The fiddler in the Hungry Five (Plus One!), Homer Crickenberger, the other freshman in the group, still lives in that area. (The whole band had a brief performing reunion about ten years ago, during Mac’s birthday trip home.) He acknowledges that the Sons Of The Pioneers material was what the band leaned toward most, but says most of the members weren’t “that focused” on one style.
“Mac had a clear voice,” recalls Homer, who sang “Yellow Rose Of Texas” with the band himself. “I thought he was a good vocalist. He sang the old songs like ‘Jimmy Brown The Newsboy’ and those songs back then, too. Of course, he didn’t play for us but for about a year.”
That was the year before somebody finally had access to a camera to take a couple photos of the Hungry Five. The band continued into the early ’40s before the regular members graduated and went to work for the Duplan textile factory.
Wiseman was set to work at a nearby Merck & Co. chemical plant, as an accountant; that was the strategizing, sensible, “earn a steady wage,” proto-businessman side of Mac. They turned him down based on the physical — and when the Franklin Roosevelt-backed March of Dimes Foundation heard about this, they offered a scholarship to continue Mac’s education. He went to Shenandoah Conservatory of Music, for a course in radio; many of his credits were earned by working as an on-air announcer, reporter and DJ at WSVA in Harrisburg, Virginia.
“We got very few 78s from country artists,” Mac notes. “They didn’t give a damn about airplay; DJing was new. We had Cliff Bruner and people like that, from Texas, Harry James, the Dorseys — so that’s another reason that I was just as versed in that pop catalogue as I was in country.”
After performing both on-air and off with broadcast entertainer and country singer Buddy Starcher — writer and originator of the ’50s Wiseman hit “I’ll Still Write Your Name In The Sand” — Mac worked at forming his first band. Based in Frederick, Maryland, he was still working those smooth modern cowboy tones, singing Sons Of The Pioneers harmonies now along with a Gene Autry imitator. That was his only real harmony experience before landing in the originating bluegrass bands.
It was there, in 1946, that he was spotted by a member of the rising Molly O’Day band, auditioned to join, and was taken in — as a bass player, because they needed one and he said yes. More importantly, he also served as a change-of-pace opening act, a role and opportunity Mac would come to relish.
He’d join Molly’s Cumberland Mountain Folks on their fast, hard hillbilly numbers, hymns and laments that would make the charismatic, audience-holding Molly the female equivalent of Hank Williams. Mac would do his fifteen minutes of more languid, laid-back ballad material on the heels of one of the band’s room-shakers, backed, significantly, by the band’s fiddler and the dobro of Molly’s husband, Lynn Davis, or regular dobro player Speedy Krise — dobro in the prevalent style of Roy Acuff’s master player, “Bashful Brother Oswald” Kirby.
Mac attempted to put together what might have been a sonically fascinating outfit in 1947 while working at WCYB in Bristol, which would have included himself, the Louvin Brothers, and a jazzy Merle Travis-style guitarist, but it never quite came together that way. A year later, Lester Flatt joined the station and recruited Mac for Flatt & Scruggs’ inaugural Foggy Mountain Boys, which quickly led to the brief, most-noted moment in the Mac Wiseman saga. And a “moment” it was, really, as his entire stretch with both the Foggy Mountain Boys and Bill Monroe’s Bluegrass Boys lasted from mid-1948 through late 1949.
Mac was Flatt & Scruggs’ de facto business manager and booker, and he got them the connections to extend their radio reach. He sang higher parts than usual with them, sang gospel with them, and had a “wonderful working relationship” with two greats who would be his friends over the decades, through thick and thin. But the hard-charging rhythms and mind-boggling cascades of notes Earl Scruggs was producing were not, when it comes down to it, the sort of backing most suitable for most of Wiseman’s singing.
Mac’s view of that key bluegrass instrument is clear enough. “I love the banjo players, but man I hate the banjo; it’s so harsh — for the kind of things I do!” he explains. “So many of the banjo players don’t even play fills; they play the same melody you’re singing. That’s what makes it raucous! Of course, Earl plays it tastefully, with his fills and things — but there are just a few others that do.”
It remains a thrill today to see Earl and Mac together — during a series of artist-in-residence 2004 shows by Scruggs at the Country Music Hall of Fame, for example. But an amused Earl had this to say about playing with his friend of 57 years, during an interview at his home:
“What I do to Mac — and I guess he knows it, once he gets in there singin’ — is I punch his timing up. Put a little punch behind it. Mac — I love his singin’; he’s a good singer, but he’ll drag himself thick. So if I get to kick it off, Mac’s gonna have to get up off that lazy spot and start cookin’ it. That really sounds better to me. I mean, I love to hear him sing uptempo tunes, too!”
That’s a picker’s commentary on what was, even back in ’48, Mac’s growing need not to plow ahead, however brilliantly, but to break the rhythm in a line, in a syllable, pause for impact where necessary, and keep that vocal up front — solo. Classic bluegrass was not built around those interests.
Bill Monroe, who famously offered Wiseman a job right over the air while Mac was still playing with Earl and Lester, apparently sensed that Mac was only passing through. He had Jimmy Martin good to go as his next lead singer even as Mac left for elsewhere — for places a guy with that voice, that different sense of rhythm, that readiness to take a spot in a variety mix, and with one extraordinary pop sensibility — might want to go.
For a little while, that brought Mac to Atlanta, where he’d be part of a quite varied touring show with the lively Jumpin’ Bill Carlisle, in his comic “Hotshot Elmer” character phase, and Martha Carson, the
even more energetic jubilee-style gospel singer who would be an inspiration to Elvis Presley. (Mac would later record several of Martha’s gritty, bluesy songs.)
He was now bringing into his act these pop “folk songs” that were getting to the charts as part of a short-lived but suggestive 1950 folk revival — “Goodnight Irene” and “Dark As A Dungeon”, the excellent Merle Travis ersatz folk song already taken on by Bradley Kincaid disciple Grandpa Jones. He even was doing some Woody Guthrie.
