From a restless young troublemaker to the “King of Country Music”
I knew many guys like him when I was growing up in North Knoxville. You know the type – small, wiry, and tough as nails. I never understood what made his kind so cocky and always looking for a fight. His speed and tenacity made him one of the best all-around athletes to attend Central High School. He lettered all four years in football, basketball, and baseball, and went on to play recreational league and semi-pro baseball at Caswell Park.
In his youth, he roamed the streets and shops of Fountain City and Arlington and was no stranger to North Broadway, Lincoln Park, and Lonsdale. He was well-liked throughout the north side because of his affable and compelling personality. A boy trying to find himself in a world of limited opportunities. The year was 1930 and a 27-year-old Roy Acuff was practicing on his father’s fiddle on the front porch of the Acuff family home on Raleigh Avenue off North Broadway in the Arlington community.
Roy had played all sports, but had not been a particularly good student at Central, and in 1925 turned down an athletic scholarship to Carson Newman College where his father had attended. At age 20, after high school graduation, he began bumming around Knoxville playing all the baseball he could find and dating all the girls who would put up with him. He did a lot of whiskey drinking and some petty crime in the years after high school, and his primary skills were manipulating a yo-yo on a string and balancing anything and everything on his chin for attention. He tried his hand at shining shoes in Fountain City Barber Shop and worked briefly on a survey team building Norris Dam. As a result of playing on the L&N Railway baseball team, he got a job working in the office where he practiced making the sound of a train whistle. Later he tried his hand at crushing rock, but too much work was involved. He tried out for the Knoxville Smokies baseball team, but that didn’t pan out. His specialty was singing loudly around the house to imitate and aggravate his sister as she trained her operatic voice.
Across from the barber shop, Roy spent a lot of time with a mechanic named John I. Copeland at his garage at the corner of Garden Drive and Broadway. Copeland was an interesting well-read man and an accomplished fiddler. Roy had learned to play the fiddle from his father and uncle, but Copeland was a treasure trove of old fiddle tunes and Roy soaked them up like a sponge. Fountain City Wrecker Service now occupies the site of John Copeland’s one-time garage and fiddle parlor.
Roy’s father, Neill Acuff, was pastor of the Fountain City Missionary Baptist Church and sometimes lawyer in the firm of noted Knoxville attorney, Hobart F. Atkins. His father did his best to keep Roy out of jail in the years immediately following high school, but it was a tough assignment. Seems that Roy was constantly in trouble with the law and with women.
On one occasion, Roy had attended a University of Tennessee football game and encountered a boy from Cleveland, Tennessee, who had played against Central in football Roy’s senior year. Roy recognized the Cleveland player as the one who had knocked out several teeth of one of Roy’s teammates after the game. Out of his great sense of loyalty, Roy knocked the boy down the stadium stairs at Shields-Watkins Field.
Roy’s mother and father became concerned about Roy’s loss of direction and self-indulgence and sat him down to caution him about the consequences of drinking whiskey and carousing, to which Roy responded, “Well, Papa, I don’t know of anything I’d rather go to the penitentiary for than drinkin’ and carousin’.” Years later, on the Grand Ole Opry, Roy once asked a very straight, religious string band musician if he had ever drunk whiskey and chased women. When the man said he had not, Roy said, “Well, you don’t know what you’ve been missin’.”
Roy Acuff’s life was forever altered by a serious sun stroke suffered while fishing in Florida in 1929. A series of related complications, including a nervous breakdown, caused him to be homebound for approximately a year. His downtime and boredom were filled with hours of hanging around the nearby Sharp (Arlington) Drug Store at the corner of Raleigh Avenue and Broadway meeting with girls and entertaining them with music from his father’s fiddle. One girl in particular, Mildred Douglas, worked in the drug store as a cashier and was paying particular attention. Mildred later became Mrs. Roy Acuff for 44 years. Years later, my brother was a soda jerk at the same Arlington Drug Store and made me my first milk shake while seated at the original marble top counter on a swivel stool.
In 1931, Roy and his musician friends began to practice and draw crowds at the Arlington Drug Store and at Thompson’s Garage in Lonsdale. My mother told me when I was growing up in Lincoln Park that she knew Roy Acuff as a teenager and watched his band play in a lot next to the drug store. My mother’s family lived on nearby Oswald Street and remembered Acuff when he first started in the music business. Roy traveled playing fiddle music and singing loudly with a medicine show selling Mocoton Tonic (with 10% alcohol) for a period of time during the early 1930’s. The show had no PA system, but didn’t really need one given Roy’s voice, which was trained to mock his sister’s.
Roy Acuff organized the band, and by 1934 he was appearing on WROL radio, and then later his band moved to become one of the original acts on the Mid-Day Merry-Go-Round on WNOX radio. Early success on the radio in Knoxville stimulated an ambitious chord in Roy and he began to hitchhike or ride the bus to Nashville to seek an audition for the Grand Ole Opry. After several trips, he finally got his chance and went on stage in October 1937. Fearful his loud delivery would blast out the strong signal of WSM radio, he sang “The Great Speckled Bird” softly in a crooning style popular at the time. Roy bombed out on his first audition and he and his “Smoky Mountain Boys” returned to Knoxville with their tails between their legs.
A second chance in 1938, however, filled the bill, and Roy Acuff and his “Speckled Bird” lived and prospered until his death in 1992. During his life, Roy Acuff had multiple nicknames and titles. In his high school days, his Central football teammates called him “Rabbit” because he was so quick and could run so fast, and his semi-pro baseball friends called him “Home Run Acuff.” Years later, All-Star baseball pitcher and broadcaster, Dizzy Dean, once introduced Roy as “The King of the Hillbillies” and Roy loved it. He was always proud to be a hillbilly from the Smoky Mountains, but later encouraged the title “The King of Country Music.” Roy, however, was insulted in 1943 by Governor Prentice Cooper when the governor was invited to appear on the Opry’s national broadcast to showcase the state of Tennessee to the nation. Governor Cooper refused to appear and stated that the “hillbilly music played on the Grand Ole Opry was an embarrassment to Nashville and the state of Tennessee.” Outraged, Acuff decided to himself run in the next election as a Republican candidate for governor, but lost to the Democrat nominee, Gordon Browning.
I will never forget hitchhiking to Nashville in 1962 with a buddy to see the Grand Ole Opry at the old Ryman Auditorium. When the usher turned his back, we slipped quickly down the center aisle to grab seats down front near the stage. When the curtain went up, there he was in the spotlight spinning a yo-yo on a string to the sound of a train whistle and breaking into song on his famous “Wabash Cannonball” at the top of his lungs.
My thanks to Elizabeth Schlappi and her book, Roy Acuff: The Smoky Mountain Boy, and my mother for detail vital to this article.
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