Eddy Arnold Stories

(written by Steve Nelson & Bob Hilliard)

Eddy Arnold (#1 country, #13 pop, 1948)

Mickey Gilley (#11, 1975)

Perhaps the most extraordinary example of a rags-to-riches story in country music would be Eddy Arnold’s. The son of a sharecropper, he spent his youth plowing fields with a mule team. In his spare time (what little of it there was), he learned to chord on his cousin’s borrowed Sears guitar. By the time Eddy had grown into his teens, his favorite singers were Gene Autry and Bing Crosby. Fearful of being permanently trapped in the life of a sharecropper, Arnold left home at seventeen and put together a country band in Jackson, Tennessee. Over the course of the next few years, he drifted first to Memphis and then to St. Louis with his guitar and his songs. Though he continued to play clubs, he rarely made more than a dollar a night. The poor kid from the country had become a poorer kid in the city, and there were few signs that Eddy’s luck would ever change.

Almost as if by magic, fortune smiled on Arnold in 1940 when Pee Wee King heard the young man sing. The band leader loved Eddy’s smooth country style and offered him a spot in his Golden West Cowboys band. Arnold couldn’t wait to pack his bags and hit the road. For the first time in his life he had a regular music job that paid solid money. King’s group performed at some of the country’s best clubs and night spots. These big-time venues offered a tremendous opportunity for Eddy to hone his talents, but what was even more important to him was that King owned a regular spot on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry. It was there that Arnold would make the most of his golden opportunity.

For three years, Eddy provided vocals for the Golden West Cowboys on the road and at the Opry. In 1943, feeling that he was sufficiently seasoned, he walked away from the band and talked the Opry’s radio flagship, WSM, into giving him a show of his own. Within weeks Eddy was so popular on the station that he was given a solo spot on the Opry.

Then what looked to be a huge break fell into Arnold’s lap. Impressed with his voice on radio as well as his Opry following, RCA offered the singer a record deal. This big break turned out to be a false start. A union strike shut down the recording business for over a year. Because of this, it was 1945 before the record label was able to introduce its newest act. By then, thanks to his Opry connection, Eddy really needed no introduction. Unfortunately, RCA was promoting him as “The Tennessee Plowboy,” perhaps the worst moniker ever for a non-comedic performer, especially an artist that the label would soon be marketing toward the pop music audience. But amazingly, this horrendous nickname would not hinder Arnold’s career.  

Eddy’s first records failed to make the national charts. It took Arnold almost a year to produce a smash country release in “That’s How Much I Love You,” which spent four weeks at #2 in 1946. Eddy, who was now being managed by a former carnival circuit promoter, Colonel Tom Parker, followed it up with “What Is Life Without Love” (his first of 28 Billboard number-one hits), and “It’s a Sin,” another chart-topper. Arnold’s success with these smooth ballads seemed out of place at the Opry. He was sharing a stage with fan favorites such as Ernest Tubb, Bill Monroe and Roy Acuff. Dressed in his tailored country-style outfits, Eddy looked as if he could be Tubb’s cousin, but when he opened his mouth he sounded as if he should have been on Broadway.

While many in hillbilly music saw this crooner style as an affront to “real” country music, RCA and Colonel Parker saw potential beyond the rather confined borders of Nashville-based music. Very quietly they began to market Eddy to both country and pop arenas. They also began to look for material away from the usual country songwriting circles. The table was now set for this orchestrated country/pop move in March, 1948. Arnold placed a song called “Anytime” atop the country charts for nine weeks, while also sliding it over to #17 on the pop side. With this release, Eddy had broken over to the “big” chart, but only in a very small way. “Anytime” spent just one scant week in the pop numbers.

For the next single, RCA turned to a songwriting team, Steve Nelson and Bob Hilliard. The composers had just come up with a romantic ballad that seemed perfect for the nation’s top pop crooners, but RCA had something quite different in mind. In a sense, “Bouquet of Roses” was a manufactured piece. It was written not to reflect a bad life experience (as many country songs were), but to marry words to an already written score. Such was often the case with pop material, and this was almost always how it worked on Broadway. But in Nashville, songs were supposed to be “lived.” In country music’s capital, songwriting was not a nine-to-five job. It was a gift from the heavens, and the resulting tunes were supposed to be “inspired.”

While “Bouquet of Roses” might have gone against the Music City grain, having been “produced” rather than “lived,” the song’s lyrics did have a country feel. This was the story of a jilted lover whose heart had been broken over and over again by one uncaring person. Still, even with its theme of lost love, “Bouquet of Roses” was far different from the era’s other big country songs. It would have been hard to imagine Ernest Tubb or Bob Wills performing the number at a country dance hall.

Inspired or not, Eddy Arnold’s recording of “Bouquet of Roses” shot to #1 on Billboard’s country chart and held that position for 19 weeks, making it the sixth-biggest country hit of all time. The record remained on the chart for just over a year – 54 weeks – longer than any other country record in history. Yet, it was on the pop side where “Bouquet of Roses” made the most waves for Arnold. It placed at #13 on the Billboard pop listings and, more importantly, stayed on the chart as a best-seller for 27 weeks. When pop covers of “Bouquet of Roses” did appear, none came close to the original in chart action or sales. With Eddy Arnold, country music had finally produced a performer who didn’t need to have his country hits covered by a pop artist to be accepted in the pop music world. Eddy was welcomed everywhere.

With startling speed, Eddy Arnold challenged the very fabric of country music. With his effortless style, his sophisticated touch and his country charm, he opened up the industry for a new kind of star. No longer did a performer have to work his way up via the beer halls and honky-tonks. Now, to sell records an artist didn’t have to sing with a twang or a yodel, and a country music fan could now have a college degree and be from New York City. George Morgan, Tennessee Ernie Ford and Jim Reeves, among others, followed in Eddy’s footsteps and with their smooth styles and country values, they won fans in both rural and urban areas. But it was Arnold who blazed the trail.

Eddy Arnold was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1966, the youngest person ever elected (at age 48). Usually, induction into the Hall takes place toward the end of an artist’s career, but the year after Eddy became a member, he won the Country Music Association’s “Entertainer of the Year” award and continued producing Billboard Top Ten hits at RCA for another 13 years, the last being “That’s What I Get for Lovin’ You” in the summer of 1980.

Arnold hosted dozens of network television specials, regularly dressed in a tuxedo. He became the first major country act to appear on numerous mainstream television shows and was also the first to appear on the major stages of the nation’s biggest cities. In the course of his career, Eddy became the most successful act in country music chart history, placing nearly 150 singles on Billboard Magazine’s country playlists, with 28 of them reaching the summit. Throughout his remarkable recording career he spent a total of 145 weeks, or almost three years, at #1.

When considering what made Eddy Arnold a worldwide star, one has to only look at the boy’s earliest musical influences. On an old record player, listening to records bought with money he made plowing neighbors’ fields, Eddy memorized the words to all the Bing Crosby and Gene Autry standards. Years later, with huge crossover hits like “Bouquet of Roses,” Arnold successfully meshed those two vastly separate styles into one, thus bringing legions of new fans to country music, expanding the scope of his musical genre, and bringing the country hick and the city slicker a lot closer together.