Roy Acuff, First Superstar of Country Music, Dies : Entertainment: Tennessee singer, 89, was a mainstay of the Grand Ole Opry for more than half a century.

Roy Acuff, the grand old man of the Grand Ole Opry, died Monday in Nashville, Tenn., the scene of his greatest triumphs.

He was 89 and had been hospitalized several times recently for heart problems. He died in Baptist Hospital, where he had been admitted Oct. 30.

Acuff was country music’s first superstar. He sang and recorded such evergreen anthems as “The Great Speckled Bird,” “Wabash Cannonball,” “Fireball Mail” and “Night Train to Memphis” and was a fixture for more than 50 years at the Opry, that Big Rock Candy Mountain of corn and country where fans go to worship while young singers and pickers perform and pray for success.

Becoming a multimillionaire in a field that prides itself on humble beginnings, Acuff had watched country music begin to grow in the 1920s, when a young balladeer named Jimmy Rodgers was singing for pennies. In those days Rodgers told simple tales of trains that would take him to faraway places. Today, electronically balanced concerts by such megastars as Willie Nelson draw tens of thousands to outdoor spectaculars.

Yet Acuff seemed unchanged through all the decades of popularity and profit. As an aged icon he told a gathering of cultural giants who had gathered for his 1991 Kennedy Center Award that “there are a lot more people who deserve it more than me.”

His millions of fans would have taken great exception.

Even as his gait wavered and his eyes dimmed, the acknowledged King of Country continued to fill auditoriums.

In 1988, he granted one of his last interviews (he said he was tired of taking questions from people who knew the answers better than he), talking at length to a Chicago Tribune reporter on the 50th anniversary of his Grand Ole Opry debut. He remembered that he had gone to the Opry on Feb. 19, 1938, 13 years after it had gone on the air in the infancy of radio. He had been playing fiddle and singing with his Smoky Mountain Boys at a Knoxville station, but the station’s range was only 50 miles or so. He was sent for when another band walked away from a performance in a management dispute.

As the weekend Opry broadcasts became more popular, its airwave power was increased. Soon the short, lean Acuff, who had been a sensation singing “The Great Speckled Bird” in his Opry debut, was being heard throughout the South over a 50,000-watt channel.

Those broadcasts gave him both a permanent home and a place in the hearts of country fans everywhere.

Singer George Jones said Acuff was his idol from the time he was 6 or 7. “When I came to the Opry for the first time in ‘56, he was the most kind, gentle man I’d ever met,” Jones said Monday. “ . . . He’s put out a lot of wonderful, great music for so many years.”

Said Porter Wagoner: “I think he’ll be missed probably more than any entertainer or singer ever has in the history of our business, because Roy Acuff was certainly known worldwide. . . . I don’t think anyone will ever replace Roy Acuff.”

Roy Claxton Acuff, who was believed to have been designated “The King of Country” by baseball legend Dizzy Dean, had hoped to become a ballplayer himself.

He had won 13 athletic letters at Central High in Knoxville, the city where his family had moved after Roy’s birth near Maynardsville in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee. His father was a Baptist preacher and amateur fiddler, and Acuff said he came honestly by the sobriquet “hillbilly.”

He was offered a contract by the New York Yankees after he graduated from school, but a severe case of sunstroke ended his athletic aspirations. Instead, he turned to music, which he had learned by singing in his father’s churches while teaching himself to play the fiddle.

Acuff hooked up with Doc Hower’s Medicine Show, and after touring for a few years, formed a group he called the Crazy Tennesseans. That name was quickly changed to the Smoky Mountain Boys when some thought the earlier name derogatory.

He was discovered in 1936 by talent agent Arthur Satherly, who placed him under contract with Columbia.

“I was one of the first fellas who reared back and hit a microphone with a strong voice,” Acuff often said of his first night in Nashville. “That,” he said, “got me my job. When I sang ‘The Great Speckled Bird’ I was the first one that ever drew mail” from the Opry radio audience.

“I never went for crooning,” he said of his passionately emotional style in a typical Acuff understatement.

At the Opry and elsewhere he sang both the secular (“Old Age Pension Check” during the birth of Social Security) and the spiritual (“Radio Station S-A-V-E-D” with news “direct from heaven”) and by 1940 had settled on the instrumental format that defined the balance of his six-decade career: a traditional mountain string band without any of the swing accents affected by such singing cowboys as Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

He shunned electric instruments. His band normally consisted of fiddles, Dobros, acoustic guitars, pianos and harmonicas.

Acuff possessed the business sense common to those who have risen from country-boy poverty. In 1942, with songwriter and pianist Fred Rose, he formed the Acuff-Rose Publishing Co. to reap an even greater harvest from his music. It became the world’s leading country music publisher.

