As his records now took off, he began to sense that there was money to be made from the songs as well. In 1941 his wife, Mildred, got together a sheaf of his favorite songs, as well as some snapshots of the band, took them to a local printer in Nashville, and came up with a little souvenir songbook. They sold these for 25 cents each to fans at shows in schoolhouses and auditoriums, and even bought time to advertise over WSM, offering them for sale by mail. This was by no means a novel idea—Opry singers had been doing this for ten years—but the sentimental Acuff songs struck such a chord that thousands of fans responded.
Quarters—actual quarters, not checks or money orders—rolled in. Mildred had to hire extra help to get the books in the mail, and soon she was carrying quarters to the local bank in bushel baskets. Now came letters from northern publishers wanting to strike a deal to include Acuff songs in their folios and books. “The fourth New York publisher had offered up to $2,500 a song for nearly anything I could write,” Roy recalled. This only made him suspicious that his songs were worth even more.
About this same time, he got a letter from a lawyer in South Carolina representing a local textile worker, Dorsey Dixon, who claimed ownership of “Wreck on the Highway,” which was becoming popular. Dixon had copyrighted the song as “I Didn’t Hear Any Body Pray” in 1938, though he had actually bought the song from a popular North Carolina radio singer, Wade Mainer. As it turned out, Roy answered that he had not tried to copyright the song, and he eventually reached an accommodation with Dixon.
But the episode showed him that as his popularity grew, the songs he sang were becoming important properties and needed special attention. The days of casually picking up an old “public domain” folk ballad were over. Thus in 1942 Acuff made what would be the most important and most lucrative decision of his career: He sought out veteran songwriter Fred Rose and asked him if he would be interested in starting up a publishing company.
Rose was a forty-five-year-old native of Evansville, Indiana, who had grown up in St. Louis and Chicago; during the late 1920s, he had been a popular radio singer and pianist and even recorded pop songs for the Brunswick Company. He had been to Nashville in the early 1930s, before Roy came to the Opry, and had then gone to Hollywood to write cowboy songs for Gene Autry films.
He knew the big-city publishing business well and had learned how to write just about any kind of song. In fact, in the spring of 1942, Rose’s friend Art Satherley, the Columbia A&R man, submitted “Fire Ball Mail” to Roy, a song Rose had penned under a pseudonym. Roy liked it enough to record it, and only later found out Rose had actually written it. This so impressed the singer that, he said, “I went to Fred Rose and made him an offer I hoped he couldn’t refuse.” Roy offered Rose a partnership in a new Nashville-based publishing company.