South Carolina, then to Washington, then to Charleston, West Virginia, then to Birmingham. In Birmingham they organized a hillbilly union and met Hank Williams, whom Alton described as “a sad boy.” Finally they landed at WLW, the new powerhouse station in Cincinnati. By 1943 WLW was at 50,000 watts, but it was still heard all over the Midwest. At this point the station decided to increase its country music programming to ten hours a week and add the popular Boone County Jamboree. This move attracted a number of bright young musicians besides the Delmores, including Grandpa Jones and Merle Travis. As the war began to take its toll on various bands, program director George Biggar (formerly of Chicago’s WLS) told Alton Delmore he needed “a good, down-to-earth gospel quartet” to replace one of the decimated bands. Alton commented that he used to teach gospel music singing schools in Alabama, and Biggar told him to try to put one together. Alton got together his brother, Grandpa Jones, and Merle Travis and talked them into trying out. Grandpa recalls: “We left the studio and went out into the hallway and tried a couple of songs out. They sounded okay—our voices blended all right. So we went in and told Mr. Biggar he had his gospel group. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Start in the morning. Go a half-hour.’” Back in the hallway, the boys began to wonder just what they had let themselves in for. The quartet didn’t even have a name, so they began to think of one. Travis recalled that the Delmores’ biggest hit had been “Brown’s Ferry Blues,” named for the Alabama hamlet where the brothers had grown up. He suggested they call themselves the Brown’s Ferry Four. Everybody laughed at the joke—a gospel quartet named after an off-color song like “Brown’s Ferry Blues.” But Alton began to think, “You know, that’s not a bad name. It’s got a good ring to it.” So, Travis later recalled, “We went on and called ourselves the Brown’s Ferry Four, and nobody ever connected it to Alton’s bawdy ‘Two old maids lying in the sand’ song.” The quartet would, of course, become the most popular country gospel group of the decade. It took to the air in 1943; because they had to have enough material to do thirty minutes a day, Alton taught the others how to read the shape-note gospel songbooks put out by StampsBaxter, James D. Vaughan, and others. They also liked to do “spirituals”—the old-time name for black gospel songs. To learn these, the four went down to a used record store in downtown Cincinnati to buy used records by groups like the Golden Gate Quartet. Merle picked guitar and sang bass; Grandpa sang baritone; Rabon, tenor; and Alton, lead. Soon the show was drawing stacks of mail. Grandpa recalled, “We were amazed at the response we started getting from farmers and factory workers who tuned us in at such an early hour.”
