The Delmore Brothers - Biography
Among country music's numerous sibling duos of the 1930's, the Delmore Brothers easily rank as the most influential, creative and original of them all. With an appealing, progressive sound equally influenced by gospel, country and blues, the Delmores ultimately contributed more than a few songs that became standards, helped introduce a proto-rock & roll brand of hillbilly boogie and also anchored the Brown's Ferry Four, country's first superstar gospel quartet. The brothers, Alton, born December 25, 1908 and Rabon, born December 3, 1916, were natives of Elkmont, Alabama, and grew up enveloped in the Deep South's febrile Gospel Quartet culture (an uncle, W.A. Williams was a prominent gospel songwriter and they also attended school with future gospel giants Jake Hess and G.T. Speer). Their early exposure to this intensely passionate brand of spiritual singing later enabled the pair to excel in some of most complex and stylized harmony vocals in country music history, a process they began in the mid-1920s--when Rabon was just ten years old. Entering and often taking the top honors at local fiddle contests (each were already proficient on guitar and fiddle), the brothers played a ceaseless string of local barn dances, school house and church socials.
By 1931, with a pair of battered guitars carried in cotton sacks, a handful of original songs and ambitions matching their talent, the brothers made their first disc ("Alabama Lullaby" b/w "Got the Kansas City Blues") for Columbia Records, but it's less than modest success didn't discourage the pair. After bombarding Grand Ole Opry general manager Harry Stone with a series of letters extolling their virtues, the Delmores were granted an audition in 1933, and although they showed up a full day late, secured a spot as regular performers on the prestigious WSM radio broadcast. Recording for RCA's Bluebird label, the Delmores waxed their signature tune, the ribald "Brown's Ferry Blues" (their first big hit), along with Delmores classics "Gonna Lay Down My Old Guitar," "Mountain Dew" and additional dozen or so additional titles.
With the national exposure the Opry brought, enjoyed a good measure of commercial success. Despite the fact that the Delmores were an immediate audience favorite, quickly became great friends with Opry star Uncle Dave Macon and were also instrumental in bringing Roy Acuff to the Opry in 1938, their relations with WSM's controlling, penurious management were rocky at best. They up and quit later that year and drifted around a series of radio gigs throughout the Southeast before landing a job on Cincinnati high-powered "super station" WLW and a contract with fast-rising independent hillbilly-R&B label King Records. At WLW, a hotbed of soon-to-break-out talent, they were both well-paid and well treated and quickly felt right at home. With everyone from Western Swinger (and fellow Alabaman) Hank Penny, kiddie act the Williams Brothers (featuring future pop balladeer Andy), guitarist Chet Atkins and comedian George Gobel working at the studio, the Delmores entered the happiest and most creative period of their career.
In short order, they formed the strictly gospel Browns Ferry Four with virtuoso banjoist Grandpa Jones and the Kentucky finger-picking guitar genius Merle Travis. It was an idiosyncratic outfit (considering the name came from Alton’s off-color 1933 hit) but the public responded enthusiastically and the quartet recorded sporadically up until the mid-1950’s, long after Travis had re-located to Los Angeles and stardom at Capitol Records. While Rabon's wartime induction to the Navy and the Musicians Union imposed 1942-1944 recording ban sidetracked the act, by 1944 the Delmores were back in full swing, and with potent sidemen like harmonica player Wayne Raney and guitarist Zeke Turner (the former later fruitfully collaborated with Lefty Frizzell, while the latter would record extensively with Hank Williams), they began cutting a series of bluesy, highly influential and big-selling boogies. Hot, unconventional performances like “Hillbilly Boogie” and “Pan American Boogie” cleared the way for rock & roll, and were successes in their own right; the Delmores’ "Freight Train Boogie" charted Top 3 and "Blues Stay Away From Me" (later covered by Memphis upstarts the Johnny Burnette Rock &Roll Trio) hit number one in 1949. Established as one of country’s most solid post-war attractions, the Delmores could write their own ticket, and between road work, they broadcast from a variety of radio stations, finally settling at powerful Del Rio “border station” XERF (whose signal reached into Canada) in 1950.
The brothers were content in “the desert country they call the Last Frontier” but, unhappily, it proved to be just that --Rabon suffered a heart attack in 1951, a copyright dispute over Alton’s much-recorded “Beautiful Brown Eyes” was settled unsatisfactorily and not long after those blows, their father died, followed by the sudden death of Alton’s three year old daughter. The act barely survived this series of disasters, and after Rabon moved to Detroit to save a failing marriage, Alton quit the business and worked as a bartender. After Rabon was diagnosed with lung cancer, Alton re-located to Detroit and the brothers resumed performing until Rabon’s death in December 1952. A staggering blow to Alton (“the unreality of death” he called it in his extraordinary autobiography Truth is Stranger Than Publicity), the loss essentially ended his interest in music and, apart from a few occasional, half-hearted ventures, the world heard very little from Alton Delmore again. With a bum liver from years of hard drinking and a broken heart over the loss of brother, Alton died in 1964. Merle Travis and Johnny Bond recorded a Delmores tribute album for Capitol shortly after his death and their songs were recorded by everyone from Hank Williams to Glen Campbell to Bob Dylan--a powerful testimony to the brothers towering country music legacy