But in 1950, Mac’s working base would be none other than the edgier-than-the-Opry home of hard honky-tonk and rockabilly, Shreveport’s Louisiana Hayride. Here, Mac would appear with a bluegrass-style band at first, including Scruggs sound-alike banjo player Joe Medford. All the better to stand out in a place that was bringing the electric guitar forward, fast.
“This was pre-bluegrass classification,” he recalls, “so my thing was being accepted as country — and that’s where I first had the band.”
Hank Williams, with whom Mac had toured as a Blue Grass Boy, was already gone, and Elvis was not yet there, but the show included stars in-the-making, and there was a niche to fill.
“Slim Whitman, Webb Pierce, Johnny & Jack were there, Kitty Wells,” Mac details. “It’s quite ironic, but in ’51 all of us were barely eking out a living — but a year later every one of us had a hit, all on different labels! I had ‘Sweet To Be’, Johnny & Jack had ‘Poison Love’, Webb Pierce had ‘Wondering’, Slim Whitman had ‘Indian Love Call’, and Kitty Wells ‘It Wasn’t God Who Made Honky Tonk Angels’.”
Something was happening in country music just then. That’s one drastically varied set of singles, with rhythms unheard in country before, flavors untried, and even thoughts unspoken. The thing really aching at Mac Wiseman, until that breakthrough, was that he had never had a record to call his own. He’d turned down an offer by King Records’ Syd Nathan to cover Bill Monroe songs sounding as much like Monroe as possible.
“He wanted a copy, because he could just out-merchandise Columbia, since he had his own distribution. He’d almost killed Hawkshaw Hawkins, making him sing like Ernest Tubb. Still, what a temptation, man! But I didn’t want everybody saying, ‘Well, he just sings like Monroe.’ I wanted to sing like Mac.”
The waiting paid off when one of the most imaginative record sellers of all time, Randy Wood, approached Mac a few months later about recording for his fledgling label Dot, starting up out of his tiny but radio-ad-famous Randy’s Record Shop mail-order store in Gallatin, Tennessee, north of Nashville.
For a first single, his first record under his own name ever, Mac had a little something he’d discovered in an old songbook — not some ancient tome from the hills, but a 1902 Tin Pan Alley-type composition written by William Marshall Smith. He’d sing it live, quietly hoping nobody would hear it and record it before he did.
Wood was not wild about the pick, because in Mac’s arrangement, particularly, “‘Tis Sweet To Be Remembered” plunges forward briskly, beginning with a striking fiddle lead, and then just stops, drags right down on purpose, and starts again real slowly, as a gentle, lilting waltz — on the chorus. That happened to go against all prevailing wisdom about what a record should sound like to stand out on a jukebox — which was now, Woods understood and Mac was coming to see, what the singles business was about. You could sell 100,000 records to jukeboxes alone.
Mac insisted, bluffed really, well it’s that song or forget it.
“I had no doubt in my mind,” he assures. “It had been ‘tested’! Anywhere I’d go and sing that song, two or three days later when you got in a cab to go downtown, the cab driver would be whistling it! And Hand of God — the record hadn’t been out six weeks till Randy called me and said, ‘From now on, you pick the material.’ I was with him for thirteen years and that’s how it was.”
Mac Wiseman was suddenly a recording star, with free reign to pick the songs he’d be cutting. And with a “new single every six weeks” policy at Dot, he was going to need a lot of them. Most of the records he made at the label during his first four years there (“I’ll Still Write Your Name”, “I Wonder How The Old Folks Are At Home”, “I’d Rather Live By The Side Of The Road”, with its astonishing faster-than-fast vocal pyrotechnics) were certainly designed to appeal to the still unnamed bluegrass market, and successfully introduced numbers that are standards in the bluegrass repertoire. Those sides generally featured banjo despite Mac’s feelings about that subject, because he saw that call as commercially right for the time.
But even then, there were change-ups. Mac kept coming up with fresh B-sides that were more like second A-sides by turning to the old parlor and mountain songs he knew well, and the label would find more. “My security blanket,” he calls these. And he could turn to the vast sheet music collection of Dot’s Johnny Maddox, a ragtime revivalist with an encyclopedic recall of old-time pop who’d teach Mac “new” old tunes.
One of Wiseman’s biggest chart singles of the time was a good example — his jaunty 1953 take on “Love Letters In The Sand”, which had been a hit for both Gene Austin and Ted Black in the 1920s. (Mac has always considered it a Rudy Vallee number, but while Vallee may have performed it live, it’s not in his discography.) It’s a song with some 19th-century melody roots, but it’s hardly an old mountain ballad. Wiseman’s success with it would inspire Wood to try it out with Pat Boone, a Dot artist set to receive a lot of attention a few years later.
“I didn’t know they were going to do that,” Mac laughs. “They tried to cover ‘Jimmy Brown The Newsboy’ with him, too; went into the studio three different times, but he never could get it!”
Among those noticing Mac’s “Love Letters In The Sand” popping out of their home radio were the two young brothers by the name of White in Southern California who were starting to buy a lot of mail-order records of the Monroe type and now added Wiseman records to every batch: Roland, who would emerge as one of the genre’s finest mandolin players, and Clarence, who’d be a premier guitar player in country rock.
“We found it interesting that these records sounded different from anything else we had heard — bluegrass or country,” Roland says. “Only later did we find out that Mac had recorded a couple of songs with Bill Monroe! Besides those vocals, he did a lot of really nice embellishments with filling runs — and that really got our attention, because we were just learning this stuff, and we were looking for all of the things we hadn’t heard before. We tried to play those Mac Wiseman runs over and over again until the record would wear out.”
