About the time the quartet got to going good, though, the draft struck: Merle went into the Marines, Grandpa into the Army, and Alton into the Navy. Since WLW owned the name Brown’s Ferry Four, the station continued to run the show, filling the spots with whatever singers were available who could sing gospel. For the first time in their careers, the Delmores were not singing together. Before they had split up, though, the Delmores, Merle, and Grandpa had made a handful of records for a Cincinnati businessman named Syd Nathan. (It was his used record store they had haunted looking for black gospel records.) Nathan’s label was called King, and during the war King records took off. By war’s end, the company was more than a regional label, and in March 1946 Nathan flew the Delmores, Grandpa, and Merle to Hollywood for a big recording session. Each act did some specialties, and then Nathan asked them to re-create the Brown’s Ferry Four for a couple of records—“Will the Circle Be Unbroken” and “Just a Little Talk with Jesus.” To everyone’s surprise, the quartet was a smash hit. The Delmores, on their own, had started out recording for King the same kind of acoustic, old-time duets they had been doing for Bluebird (and later Decca). Then, at the famous Hollywood session in early 1946, they tried something new: Adding a third guitar, played by Jethro Burns, and a strong bass, they did a piece Alton had written called “Hillbilly Boogie.” In the interim the Delmores had moved from Cincinnati to the more heady atmosphere of Memphis, where the blues and rhythm and blues were flourishing. The brothers’ longtime interest in the blues found new inspiration. At the same time, a new style known as “country boogie” was producing hit records for Porky Freeman and Arthur “Guitar Boogie” Smith. Syd Nathan was anxious to get a piece of the action. With “Hillbilly Boogie,” he did, and the Delmores found themselves riding the crest of yet a third career. Soon the Delmores were cutting uptempo boogie records at almost every King session. One of their first big boogie hits was “Freight Train Boogie,” in 1946, on which the acoustic sound was enhanced by an electric guitar—the brothers’ first step into “modern” country. Next came “Mobile Boogie,” “Peach Tree Boogie,” “Pan American Boogie,” “Sand Mountain Blues,” and “Blues Stay Away from Me.” The latter, cut in 1949 as an example of what Syd Nathan called “a hillbilly Hucklebuck” (a popular rhythm and blues dance), became the biggest hit of all. Worked out by the brothers and Henry Glover, King’s black studio pianist, the song featured one of the most memorable guitar riffs in modern music: It was invented, and played, by Zeke Turner, the Cincinnati session man who played some of the hottest licks heard on Hank Williams’s records. Another fixture on the boogie sides was harmonica player Wayne Raney, who had teamed up with the brothers in late 1945 and worked with them off and on for the next six years. Sadly, the Delmores seemed unable to take full advantage of the spectacular success of their King records. They moved restlessly around the South during this time; from Memphis they went to Chattanooga in 1947, then to Jackson, Mississippi, then to Athens, Alabama, then to WCKY in Covington, Kentucky, then to Fort Smith, Arkansas, then to Del Rio, Texas, and finally to Houston. Here they finally broke up. The country boogie fad had spent its force, and the newer rockabilly and honky-tonk styles were starting to emerge. Though Alton was interested and able to embrace this next generation of music (he, in fact, cut a couple of rockabilly-flavored singles in the later 1950s), Rabon couldn’t. With Rabon suffering from lung cancer, the brothers reunited for a final few months. There was time for one more recording session, in August 1952; they decided to do a set of Brown’s Ferry Four sides, and one under their own name. One of these, “The Trail of Time,” became the final hit in a joint career that encompassed over two hundred sides. On December 4, 1952, Rabon died. Alton Delmore, the more creative of the two, who had written most of their songs, continued to dabble in music, but with little success. His songs were recorded by artists like Tennessee Ernie Ford, and he enjoyed modest royalties; but he finished out his life working as a postman, bitter about the new Nashville scene. He channeled some of his creative energy into writing fiction, and completed most of an autobiography titled Truth Is Stranger than Publicity. The Delmores’ music still lives today in the work of artists like Doc Watson, Bill Monroe, Jim and Jesse, Ricky Skaggs, Emmylou Harris, and others, and in the work of Alton’s son, Lionel, whose “Swingin’” was a huge hit in the early 1980s. Their legacy is one of country music’s richest, a link between the music’s past and its future.
