CMT Blog: Roy Acuff

I wish the Country Music Association would decide whether it wants to be a trade group that promotes a particular brand of entertainment or an adjunct to the American Legion. It’s one thing for the CMA to applaud the good work that some soldiers do some of the time, but it’s quite another for it to fawn over all things military and to coerce those attending the CMA Music Festival to do the same. Here’s what I’m talking about. This year, the CMA arranged for a “flyover” of four military jets before the start of each nightly concert at LP Field. This went on for four evenings. Then, during breaks in each concert, the pilots and support team members of these aircraft were paraded across the stage and introduced to the crowd by name.

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As Carrie Underwood readies herself to become the newest member of the Grand Ole Opry, it’s time we paid some attention to its oldest member — Little Jimmy Dickens. He’s a virtually untapped treasury of country music lore, and he’s not going to be around to recount the old days forever. A member of the Opry since 1948, Dickens is 87.

Although there have been hundreds of articles written about him, I don’t believe he’s ever been the subject of a full-scale and scholarly biography. Yet here’s a man whose performing skills were so impressive that the mighty Roy Acuff got him into the Opry even before Dickens had his first hit record. The diminutive (4′11″) West Virginian was there to welcome Hank Williams to the Opry in 1949 and subsequently toured with him.

It was probably his small stature that drove Dickens toward the novelty songs by which he’s primarily known, pieces such as “Take an Old Cold Tater (And Wait),” “Out Behind the Barn” and “May the Bird of Paradise Fly Up Your Nose.” But he’s also a first-rate ballad singer who can rivet an audience with something like “We Could” or bring it to tears with a recitation like “(You’ve Been a Good Doll) Raggedy Ann.” Younger Opry stars, notably Vince Gill and Brad Paisley, have recognized Dickens’ still formidable talents and featured him in some of their music videos. But more needs to be done.

Somebody at the Country Music Hall of Fame (of which Dickens has been a member since 1983) ought to sit down with him and record every story, joke and obscure lyric he can recall. There aren’t many memories of his era still around.

The other day, as I was plowing through the voluminous press material that accompanied a new album some record company had sent, my mind doddered back to an ancient time when people focused on the song instead of the singer. It wasn’t necessarily a better time, but it did have its charm. This was before widespread television, of course, before Top 40 radio, before info-rich Web sites and before fan magazines that chronicled a performer’s marriages, affairs, temper tantrums, rehab sessions, crazy relatives and personal regimen for weight loss.

I knew absolutely nothing about the Carter Family nor had I any curiosity when I heard their terrifying “The Cyclone of Rye Cove” emanating from a scratchy phonograph record. I was equally indifferent to who Roy Acuff might be or what he looked like when he scared me to death by wailing “The Great Judgment Morning” over the radio. Red Foley had me weeping with “Old Shep” — again via faceless radio — years before I discovered he was from Kentucky and had a drinking problem. The thought that I might enjoy a song more by learning about the singer never occurred to me.

There was no plot back then to keep singers anonymous. They sold their pictures and songbooks by mail and at their shows, but there was really no technology, as there is now, for making their personalities seem more engaging than their songs. Record sleeves and album covers didn’t routinely carry the artist’s picture until the 1950s, when the “long-playing” one-disc format became commonplace. At roughly the same time, television, with its voracious appetite for appealing images, became the essential seedbed for personality-centered rock ‘n’ roll. Music marketing has tended in that direction ever since.

Nowadays, every album I get comes with an illustrated package that tells me everything about the singer — from when he got his first guitar to who wrote his songs. It’s all mildly interesting, but the music I hear isn’t any more moving than those long-ago tunes that grandly stood alone.

One of the most gorgeous books to ever come out of Nashville has just been published. Jim McGuire’s Historic Photos of the Opry: Ryman Auditorium 1974 (Turner Publishing) includes well over a hundred photographs taken at the Ryman during the last year the Grand Ole Opry was there, 1974. Besides text by McGuire, it also has a foreword by Garrison Keillor and an appreciation by Marty Stuart.

Pictures in Historic Photos of the Opry are all in stark black and white. I suspect you’ve seen the striking cover picture before. It’s a haunting, striking and gothic image of the Ryman, deserted on a rainy night, with lightning bolts arcing dramatically overhead. Remember, this was taken in the days long before Photoshop. McGuire writes that he visited the Ryman during every thunderstorm that year, hoping for just such a shot. He finally captured it, with his Nikon resting on the windowsill of his 1955 Buick. He held the shutter open for three seconds to catch the lightning. He writes, “Three of the best seconds of my life.”

