd Corrigan and William Frawley.

Acuff and his band also joined Macon and other Opry acts at various tent shows held throughout the Southeast in the early 1940s. The crowds at these shows were so large that roads leading into the venues were jammed with traffic for miles.[10] Starting in 1939, Acuff hosted the Opry's Prince Albert segment. He left the show in 1946 after a dispute with management.[1]

In 1942, Acuff and songwriter Fred Rose (1897–1954) formed Acuff-Rose Music. Acuff originally sought the company to publish his own music, but soon realized there was a high demand from other country artists, many of whom had been exploited by larger publishing firms.[19] Due in large part to Rose's ASCAP connections and gifted ability as a talent scout, Acuff-Rose quickly became the most important publishing company in country music. In 1946, the company signed Hank Williams, and in 1950 published their first major hit, Patti Page's rendition of "Tennessee Waltz".[20]

A life-size statue of Roy Acuff sits on a pew alongside a statue of Minnie Pearl in the lobby of Ryman Auditorium.

In 1943, Acuff was initiated into the East Nashville Freemasonic Lodge in Tennessee, of which he would remain a lifelong member.[21] Later that same year, Acuff invited Tennessee Governor Prentice Cooper to be the guest of honor at a gala held to mark the nationwide premiere of the Opry's Prince Albert show. Cooper rejected the offer, however, and lambasted Acuff and his "disgraceful" music for making Tennessee the "hillbilly capital of the United States."[19] A Nashville journalist reported the governor's comments to Acuff and suggested Acuff run for governor himself. While Acuff initially did not take the suggestion seriously, he did accept the Republican Party nomination for governor in 1948.[10][19]

Acuff's nomination caused great concern for E. H. Crump, the head of a Memphis Democratic Party political machine that had dominated Tennessee state politics for nearly a quarter-century. Crump was not worried so much about losing the governor's office—in spite of Acuff's name recognition—but did worry that Acuff would draw large crowds to Republican rallies and bolster other statewide candidates. While Acuff did relatively well and helped reinvigorate Tennessee's Republicans, his opponent, Gordon Browning, still won with 67 percent of the vote.[22][23]

After leaving the Opry, Acuff spent several years touring the Western United States, although demand for his appearances dwindled with the lack of national exposure and the rise of musicians such as Ernest Tubb and Eddy Arnold, who were more popular with younger audiences.[4] He eventually returned to the Opry, although by the 1960s, his record sales had dropped off considerably. After nearly losing his life in an automobile accident outside of Sparta, Tennessee, in 1965, Acuff pondered retiring, making only token appearances on the Opry stage and similar shows,[10] and occasionally performing duos with long-time bandmate Bashful Brother Oswald.

In 1972, Acuff's career received a brief resurgence in the folk revival movement after he appeared on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band album, Will the Circle Be Unbroken.[23] The appearance paved the way for one of the defining moments of Acuff's career, which came on the night of March 16, 1974, when the Opry officially moved from the Ryman Auditorium to the Grand Ole Opry House at Opryland. The first show at the new venue opened with a huge projection of a late-1930s image of Roy Acuff and the Smoky Mountain Boys onto a large screen above the stage. A recording from one of the band's 1939 appearances was played over the sound system, with the iconic voice of George Hay introducing the band, followed by the band's performance of "Wabash Cannonball". That same night, Acuff showed President Richard Nixon, an honored guest at the event, how to yo-yo, and convinced the president to play several songs on the piano.[10]

In the early 1980s, after the death of his wife, Mildred, Acuff, then in his 80s, moved into a small house on the Opryland grounds and continued performing daily on stage. He arrived early most days at the Opry before the shows and performed odd jobs, such as stocking soda in backstage refrigerators. He made a cameo appearance in the music video for Moe Bandy and Joe Stampley's 1984 parody hit song "Where's The Dress?"[24] In 1988, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement.[25] In 1991, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts,[26] and given a lifetime achievement award by the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the first Country music act to receive the esteemed honor.

Roy Acuff died at the Baptist Hospital in Nashville on November 23, 1992 of congestive heart failure at the age of 89.[1] He is buried in the Hillcrest section of (grave 6, lot 9) of Spring Hill Cemetery on Gallatin Road in Nashville.[27]