by Colin Escott
DeFord was a bright feature of our show for fifteen years. Like some members of his race and other races, DeFord was lazy. He knew about a dozen numbers which he put on the air and recorded for a major company, but he refused to learn any more, even though the reward was great. He was our mascot and still loved by the entire company. We gave him a whole year’s notice to learn some more tunes, but he would not. When we were forced to give him his final notice, DeFord said without malice, “I knowed it wuz comin’, Judge, I knowed it wuz comin’.”
DEFORD BAILEY:
[Judge Hay] had a boss, too. It was the company. It’s terrible for a company to say things like that about me. That I didn’t know no songs. I reads between the lines. They seen the day was coming when they’d have to pay me right, and they used the excuse about me playing the same old tunes. I walked out of WSM with a smile. I told myself, “God gave every man five senses and I’m going to use them. I ain’t gonna work for another man as long as I live.” I made the back room of my house on Thirteenth Street into a shoe shine parlor, and I cooked dinners and sold’em to workmen.
What’s certain is that DeFord Bailey was not replaced by another harmonica soloist, black or white. The day of the instrumental soloist on the Opry had gone. The departed stars were replaced by Pee Wee King, Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, Minnie Pearl, and Ernest Tubb. There was no master plan behind their hiring, but these new stars would create a fanatically loyal audience numbered in the millions. They not only broadened the show’s appeal but (with the exception of Pee Wee King) stayed into the 1980s or beyond, thereby creating the continuity for which the Opry became renowned. The Grand Ole Opry would make them household names, and they in turn would become its mainstays.
Pee Wee King: June 1937
Born Julius Frank Kuczynski in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Pee Wee King was in some ways a more unlikely Opry star than DeFord Bailey. An accordionist, his earliest appearances were at polka dances in Polish community centers around the upper Great Lakes. Pee Wee not only brought Eddy Arnold, Cowboy Copas, and Grandpa Jones to the Opry, he brought his father-in-law, J. L. Frank, who booked many Opry touring packages, and played a role in the Opry’s acquisition of Roy Acuff and Ernest Tubb.
Elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1967, J. L. Frank was known as the “Flo Ziegfeld of country music,” and was the first promoter to see the nationwide potential of Opry acts in touring packages.
PEE WEE KING:
Mr. Frank had gotten Gene Autry his movie contract, but he decided not to go out there himself. Gene gave me a sense of what I wanted to do musically, but Joe Frank showed me how to do it. I married [Frank’s stepdaughter] Lydia, and I formed the Golden West Cowboys. We tried to make the Cowboys a unique band. We were a dance band and more. By the time we got to the Opry, we were a well-rehearsed, versatile band. We could play single-note violin, an accordion playing two-part harmony, waltzes, two-steps, polkas, ballads. My boys could all read music. One of Mr. Frank’s main goals was to get one of his acts on the Opry, and we were the first one to make it. We went down for an audition on Easter weekend of 1937, and we were asked to stay for the Saturday night shows.
If Judge Hay had not been on p1ended sick leave, it’s doubtful if Pee Wee King would have been hired. Pee Wee’s music was too slick and up town for the Judge, but Hay wasn’t there and Harry and David Stone heard an artist who would professionalize the show
DAVID STONE:
It was one stormy, snowing afternoon. Almost everyone in the office had gone home. Vito Pellettieri and I were in the studio, and J. L. Frank came in with his group, the Golden West Cowboys. They did a very short audition, fifteen or twenty minutes. On our recommendation [to Harry Stone], Pee Wee brought the group down. They were neat, well-dressed, enthusiastic. They displayed good showmanship and good entertainment. They just said, “We like it in Louisville, but we would very much like to come to Nashville.”
left: 1938 WSM program release featuring Pee Wee King and His Golden West Cowboys.
right: J. L. Frank (top left) and two of his acts, Gene Autry (back row, fourth from left) and Pee Wee King and His Golden West Cowboys, visit the WSM studio. Posing with them are comedians Sarie and Sallie and Asher Sizemore with his sons, Buddy Boy and Little Jimmie.
