The Story Behind The Song: “Tennessee Waltz” – Pee Wee King (#3 country, #30 pop, 1948) Cowboy Copus (#3 country, 1948) Roy Acuff (#12 country, 1948) Patti Page (#1 pop, #2 country, 1951) Pee Wee King (re-issue, #6 country, 1951) Lacy J. Dalton (#18 country, 1980) The co-writer of one of country music’s most enduring songs and one of the record industry’s all-time blockbuster hits had as unlikely a background of any person who has ever reached country music stardom and subsequent induction into the Country Music Hall of Fame. Julius Frank Anthony Kuczynski, the son of a violinist, was a city lad born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He was a mechanical draftsman by trade, but from his youth his passion was music. By fourteen he had already formed his own group and was playing fiddle and accordion at polka dances. He soon began appearing on radio as well. Bitten hard by the entertainment bug, Julius gave up on a career as a draftsman and left home while still in his teens. Moving to Louisville, Kentucky, he landed a job with the Gene Autry Show. By 1934 Kuczynski had become completely immersed in country music. Sensing that Julius Frank Anthony Kuczynski was not a great name for a hillbilly act, he started going by Frankie King. While performing on the “Crazy Water Barn Dance,” King would meet another young man who would become one of his best friends and his closest and most-trusted musical advisor. Redd Stewart was a talented Kentucky native who sang and was adept at several instruments as well, including guitar, piano and fiddle. Stewart had performed with a number of local Louisville groups for several years when King, now going by the name of Pee Wee instead of Frankie, was forming his Golden West Cowboys band. In 1935 Redd was one of the first men King hired for the Cowboys. Over the course of the next two decades, Stewart would play every instrument in his friend’s band and sing lead vocal on most of the group’s notable hits. Less than a year after they first played together, the Golden West Cowboys had developed such a strong following that they were invited to leave Louisville and move their show to Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. The group would remain WSM regulars for over a decade. Sensing that this was a prime opportunity, Pee Wee branched out. He travelled to Hollywood and appeared in cowboy movies. He also took his band to both coasts and appeared on several national radio shows. With their polish and shine as well as their solid dance numbers, the Cowboys were favorites wherever they worked. Despite some personnel changes, the group remained popular throughout the war years too. When World War II ended, Pee Wee was ready to really take them to the top. He was determined to get the Golden West Cowboys the one thing they lacked: a nationally-charted record. In the mid 1940s King collaborated with Stewart to write “Bonaparte’s Retreat.” After that mild success, the two began to write together more often. They found that some of their most productive hours as songwriters occurred during the long stretches on the road between gigs. It was on one of those arduous trips in 1946 that Pee Wee caught magic and fleshed it out into a song. King and Stewart were listening to the radio late one night as they crossed the Texas/Arkansas border and they heard Bill Monroe’s “Kentucky Waltz” come on the radio (which was a top country hit at the time) and Red noted an irony. He wondered aloud why no one had ever written a waltz about Tennessee. King thought about that for a few moments and suggested that it was probably just an oversight. He also was of the belief that he and Redd should take advantage of that oversight before someone else did. Turning the radio down, Redd grabbed the matchbox he had used to light his last cigar. Pulling a pen from the glove box, he waited for King to share his thoughts. Pee Wee said, “Why don’t we just add words to the ‘No Name Waltz?’” Stewart quickly agreed. An untitled melody had been the band’s theme song for years. Pee Wee and Redd always called it the “No Name Waltz.” Amazingly, the two men had never considered writing lyrics to the song until that night. Now as the Arkansas countryside flew by, they wondered why they had waited so long to add words to the old tune. With the dome light lighting up the cab, King and Stewart wrote a sad song about a dance and a lost love. When they arrived in Nashville the following morning, they turned it over to Fred Rose of Acuff-Rose publishing company. Rose adjusted one line of the song, changing “Oh the Tennessee Waltz, Oh the Tennessee Waltz” to “I remember the night and the Tennessee Waltz.” King started using “Tennessee Waltz” in his live shows and it quickly became a concert favorite. A considerable amount of time passed before Pee Wee’s group was able to cut the song, their recording being made in a December 2, 1947 session at the RCA Victor Studio in Chicago (RCA’s Nashville facility was still over a decade in the future). The record reached #3 on Billboard’s country listings (the chart was then known as “Best Selling Folk Retail Records”) and finished at #30 on the pop chart. Meanwhile, others took note of “Tennessee Waltz’s” natural appeal and headed to the recording studios to make their own versions of it. This was a common practice in those days. Sometimes there would be several versions of a song by different artists on the market at the same time. King’s original version turned up on the charts first, in April of ’48, and just one month later Lloyd “Cowboy” Copus (ironically a former member of Pee Wee’s Golden West Cowboys) had his own version of “Tennessee Waltz” on the charts as well. It too peaked at #3. Then Roy Acuff released the song in November, pushing his record to #12. Yet all of these successful releases paled in comparison to what would transpire two years later. Patti Page had been recording for the Mercury label since 1947 and had scored with several pretty good-sized hits, even notching a million-selling single, “With My Eyes Wide Open, I’m Dreaming.” In November, 1950 Patti entered the studio to cut a Christmas tune called “Boogie Woogie Santa Claus,” but she needed a “B” side for the holiday release. Instead of choosing another Christmas number, she selected “Tennessee Waltz” because the country hit two years earlier had been a favorite song of her father’s. Jerry Wexler, a record reviewer for Billboard Magazine, helped Page secure the sheet music for “Tennessee Waltz,” which was forwarded on to Patti’s manager and orchestra leader Jack Rael. The stage was now set for a history-making event. At the time, Mercury’s New York studio had just started experimenting with a primitive form of multi-track recording and when Patti Page arrived at the session, she discovered that the plan was for her to be a “guinea pig” of sorts because her assignment was to sing a duet with herself! “Tennessee Waltz” was determined to be the perfect song for this endeavor. First, a track was laid down with Patti singing the lead, then a completely different recording was made with her singing the harmony lines (years later, Skeeter Davis would use a more-modernized version of this technique to great success at Nashville’s RCA Victor studio). After blending the two tracks together (in a process known as “overdubbing”) Patti’s producers felt that her new recording had a “pleasant” feel to it and believed that “Tennessee Waltz” could perhaps become a modest seller based simply on the new voice-over harmony gimmick. Mercury’s promotions department had completely underestimated it and was totally caught off guard by the tidal wave that was about to hit. The “A” side, “Boogie Woogie Santa Claus,” was entirely ignored (even though the record had been issued during the height of the Christmas season) and “Tennessee Waltz” shot to #1 almost immediately, in Billboard Magazine’s December 16, 1950 issue. The song would remain in that position for thirteen of its thirty weeks on the pop chart. After the first initial pressings, “Boogie Woogie Santa Claus” was quickly replaced on the record by a song called “Long Long Ago,” with “Tennessee Waltz” now designated as the “A” side. Patti Page’s version of “Tennessee Waltz” also showed impressive numbers on Billboard’s country charts as well. Pee Wee King observed that former Golden West Cowboy Eddy Arnold had already bridged the gap between country and pop, and now with “Tennessee Waltz,” Page was reversing this trend by bringing her pop sound back to country! Patti’s record reached #2 on the country side and stayed there for three weeks, unable to crawl over Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Shotgun Boogie,” which was maintaining its fourteen week hold on the #1 position. Sensing the power of “Tennessee Waltz,” an onslaught of other artists raced to record it. New versions showed up seemingly each week. In pop music, Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Jo Stafford, Spike Jones, The Fontane Sisters and Anita Day all released singles on it in 1951 alone! Three of those cuts made the top ten. In country, RCA re-released Pee Wee King’s version, which made it to #6 the second time around. This set the stage for King’s runaway smash later that year, “Slow Poke,” which ranks sixteenth on Billboard’s all-time country hit list. “Tennessee Waltz” quickly became one of the most powerful moneymakers in music history. In the nearly seventy years since it was written, the song has been recorded by literally hundreds of performers. With sales of over six million copies, Patti Page’s version of “Tennessee Waltz” is the all-time best-selling single ever recorded by a female artist. It is also the sixth best-selling pop single released before 1954, and three of the songs ahead of it have an unfair advantage because they are perennial Christmas classics. In 1965 “Tennessee Waltz” was named an official state song of Tennessee (one of an eventual nine, the most of any state.) – JH
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 03:26:48 +0000