Roy would put up $25,000 seed money, and Rose would completely run the company. At the center of the catalog would be songs by Acuff and by Rose. Sensing the time might be right for a country music publisher, one located right in Nashville, Rose agreed, and on October 13, 1942, Acuff-Rose was born. (For legal reasons, the actual partnership was signed between Fred and Mildred Acuff.) Within two months, Fred came to Roy and said, “I think we need a little bigger place”—the new company was taking off. Eventually, of course, it would be the most famous publisher in Nashville, with catalogs that ran from Hank Williams to the Everly Brothers.
Going into the 1940s, Roy and the band traveled like any other Opry group, grinding over old two-lane highways in Packards and Fords; their dream, Roy recalled, was to do a show where their gate would crack $100. As the radio, the films, the records, and the songs began to work their magic, the tours began to grow as well. By 1943, some of their shows at southern fairs were attracting as many as 16,000 fans.
For a time, Roy decided to travel with his own tent show—a fleet of trucks, the entertainers, a crew of roustabouts to put up the tents, a set of cooks to feed everybody, and a sound crew to set up the sound. “We started out in Georgia in early spring and worked our way up north, up through the Carolinas and Virginias, up to Ohio,” Roy recalled.