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AT HOME: At the Cave, Roy and his immediate family (his wife, Mildred, and 9-year-old son, Roy Neill) do not stay at the hotel, but live in a big lodge on the edge of the lake. One end of its huge living-room features Roy's miniature-liquor-bottle collection.
In Nashville, the AcufFs live in a new house in the Ingle-wood section. It is pine-paneled throughout (even to the bathrooms), compact but comfortable, and designed for simple and uncomplicated living and entertaining. One end of one hall features Roy's hand-painted tie collection. There is also the office where Mildred keeps her books—and a sharp eye on the whole complex Acuff operation.
Close friends say that a large part of the Acuff business acumen is Mildred's. She says that the only financial training she ever had she got at a time when she was cashier in a drugstore, before she married Roy in 1936.
Both were born in East Tennessee, not far from Knox-ville. Roy's father was both "a qualified minister and lawyer." But he was not well off financially, and Roy says "we lived just like common livin' folks." But music was not his first choice as a career. He went to Florida as a young man for a big-league baseball tryout. A sunstroke got him, however, and he came back to Tennessee a sick boy. It was then that his father found him a fiddle and a batch of phonograph records.
FIDDLE AND YO-YO: Music pulled Roy out of his illness and troubles, and it was not long before he had joined a medicine show. "I figured that might work instead of sitting around home, playing the fiddle, and yo-yoing." There followed appearances on WROL and WNOX in Knox-ville and finally, in 1938, his first appearances on WSM and the Grand Ole Opry.
"I'm a seller and not a singer," he explains. "I'm strictly a seller. There's something about me. I'm able to reach the people. I started balancing my bow to keep the fiddle in the act. Then I got too nervous and got me a yo-yo. What will come after the yo-yo, I don't know. But I'll find something."
But showmanship alone does not explain Acuff's appeal to his audience (and like most country musicians, he feels |
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