ALTON DELMORE:
Joe Frank goes, I think, as one of the most neglected persons in the entire field of country music. Joe was an outstanding person who could prod out real talent when he found it. He was a down-to-earth businessman who knew what would go in the game. He talked and acted like a plowboy but had a tremendous knowledge of the entertainment world. He always had his heart in his work and always had a good word for down-and-out musicians and a handout if they asked for it... and a lot of times when they didn’t ask for it. I give Joe Frank credit for putting the Grand Ole Opry in the big-time class and big-time money.
Pee Wee was the first Opry act to join the Musicians Union, and, in 1938, became the first to appear in a movie when he made a cameo appearance in Gene Autry’s Gold Mine in the Sky.
PEE WEE KING
I think they asked us to join the Opry because we were microphone minded. There was no hesitation. No drawn-out pauses between our tunes. We knew what we were doing because we were organized. This was the way we made a living. Most of them who were on the Grand Ole Opry were farmers and had jobs and did this on Saturday night only. We made our living in the music business.
One of those who appreciated Pee Wee’s style and sophistication was a struggling young singer, Eddy Arnold. Originally from rural Tennessee, Eddy was living in St. Louis in 1939 when he heard that Pee Wee’s singer, Jack Skaggs, was leaving. He wrote a letter that ended up in the hands of J. L. Frank and followed it with an audition disc. Hired as of January 1940, Eddy later joked that he spent as much time selling Pee Wee’s songbooks and sweeping out the auditorium as he did onstage, but he came to share Pee Wee’s goal of broadening country music’s appeal.
Many Opry listeners only knew Pee Wee’s name. He didn’t sing, and was so self-conscious about his starkly northern accent that he usually left emceeing duties to his band-members. Because he’d never been country, Pee Wee wasn’t betraying or forsaking country music in edging closer to pop. More contentiously, he probably introduced the electric guitar and drums to the Opry stage. Always out of place on the Opry, Pee Wee returned to Louisville in 1947 to work in what was then the new medium of television. He went on to cowrite three songs that became pop and country standards, “Tennessee Waltz,” “Slow Poke,” and “You Belong to Me.”
Eddy Arnold singing with Pee Wee King’s Golden West Cowboys.
Roy Acuff: February 1938
GRANT TURNER:
Roy Acuff gave the Grand Ole Opry its voice.
Roy Claxton Acuff was born in Maynardville, near Knoxville, Ten-nessee, on September 15, 1903. He grew up on a tenant farm in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, and played semipro baseball until sidelined by a debilitating bout of sunstroke. During the layoff, he honed his skill on the fiddle, and, after his recovery, he formed the Crazy Ten-E-Seeans. Based in Knoxville, Roy Acuff first appeared on the Grand Ole Opry in October 1937, but didn’t do well.
Roy Acuff: “I was hired at the Opry as a fiddle player. Country music in the late 1930s was mostly instrumental. I never would have lasted as a fiddle player. I’ve stuck around all of these years because of my singing.”
DAVID COBB, WSM announcer:
I sincerely did not want to say anything to hurt Roy’s reputation, but I said the.sooner he found another way to make a living, the better it would be for him.
PEE WEE KING:
My manager, Joe Frank, was the one who gave Roy his first big boost. He contacted Roy and said, “Man, you’re missing the big boat. You don’t have to be.”stuck in a little town like Knoxville. Come on down to Nashville. You can go national.” Roy was skittish about leaving Knoxville, especially since he’d been turned down by the Opry once.
Roy was offered another on-air audition on February 5, 1938.
DAVID STONE:
There was a gap in the program. Someone stopped too early or didn’t show up. I crooked my finger at Roy. He came out and I introduced him, and Roy said he was going to sing “The Great Speckled Bird.” Come Monday morning, the powers that be wanted to know who was the guy singing about the bird. But as the morning went on, the lanky guy who was head of our mail department called up and said, “What are we going to do about all these letters coming about something to do with a bird?” We went down to the mail room and there were several stacks of mail just for Roy.
Soon after coming to the Opry, Roy Acuff’s Crazy Ten-E-Seeans became the not-so-crazy Smoky Mountain Boys.
