Mac’s records were sounding different in no small measure because of his radically fresh ideas about how to make them jukebox-friendly and stand out on the radio.
Adding drums was still out of the question on country records — but you could make the record heavier, put a strong “bottom” and heavy rhythm on a single in other ways. Mac was soon featuring the twin fiddles of Tommy Jackson and Del Porter — two of the great fiddlers in Nashville recording history — on his records and in the band, at a time when that hadn’t been tried outside of western swing. And he had such “minor” guitar hands as Hank Garland, Chet Atkins and Grady Martin chopping rhythm in the background.
With the succession of hit singles, Mac was invited by WRVA radio of Richmond, Virginia, to come be the regular star of their Old Dominion Barn Dance, a program much heard up and down the east coast. That outlet won Mac and his Country Boys a growing following.
In Wiseman’s utterly unconventional sort of bluegrass band, the vocalist up front would always be the central attraction around which all other sounds were developed. Vocal harmonies were scarce and flashy solo instrumental takes were downplayed, though he introduced such ace players as Eddie Adcock and fiddler Scotty Stoneman. Not every instrumentalist knew quite how to react with Mac’s singular phrasing.
“The way Mac works,” Adcock explains, “is when he starts a song, that rhythm he hits right then, the timing — that’s what it’s going to remain throughout. If you just keep that beat in your head, well…I’ve never had problems playing on the albums or anywhere else. Only people who start by listening to his vocal, who get confused and start following that, think Mac’s playing out of time. And when it comes right down to it, they’re the ones doing that!”
Adcock’s longtime musical partner and spouse Martha adds, “Whether Mac’s playing guitar by himself or he’s singing with a band, he wants his vocal to float on top of the rhythm section. His phrasing could be compared to a Frank Sinatra — floating on top of a band.”
Indeed, you can compare the singular, unclassifiable singing style Wiseman has developed to sophisticated pop or even jazz, as some do. Or you can be reminded, just as easily, of the way the most traditional of folk balladeers floated their storytelling over the drone of some dulcimer or the Scottish pipes, and be equally on target. Being more modern and sophisticated than the conventional tones, and also at times more unreconstructed, is the essence of Wiseman’s vocal power.
This “float like a butterfly (then sting like a bee)” singing style had always called for more flow, more sustain than the lockedin “Monroe’s way or the highway” that the bluegrass police had favored, or had allowed in a band. Wiseman took another historic sonic step away from those conventions in 1954. For the live shows, especially for the slower ballad parts of those shows, if not yet for the records, Mac brought the dobro of Buck “Uncle Josh” Graves into the Country Boys.
Graves had gone to Earl Scruggs in 1949 to figure out how to work the equivalent of the Scruggs-style three-finger banjo rolls on the dobro. They’d worked it out together, and Graves developed a flowing, yet note-filled, cascading style as a result. He had been playing the earlier, sturdy Brother Oswald country style dobro with Wilma Lee & Stoney Cooper (Dominion Barn Dance regulars themselves) when Mac invited him to join the Country Boys. It’s a piece of history — the first change in the sound of bluegrass — that Josh himself was eager to clarify.
“Mac took the chance on it first — we both hold to that — that he was the first one to use the dobro for bluegrass,” Graves asserts. “It helped a lot that Mac was my favorite singer. I loved the slow stuff and the ballads that he did, especially, because that’s where the dobro would shine.
“I could work better with him than anybody I think, besides with Flatt & Scruggs. That heart and soul that he puts into a song, it just makes you want to play. He didn’t copy nobody, and he still don’t, the little rascal. I owe a lot to Mac.”
It was Josh’s playing with Mac, Wiseman agrees, that showed Earl and Lester how well the dobro sound could fit in, and it would, of course, become a mainstay in their classic band from that point. The additional opportunities for sustained sound that dobro offered very arguably opened the door, over time, to newgrass and some of the key innovations within the bluegrass genre.
If 1955 was The Year That Shook Country, what with the dawn of television and the simultaneous rockabilly revolution sweeping away much of traditional twang (and drastically changing radio), Mac saw the flux as much as an opportunity as a dilemma. He began by adding singles with very different sound and content to his mix, including a memorable turn on Smiley Lewis’ much-covered “I Hear You Knockin'” with piano triplets from Johnny Maddox, but with a fiddle still in play, and a treatment like no other. It may have been startling then; it sounds like some utterly alternate version of terrific rock ‘n’ roll now. He joined the competition to get out a version of the ballad theme from the Davy Crockett TV show sweeping the nation — the best of four out at once — and had another major hit.
The way that Wiseman already had — even solo, or especially solo — with a modern folk-like ballad such as “Dark As A Dungeon” (there’d soon be a single of that, too) served him well now, in the wake of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” hit and growing interest in Americana sagas.
Within months, he’d dropped the band — an economic necessity for many, but a move Wiseman could easily adjust to. And Mac jumped at Randy Wood’s decision to appoint him A&R head of a new Dot Country division, where he could call shots for other artists as well as himself, in Los Angeles. By the following year he’d be recording charming, jumpy turns on the Clovers’ “One Mint Julep”, Martha Carson’s “Hey Mister Bluesman”, and even that track, unissued at the time, called “Teenage Hangout”.
“The hardcore bluegrass fan was very skeptical of those,” Mac recalls, even though he was continuing to make bluegrass-friendly sides as well. “Some of the radio stations just dumped those new singles in the wastebasket. But in the northwest and midwest, where my earlier records had also been popular — Minneapolis, for instance — it was different. These records did very well. They had a record hop, Dick Clark sort of thing that I played there, to 10,000 people, along with Andy Williams and Eileen Rodgers.”
(Wiseman actually lip-synced “One Mint Julep” at that show, since there was no band around that could play the arrangement. Williams, who’d started out with his brothers on an Iowa barn dance show himself, was now pursuing a slightly rocked-up pop teen audience, with his years of TV stardom and “Moon River” mega-hits up the road; Rodgers was known at the time for bringing an especially bluesy tinge to pop.)
