[78-L] Roy Acuff 78 review

[David Lewis]

i wrote this for my facebook page. Would enjoy any feedback on it if anyone is interested.

Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys: Wreck on the Highway/Fire Ball Mail -- Okeh 6685, recorded in Hollywood May 28, 1942. 

This Roy Acuff record is toast; enlarged center hole and worn so bad it must've been played a jillion times. I've never seen a pre-war Roy Acuff 78 that WASN'T played a jillion times; in fact, the first Roy 78 I ever owned -- which came from the collection of a little old lady that died a few houses down from me when I was about 10 -- was in much the same condition. I got it and played it a jillion times more myself; for the record that was Columbia 37007, by Acuff and the Crazy Tenneseeans, "Steel Guitar Blues" b/w "Steel Guitar Chimes."

Like "Steel Guitar Blues," this record was also re-released on the main Columbia label, as Co 37028. The significance of this was that Okeh was a 35 cent record and the main Columbia label charged 75 cents, so the profit margin was better -- people were always going to buy these records, even though they originally appeared on cheap labels that appealed to rural customers, and so why not charge full price for them. And there was a reason for that; they were great records. "Wreck on the Highway" narrates a drunken road accident in harrowing detail, with Acuff painting a grim landscape in shades of blood, whiskey and broken glass. Something I read stated that Acuff copped the refrain "And I couldn't hear nobody pray" from another songwriter, but I know it as a line from an old black Gospel hymn. 

Nevertheless, Acuff did cop something like 85 percent of the material he did from stuff that was already around; "Steel Guitar Chimes" is about 100 percent lifted from "Moana Chimes," a Hawaiian guitar solo that was recorded in the 1920s. But the material Acuff did accounts for only a small percentage of the effectiveness of his early records; it's the intensity and bald sincerity of these performances that make them matter. "Fire Ball Mail" was written by Acuff's future publishing partner Fred Rose; it's a railroad song so deeply steeped in train vernacular that to the uninitiated it barely makes sense. But it is the rhythmic drive of the piece, the energy of Acuff's singing and the beautiful steel guitar solos that makes this what it is. 

Later, Acuff founded the Acuff-Rose publishing concern with Fred Rose which became the number one publishing house in country music. Also, around 1950 his own performing style became kind of crowded out by honky-tonk and more citified approaches to making country music, so he stepped back to concentrate on his business more, a decision which made life very comfortable for him in a material way. He did come back periodically -- sometimes quite successfully -- as a performer; I saw him on television numerous time. But Acuff seemed comfortable in the role of elder statesman and seemed to have lost his edge. When I was about 12 or 13 I acquired a 1960s era white label Hickory 45 of "Wabash Cannon Ball" from Oran White at his studio. It struck me as very bright and routine and I didn't like it at all.

So his key output appears to be material recorded beginning with his first ARC session in 1936 and ending at Columbia in 1947, though he made some recordings for them in 1951. In 1948, Acuff ran as a Republican for governor of Tennessee and lost, and that also really took the wind out of his sails. It isn't a huge amount of material really, given all that time, and Sony does have a CD drawn from that period called "The Essential Roy Acuff" which includes both of these sides and "Steel Guitar Chimes" to boot. But this is a cheap, short, truck stop type collection and my experience with these is that they are generally not taken from the master discs in the vault but from 1950s tape with horrible fake echo. 

In Acuff's case, Sony cannot do for him what they did for Bill Monroe; he just isn't famous enough anymore and even the experts tend to think of him in the publishing, rather than the performing, context. Even Columbia and Okeh 78s are dubs, taken from 16" masters they used from 1940 to 1948. So unless you are lucky enough to encounter Roy's first few titles on original Conqueror or Vocalion issues in tip top shape then it is difficult to have meaningful sonic contact with this key early work of Roy Acuff; however, though beaten to death, this sorry specimen is still to be preferred over the "hi-fi" versions of the 50s. -- Uncle Dave Lewis 
       

Uncle Dave Lewis
uncledavelewis at hotmail.com