ROY ACUFF:
You didn’t get on the Opry for singing a song or having a hit number. They didn’t ask you if you ever recorded. They didn’t care. You had to be a showman. The only way you could get on was to have something to show and prove it. When I came back, I was supposed to fiddle, and I did. But I sang “The Great Speckled Bird” that night. The audience reaction was overwhelmingly positive. The np1 day, we had to be in Dawson Springs, Kentucky, then I went back to Knoxville, and in two weeks they sent my mail. It came in bushel baskets.
The Delmore Brothers were the Opry’s biggest attraction, and they took up for the performer who would soon supplant them.
ALTON DELMORE:
On Monday morning I went to see David Stone about the band we wanted to play with us. He wanted to get us back on the road. He asked me, “Have you decided who you want to play your dates with you?” “Yes, we want Roy Acuff.” “And, if I may ask, who the hell is he?” “He’s the leader of the last band that played last Saturday.” “I’ll be goddamned if I think I’ll ever be able to understand you crazy hillbillies. Here you are picking the worst band that played.”
The group Roy Acuff brought to the Opry in 1938. From left: Clell Summey, Jess Easterday, Imogene “Tiny” Sarrett, Acuff, and Red Jones.
At the Delmores’ request, David Stone wrote to Roy Acuff offering him a job:
Dear Roy,
I am in receipt of your telegram advising that you will be here for programs starting the 19th. I will book you for a spot on the Grand Ole Opry, and also a series of 7:00 a.m. programs starting Monday February 21st.
I am teaming you up with the Delmore Brothers for several personal appearances. These boys have tremendous popularity in this territory, but they cannot manage or build their own unit so I think it would be a great combination for the two acts. I think I can get some good dates right away and start you out as soon as you get here. This will save a great deal of time in getting your build up with the WSM audience.
Yours very truly,
David P. Stone.
February 10, 1938
ROY ACUFF:
That song, “The Great Speckled Bird,” was what done it. I’d heard the song over around Knoxville and paid a guy to copy it down for me. It was written by a preacher in Springfield, Missouri. I met him once. I never knew who the writer was all those years. The song was stolen from him.
When I came to the Opry, I called my band the Crazy Ten-E-Seeans. David Stone wanted a name change. I came up with Smoky Mountain Boys to get in a plug for my homeland of east Tennessee. You know, if it hadn’t been for the Opry, I think I might have fallen by the wayside. It was like a network show. With the fifty-thousand-watt clear channel, we were covering everything from the Rocky Mountains to Maine, and from Canada into the islands off the Florida coast. I didn’t realize how different my singing was until the mail started coming in. The letters would mention how clear I was coming through, and how distinct my voice was, and how they could understand the words. When I got started, my goal wasn’t wealth. I only wanted to do something I enjoy. No city of any size would accept hillbilly performers, so we played schoolhouses out in the woods and small theaters in small towns. Twenty-five dollars was a big gate. I didn’t get my first one-hundred-dollar gate until along about 1940. That was at the McFadden School in Murfreesboro.
ALTON DELMORE:
Roy was a hungry person. Not for food or security, but to make a little niche. I believe Roy’s carelessness for security really benefitted him more than anything because he didn’t seem to worry if we had a good date or a bad one as far as money was concerned. He just wanted to make good as an entertainer. And he was a natural salesman. He could sell himself on the stage anytime.
The Delmore Brothers left the Opry seven months after Acuff arrived. By then, Judge Hay was back, encouraging Acuff to sing the “heart” songs. Acuff complied, and his influence became inestimable.
HANK WILLIAMS:
Roy Acuff is the best example of sincerity in singing. He’s the biggest singer this music ever knew. You booked him and you didn’t worry about crowds. For drawing power in the South, it was Roy Acuff then God. He’d stand up there singing, tears running down his cheeks.
ROY ACUFF:
I like to get into the mood of a song. If you don’t feel it, you can’t sing it. You can’t fool a person out there. I’ve cried onstage, not just for that audience, but I’ve cried because I wanted to cry. Because it was hurting.