McGuire, who came to Nashville by way of New York in 1972, has over the years taken some of the most memorable photographs of artists and musicians and their milieu. He has an exhibit titled “Nashville Portraits” now on a museum tour of the U.S. His book captures the life of the Opry at the Ryman: the artists on stage and jamming backstage, the fans inside and outside, the alley behind the Ryman, the city around the Ryman.

I interviewed Roy Acuff at Opryland shortly after the Opry was ensconced there and asked him about the Ryman. “That old building?” he fairly snorted. “I’ll be the first one to knock the bricks out from under it.” So, not everyone revered the old tabernacle. But, its spirit comes through very tellingly in these photographs. I can’t imagine downtown Nashville — or country music itself — without the Ryman.

Sitting at Porter Wagoner’s funeral the other day and pondering his legacy, one thing became very apparent to me: The last great hillbilly is gone. My old Austin pal, the writer Dave Hickey, once said that Porter was the last of the great hillbillies, and I am proud to steal that from him. Dave also said that you need to recognize and appreciate the value and the difference between a genuine rhinestone and an imitation pearl. Porter was the genuine rhinestone. If Porter could have discovered Nashville’s lost rhinestone mines, what a different place this world would be.

Porter was a true hillbilly from the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. He was a rawboned farmboy with plain musical tastes. He was a man as plain and simple as dirt. Early on in his career, he was a singing butcher, warbling on station KWPM in West Plains, Mo., while working as a butcher. He went on to become a master of simple, direct, homespun music, combined with an unerring taste for hillbilly flash and dazzle. My boss at CMT recalls the years when CMT was headquartered at Opryland and we shared the Opry’s backstage parking lot. On late Friday afternoons, my boss would see Porter arrive for work, stepping out of his latest big, gaudy pimpmobile, with his dark sunglasses, puffing on a cigarette, with his garment bag holding a couple of flashy suits slung over one shoulder. Porter’s appearance signaled that all was running on schedule in the country music world.

“Hillbilly” has had an interesting history in country music. Once considered a denigrating term, it seems to have regained some integrity as a word defining traditional taste in old-time, rural country music. The first country music records, back in the 1920s, were referred to as “hillbilly” records. The first country music record chart was launched by Billboard magazine in 1939 and it was called the “hillbilly” chart. Over the years, the term hillbilly became a truly denigrating putdown. But things change and the word became more or less neutralized. Porter made it seem a desirable thing at last.

It’s hard to define a true hillbilly, but you know one when you hear one. There’ve been only a few truly great hillbillies over the years. Uncle Dave Macon, Charlie Poole, Roy Acuff, Ernest Tubb, Hank Williams, Faron Young, Webb Pierce, Lefty Frizzell, Porter … you pick the rest. But there aren’t any more of the great hillbillies left. And there won’t be any more.

It wasn’t too long ago that country performers routinely incorporated a title with their name, the idea being that such an addition gave them a little extra boost in stature and individuality. Thus, Roy Acuff was the King of Country Music, Kitty Wells the Queen and Tammy Wynette the First Lady. The practice went a long way back. Jimmie Rodgers billed himself as the Singing Brakeman (and later bore the title of Father of Country Music). Grand Ole Opry patriarch Uncle Dave Macon was known as the Dixie Dewdrop. Eddy Arnold gained fame as the Tennessee Plowboy (but gradually eased away from that designation as he sought a broader, more urbane audience). Tennessee Ernie Ford styled himself as the Old Pea Picker, and Ernest Tubb labored as the Texas Troubadour. Patti Page was the Singing Rage.

Sometimes these titles were conferred on performers by their admirers and sometimes by their paid promoters. But whatever its origin, the value of a title lay in whether or not it stuck and eventually became synonymous with the performer’s name.

Before there was a Gary LeVox, Vern Gosdin was the Voice. Roy Rogers was King of the Cowboys, Bill Monroe the Father of Bluegrass, Hank Snow the Singing Ranger, Johnny Cash the Man in Black and Tom T. Hall the Storyteller. Generously proportioned Kenny Price of Hee Haw went to his grave as the Round Mound of Sound. Ranger Doug Green of Riders in the Sky continues to call himself (albeit puckishly) the Idol of American Youth.

So here’s what I’d like to know: What do you think would be fitting honorifics for the likes of Garth Brooks, Vince Gill, Alan Jackson, Reba McEntire, Martina McBride, Kenny Chesney, Keith Urban, Tim McGraw, Faith Hill (separately or in tandem), Josh Turner, Carrie Underwood, Brad Paisley, Miranda Lambert or any other act of your choosing? Here’s your chance to influence country music history. The floor is yours.