Acuff said he decided to become his own publisher after “people from Chicago, New York and California” began showing up in Nashville wanting to buy his songs.

“They was offering me a thousand to $1,200,” he recalled many years later. “I told my wife, ‘If this song is worth $1,200 to them it must be worth more than that to me.’ ”

During World War II Acuff performed before tens of thousands of servicemen. When Foreman Philips founded the Los Angeles County Barn Dance on the Venice Pier in 1942, Acuff appeared at its premiere, conquering another section of America.

In 1944, Acuff, now a regional and soon to be a national institution, entered the political arena, running to unseat the Republican governor of Tennessee who had refused to appear on the Grand Ole Opry, saying country music was “disgracing the state.” Acuff withdrew from that race but four years later campaigned in earnest with his Smoky Mountain Boys, winning the Republican nomination.

Although he lost the election, he received 167,000 votes, more than any GOP nominee had ever earned in a statewide campaign. In a philosophical concession speech, he said that if he had won, “I would have been just another politician. As a singer, I can be Roy Acuff.”

By then other country legends--Bill Monroe, Hank Snow, Ernest Tubb--were sharing the Opry stage with Acuff, singing songs of desolation, unrequited love, unfaithful lovers, car wrecks on the highway, the demise of sickly children and the grief of the parents those waifs had left behind.

In 1962 Acuff became the first living person elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame.

The citation read: “The Smoky Mountain Boy fiddled and sang his way into the hearts of millions the world over, oftentimes bringing country music to areas where it had never been before. . . . Many successful artists credit their success to a helping hand and encouraging word from Roy Acuff.”

He suffered multiple and serious injuries in an automobile accident on a rainy highway outside Sparta, Tenn., in 1965. After a long and painful recuperation, he cut back on his traveling while building up the country music museum he had established in Nashville. More and more his wife, Mildred, became the business person in the family, overseeing Acuff-Rose and Hickory Records, which the Acuffs co-owned. But by the 1970s he had resumed his old hectic pace.

A New York Daily News critic wrote in 1971 that “Acuff hits the stage like greased Tennessee lightning. And he punctuates his renditions . . . with turns on the fiddle, the uke and even the yo-yo.”

During breaks at the Opry, he entertained by doing yo-yo tricks and balancing his fiddle upright on the bridge of his nose while fans rushed to the stage to take pictures.

When President Richard M. Nixon visited the Opry in 1974, a widely published picture showed Nixon using Acuff’s yo-yo.

Acuff stepped across the country line in 1972, recording, with the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, “I Saw the Light” and “The Precious Jewel.” But he harrumphed afterward, “I have no respect for hippies.”

He said he had made the records only at the urging of a friend of both Acuff and the band of longhaired, bearded musicians. He went to the studio and, reflecting on a recording tradition he had established years earlier, said to the young band members: “Fellers, they call me one-time Acuff. Now let’s get it over with.”

He added to that legend by recording his songs in a single take.

In 1974 the Opry left behind the trying acoustics and limited capacity of Ryman Auditorium and moved into new quarters in Opryland U.S.A., an amusement and entertainment park on the outskirts of Nashville near Acuff’s country music museum.

Acuff by now was in improved quarters himself, living in an antebellum mansion in Nashville where he proudly flew an American flag each day.

Acuff, who signed off each of his thousands of performances saying, “Till we meet again,” resisted retirement until his heart began to fail recently.

“My 50 years with the Opry,” he said in 1988, “is just another day to me. I’d like to stay with them a while longer but . . . I have no set program. As long as I’m feeling good . . . I want to stay around.

“And when I feel that I’m not beneficial any longer, I’ll thank ‘em. And that’ll be the way that I leave.”

Said Robert Hilburn, The Times’ pop music critic, after Acuff’s death:

“Roy Acuff was country music’s greatest ambassador for so long that it’s hard to picture the music or his great love, the Grand Ole Opry, without him.

“Acuff’s trademark songs represented an inspiring link with the purity of the country’s rural tradition, and he put so much passion into those songs each time he stepped to the microphone that it was impossible not to be touched anew by them. His dedication and devotion to country music served as an influence and model for hundreds of contemporary country singers who once dreamed of nothing more than someday being able to stand alongside Acuff on the Opry stage.”

Acuff’s wife, whom he married in 1936, died in 1981. Their son, Roy Neal, survives.

(Southland Edition, A24) Country Anthems

Some hits by Roy Acuff:

“The Great Speckled Bird”

“Wabash Cannonball”

“The Precious Jewel”

“Wreck on the Highway”

“Fireball Mail”

“Night Train to Memphis”

“Cowards Over Pearl Harbor”

“So Many Times”

“Come and Knock”

“Freight Train Blues”