Word: acuff
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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First into the 1944 race for Tennessee Governor last week went the name of a hillbilly minstrel, Roy Acuff, 40, of Nashville. Fiddler Acuff insisted that his friends had put in his name, that he was still undecided whether to run. He thereupon resumed his fiddling, while his friends hoped that Memphis' Boss Ed Crump burned...
Boss Ed wants no independent candidate challenging his well-oiled, 34-year-old state machine, particularly anyone like Roy Acuff, whose Grand Ole Opry radio program has an audience of 130 NBC stations. Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys are known in every village town hall and crossroads school in Tennessee. Hundreds of admirers flow into Nashville to attend his Saturday-night NBC broadcast ; thousands listen to his nasal singing. And if Acuff can transfer his popularity to politics, he may yet give Crump the Memphis Blues...
...Acuff, son of an oldtime fiddler, was a second-string radio singer a few years ago, when Columbia Recording Corp., trying to trace an old English ballad, The Great Speckled Bird, found that Acuff knew it and hundreds more. Columbia signed him up. Since then, he has made four motion pictures (two still unreleased) and barrowfuls of money. Recently he put down $25,000 cash for an old mansion on Nashville's fashionable Hillsboro Road...
...last week the flood of camp-meetin' melody, which had been rising steadily in juke joints and on radio programs for over a year, was swamping Tin Pan Alley. Big names in the drawling art of country and cowboy balladry like Gene Autry, the Carter Family, Roy Acuff and Al Dexter were selling on disks as never before. Top-flight songsters like Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra were making their biggest smashes with hill billy tunes. A homely earful of the purest Texas corn, Al Dexter's Pistol Packin' Mama, had edged its way to first place...
...hand Edith got for this Smoky plaint was roughly comparable, in Grand O1' Opry circles, to the way Lily Pons was welcomed to the Metropolitan. Right off, Edith was invited to join the Opry company. And Uncle Dave, Roy Acuff and the rest were pretty sure that The Broken Heart, properly whanged up, would be a juke-box hit in no time...