Legend dies, but legacy lives on
The music world lost another legend last Thursday. Eddy Arnold died at age 89 in Nashville.
Nicknamed the ‘Tennessee Plowboy,’ Arnold rose from grinding poverty to shining success on the world stage. Born on a farm May 15, 1918, he knew how to plow behind a mule ‘ and he rode one to his first singing gig.
Eddy’s first big musical break came in 1940 when Pee Wee King hired him to sing with the popular Golden West Cowboys. He appeared regularly with them on the world-famous Grand Ole Opy.
In 1943, Arnold ventured out on his own with a radio show on WSM. Soon after, he won a recording contract with RCA and began hosting a spot on the Grand Ole Opry, with ‘Cattle Call’ as his theme song. He was even managed for a while by the famous, or infamous, Colonel Tom Parker, later Elvis Presley’s manager.
Mr. Arnold hit pay dirt in 1946 with ‘That’s How Much I Love You.’ He quickly scored a string of other hit songs and made the leap from radio to television. From November 1947 through January 1949, he had six No. 1 country songs. In late 1948, he had an incredible six songs in the Top 10 at once! He also became a popular guest on such mainstream TV shows as Milton Berle and Ed Sullivan.
As Mr. Arnold’s country career began to cool in the 1960s, he turned to more pop-flavored ‘Nashville Sound’ recordings. That re-energized his career and took him and his music to new levels. It also helped him gain even wider audiences for country music at a time when they were needed for the genre to survive in a world of stiff competition from the Beatles and others.
By any objective measure, Eddy Arnold was a superstar long before that title was used and sometimes abused. Indeed, he sold more than 85 million records and had 147 songs hit the charts in a brilliant career that spanned more than six decades.
Along the way, he was named to the Country Music Hall of Fame and received the Country Music Association’s first, highly coveted Entertainer of the Year award. He also won other awards and honors, too numerous to mention here, but including the crossover hit ‘Make the World Go Away’ and 16 other consecutive hits in the 1960s alone. Moreover, he filled New York’s Carnegie Hall, Hollywood’s Coconut Grove and prestigious clubs in Las Vegas.
Before retiring from active singing in 2005, Arnold released a new RCA album, ‘After All These Years.’ Aptly titled, it is a veritable treasure trove of his songs that transcend time and place. It includes my personal favorite, ‘You Don’t Know Me,’ from the prolific pen of the late, great Cindy Walker, with whom he had so much musical success.
Randy Travis was right. ‘It’s not what you take when you leave the world behind you. It’s what you leave behind you when you go.’
Eddy Arnold has left behind him the legacy of an honorable man and his music, to be enjoyed for the ages.
Retired Army Col. Thomas B. Vaughn can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].