“Clear channel” meant that no other station anywhere in the country was assigned to WSM’s 650 wavelength, and that the 50,000-watt WSM signal could be heard widely. But now, with the NBC hookup, parts of the Grand Ole Opry would be heard literally nationwide—at first on some NBC stations, eventually on all. Chosen for the network segment was the so-called Prince Albert Show portion of the Opry, one that featured Roy and his band.
Thus every Saturday night Acuff’s music was carried into an imposing number of homes, reaching many who knew little of country music, and others who could now hear the Prince Albert portion more clearly than they could the other sections of the Opry. Though Acuff didn’t do the kind of announcing he would do in later years (the announcing was handled by Judge Hay, reading from clever scripts), he handled scripts well, was quick with an appropriate ad lib, and displayed an easygoing humility.
Fans began to see what Roy was really all about. As he began to specialize more and more in heart-tugging sentimental songs like “Don’t Make Me Go to Bed and I’ll Be Good,” fans were impressed with how seriously he took the songs. On one particular show in early 1940, Acuff began singing an old piece called “That Beautiful Picture,” spun it out for a full four or five minutes, and by the end, according to witnesses, tears were literally streaming down his cheeks.
The audience went wild with applause. Even on the tight network schedule, Opry management let Roy come back on stage for an encore, to do another couple of verses. It was all part of the magic of his appeal, and now it was being heard on NBC as well. It was also during this time—the years between 1940 and 1943— that Roy produced his biggest group of hit records. His “Great Speckled Bird” and “Wabash Cannonball” had been cut and made into hits even before he came to the Opry, but now came the second wave—the ones that got on the Billboard charts, onto the jukeboxes, onto radio shows across the country.
There was the one that started with the plaintive, “Way back in the hills . . .”—“The Precious Jewel.” Roy wrote it himself, driving the band car to a show date one evening. “Rachael sat beside me and took the words down,” he recalled; the melody he borrowed from an old prison song called “Hills of Roane County.” Then there was “Wreck on the Highway,” the song “where whiskey and blood ran together,” which was recorded in May 1942. As with “Precious Jewel,” this one featured a “screaming tenor” by Oswald—no-holds-barred mountain music as its best. (On one such session, Oswald’s voice gave out, and he had to reinforce it with a bottle of the song’s subject.) There were the other great train songs, “Fire Ball Mail” (1942) and “Night Train to Memphis” (1942).
Serious Acuff fans also remember a few chart hits that aren’t so well-known today: “The Prodigal Son” (1942), “I’ll Forgive You But I Can’t Forget” (1944), and a rollicking song about the newfangled Social Security system called “Old Age Pension Check” (1939). Most of these records came out on the old purple Okeh label, then a subsidiary of Columbia. During his early recording days, Roy had almost lost the rights to a number of his songs to a clever A&R man.