Roy Acuff gives it all he’s got with guitar player Lon Wilson and right-hand man Pete “Bashful Brother Oswald” Kirby adding the harmony.
Roy Acuff saw it all, from rural string bands to the dawn of New Country. To him, country music was just that: music for, by, and of country people. No compromise, no artifice, no concessions. Those who live and die by chart statistics might wonder why the man dubbed “The King of Country Music” just barely figures in the chart books, but Acuff made his mark before the country charts started; in fact, his success was one of the reasons that the music industry took country music seriously enough to start a country chart.
Bill Monroe: October 1939
Bill Monroe was better known than Pee Wee King or Roy Acuff when he came to the Opry. As one of the Monroe Brothers, he’d sold hundreds of thousands of records in the late years of the Depression, and the brothers had been a big draw in the Carolinas. When Bill Monroe auditioned at the Opry, he was leading his Blue Grass Boys, but had yet to develop the style of music that would later be known as bluegrass.
Despite their success as a team, the split between Bill and his brother Charlie was far from amicable.
Bill Monroe.
MINNIE PEARL:
They say that if Bill had to travel east to get a booking, he would go out of his way to go by his brother’s house in Kentucky and get him out of bed in the middle of the night just so they could have a fight.
CHARLIE MONROE:
He won’t last on the Opry. Wait’til people find out how difficult he is to get along with.
The Monroe Brothers had been a partnership in which Bill was the junior partner, but he never again took a backseat. His opinions on how his Blue Grass Boys should look and play were unbending. He dressed soberly and required that his band members did likewise. Unlike other country acts at that time, they did little or no comedy and barely moved onstage
BILL MONROE:
After Charlie and me broke up, I was searching for a name for my group, and I wanted a name from the state of Kentucky. Before I come to WSM, I’d already decided on using the name “bluegrass,” because that’s what they’d call Kentucky, the Bluegrass State, so I just used Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys. I showed up at WSM on a Monday morning, and I met the Solemn Ol’ Judge. David Stone and Harry Stone was there. They was all goin’ out to get some coffee and something to eat. They told me that Wednesday was the audition day. So they come back and I sang “Mule Skinner Blues,” “Bile Them Cabbage Down,” numbers like that, and a gospel song.
CLEO DAVIS, Bill Monroe’s guitarist:
They put us in one of the studios, and we really put on the dog. We started out with “Foggy Mountain Top,” then Bill and I did a duet with duet yodel, fast as white lightning. We came back with “Fire on the Mountain” and “Mule Skinner Blues.” That sewed it up.
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p; BILL MONROE:
They said I could go to work for’em that Saturday, or I could go on lookin’ for another job. Maybe I could make more money. I told’em I wanted to be at the Grand Ole Opry. They said, “Well, you’re here, and if you ever leave, you’ll have to fire yourself.”
One of the earliest incarnations of the Blue Grass Boys, around late 1939 or early 1940. From left: Art Wooten, Bill Monroe, Cleo Davis, and Amos Garren.
Bill Monroe was the only Opry performer not to admit to nerves on the first night.
BILL MONROE:
I wasn’t a bit nervous that first night because I knew I could do what I was up there to do. I sung “Mule Skinner Blues,” and it got three encores. The management just stood and looked at us. They knew the music was altogether different. They didn’t know me, but they knew I had a music that would fit in at the Grand Ole Opry. It would be fine for the farm people, the country people. It had a hard drive to it. Back then, they just drug the music out. Our music was pitched up at least two or three changes higher than anyone had ever sung it at the Opry.
CLEO DAVIS:
Performers such as Roy Acuff, Pee Wee King, and Uncle Dave Macon who were standing in the wings could not believe when we took off so fast and furious. Those people couldn’t even think as fast as we played. There was nobody living who had ever played with the speed we had.
From left: Bill Monroe, Howdy Forrester, Clyde Moody, Cousin Wilbur (Wesbrooks), David “Stringbean” Akeman. Cousin Wilbur: “Sometimes we’d go to bed one night a week, and it was a good thing we didn’t go to bed more often, because if we had, we wouldn’t have had no money to pay the bill.”
