A country way of life, Episode 23 (Grady Martin, Roy Acuff, Fred Rose)
Author: Jonny Brick.
Player: Grady Martin
As pickers go, Grady Martin is one of the most celebrated within the industry while perhaps being most unknown by the general country fan. Merle Haggard called him ‘everybody’s hero’, the musician’s musician who added finesse to hundreds of cuts.
You know his work in country music: the acoustic guitar of El Paso by Marty Robbins, For the Good Times by Ray Price, Coal Miner’s Daughter by Loretta Lynn, Why Me by Kris Kristofferson, I’m Sorry by Brenda Lee and Turn the Cards Slowly by Patsy Cline.
His guitar parts are all over Cline’s catalogue, as they are on Joan Baez’s albums in the late sixties and early seventies. Martin could also play rockabilly, the trendy sound of the 1950s, and he was part of Johnny Burnette’s trio. He joined the backing bands of first Little Jimmy Dickens and Red Foley then, in the 1980s, Jerry Reed and Willie Nelson.
Martin died in 2001 and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2015.
Songwriters: Roy Acuff and Fred Rose
It makes perfect sense to couple Roy Acuff and Fred Rose, seeing as they were the two heads of the mighty publishing company that emerged in the early decades of commercial country music. They also formed Hickory Records, which steered the career of Donovan.
Emerging as a performer on radio in the 1930s, Acuff wrote several country standards including Great Speckled Bird, and he turned the folk song Wabash Cannonball into a smash that sold over 10 million copies. He sang in a loud clear voice, like he was ‘going for the cows’, and he also did yo-yo tricks for the audience! When he wasn’t playing his fiddle, he was balancing it on his nose.
Acuff was frequently photographed with presidents when they visited the Opry, and indeed he twice ran for governor of Tennessee. As an elder statesman, Acuff popped up on the TV show Hee Haw and he also appeared on the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s album Will The Circle Be Unbroken. He sang I Saw the Light, Wreck on the Highway and his own cut The Precious Jewel. Before the last of these, he recalled some old wisdom from his days in the studio to capture lightning in a bottle: ‘Put everything you’ve got into it…Every time you go through it you lose just a little something!’
His is the first entry in the Big Book of Country Music, which describes him as the man who ‘helped pave the way for the transformation of old-time country music into modern pop-style country’. Obituaries referred to him as the ‘king of country music’, which wasn’t bad for a kid who wanted to be a baseball player.
Acuff was inducted as Opry member 34 along with his band the Smoky Mountain Boys. He would become indelibly linked to country’s mother church, and he was also the first living member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, which was established in 1961. That year had seen the posthumous induction of Hank Williams, Jimmie Rodgers and, alongside these titans, Williams’ producer Fred Rose, who died in 1954.
Rose first wrote songs in the 1920s when jazz was all the rage in his then home of Chicago. After he moved to Nashville, he worked as the pianist on WSM, the station which broadcast live from the Opry, and wrote songs in a country idiom for Hollywood stars like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.
Rose and Acuff joined forces in 1942 to form Acuff-Rose Publications, which looked after the copyrights of Williams and Boudleaux and Felice Bryant. Rose co-wrote several of Williams’s hits including Take These Chains from My Heart, Kaw-Liga and I’ll Never Get Out of this World Alive.
He was also responsible for Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain, which was first cut by Acuff and Williams before Willie Nelson revived it on Red Headed Stranger and took it to number one on the country charts. It also put Rose, whose son Wesley went into the family business and helped the Everly Brothers achieve worldwide fame, back in the Hot 100 when it peaked at 21.
All Episodes can be found here
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