Google roy acuff biography
•
•
Roy Acuff: The Smoky Mountain Boy
This biography of a Nashville legend is “one of the best studies of a country music personality that has been issued to date” (The Journal of Country Music).
Roy Acuff was the first living performer to be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame. He was an artist whose devotion to his work boosted not only his own career, but also the credibility and popularity of his field. This country music legend helped bring the fledgling industry and its capital, The Grand Ole Opry, from regional entertainment to certified national institution.
His career began back in 1938, when this son of a small-town Baptist preacher made his first appearance on the famed stage in Nashville. This first step toward stardom transformed his life. Roy Acuff: The Smoky Mountain Boy draws upon personal interviews with Acuff’s contemporaries, friends, and family as well as Acuff himself—tracing the roots of his career through the evolution of his musical s
•
Roy Acuff, First Superstar of Country Music, Dies : Entertainment: Tennessee singer, 89, was a mainstay of the Grand Ole Opry for more than half a century.
Roy Acuff, the grand old man of the Grand Ole Opry, died Monday in Nashville, Tenn., the scene of his greatest triumphs.
He was 89 and had been hospitalized several times recently for heart problems. He died in Baptist Hospital, where he had been admitted Oct. 30.
Acuff was country music’s first superstar. He sang and recorded such evergreen anthems as “The Great Speckled Bird,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Fireball Mail” and “Night Train to Memphis” and was a fixture for more than 50 years at the Opry, that Big Rock Candy Mountain of corn and country where fans go to worship while young singers and pickers perform and pray for success.
Becoming a multimillionaire in a field that prides itself on humble beginnings, Acuff had watched country music begin to grow in the 1920s, when a young balladeer named Jimmy Rodgers was singing for