Roy Acuff – Songs of the Smoky Mountains
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Posted On May 1, 2002
When Roy Acuff signed a contract with Capitol Records in 1953, he was 50 years old and a country music superstar, even though he hadn’t had a hit in many years. He ruled the roost every Saturday night on the Grand Ole Opry, but his string-band style was already something of an anachronism, having lost ground to the electrified honky-tonk of Ernest Tubb, Webb Pierce and others.
Wisely, producer Ken Nelson didn’t try to gussy up Acuff’s unabashed hillbilly sound. He brought Acuff and his great band, the Smoky Mountain Boys — dobroist Pete “Bashful Brother Oswald” Kirby, fiddler Howard “Howdy” Forrester, harmonica player and pianist Jimmie Riddle, guitarist Lonnie “Pap” Wilson, and bassist Joe Zinkan — into the studio and let them do what they did best: make good, old-fashioned country music.
Released in 1955, Songs Of The Smoky Mountains is the best of Dualtone’s three Capitol reissues, and makes a fine companion to Columbia’s The Essential Roy Acuff: 1936-1949. The disc contains 12 re-recordings of Acuff’s most famous songs, including “Wabash Cannonball”, “The Great Speckled Bird”, “Pins And Needles (In My Heart)”, “The Wreck On The Highway”, and “The Precious Jewel”. Acuff sings them all in his trembling, heartfelt voice. At times, he sounds as if he’s about to break down and cry. Few singers could imbue a song with as much emotion as Acuff; no wonder Hank Williams, Lefty Frizzell, and George Jones all cited Acuff as a major influence on their singing.
Then there’s Kirby’s whining, wailing dobro, an essential component of Acuff’s sound. The weepy “The Wreck On The Highway” would be half the song that it is without Kirby’s mournful fills. (He also sings high harmony and plays banjo on some numbers.)
Acuff recorded a number of singles for Capitol, and long after he had left the label, they were released on two albums: The Great Roy Acuff, from 1964, and The Voice Of Country Music, from 1965. According to Paul Kingsbury, who wrote the notes to all three reissues, Capitol was trying to benefit from Acuff’s 1962 induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame.
At any rate, the albums are pleasant, though hardly essential, collections of songs about sin, salvation, lost love, and trains, the last being one of Acuff’s favorite subjects. Unlike Songs Of The Smoky Mountains, these albums featured new songs, many of them owned by Acuff’s lucrative publishing company, Acuff-Rose. They may be unfamiliar (though Louvin Brothers fan will recognize “Streamline Heartbreaker”), but they’re country to the core, and they serve Acuff and his boys well.
One quibble: While it’s commendable that Dualtone saw fit to reproduce the original album covers — front and back — the images are so small you practically need a magnifying glass to read them.
