Bill Carlisle

Yodeling singer, songwriter, and guitarist Bill Carlisle entered the profession as the younger sibling of Cliff Carlisle, a country vocalist who rose to prominence in the 1930s. Throughout that decade Bill built a reputation for delivering suggestive, blues-inflected country material, yet from the 1950s onward his profile rested chiefly on comic numbers performed with his family troupe, the Carlisles, who became longtime fixtures at the Grand Ole Opry.

In the 1920s the brothers appeared together in a family ensemble on Louisville radio, an early example of the barn-dance format. Cliff arranged Bill’s first solo opportunity in 1933 by including him in an ARC audition; the resulting single, “Rattlesnake Daddy,” found an audience and later became a bluegrass standard. Publicists labeled him “Smilin’ Bill” for his clean, lightning-fast guitar runs. He soon approached his brother’s level of popularity, sharing Cliff’s yodeling technique and taste for double-entendre material such as “Copper Head Mama” (1934) and “Jumpin’ and Jerkin’ Blues” (1935). The Carlisle brothers joined Decca in 1938, extending the blues-and-Hawaiian base established by Cliff’s pioneering dobro work. During an extended engagement at Knoxville’s WNOX they starred on two barn-dance programs, while Bill continued solo broadcasts across the Southeast.

After World War II the brothers moved to the fledgling King label in Cincinnati and scored a major success with their version of Ernest Tubb’s wartime hit “Rainbow at Midnight” in 1946. Bill followed with his own Top 15 entry, “Tramp on the Street,” in 1948. Cliff retired around 1950, after which Bill assembled the Carlisles, a unit whose membership, despite the name, included non-relatives such as gospel singer Martha Carson and songwriter Betty Amos. He also shared bills with emerging talents including Don Gibson, Chet Atkins, and Homer & Jethro. During these shows he began incorporating stage leaps and refined the comic character Hotshot Elmer, which he had introduced earlier; as Elmer he would vault over chairs, tumble down stairs, and disrupt proceedings. The athletic antics earned him the nickname “Jumpin’ Bill.”

Those antics set the stage for the Mercury sides that defined his 1950s fame: a run of novelty numbers, off-kilter gospel items such as “Rusty Old Halo,” and straight country harmony recordings. The first, “Too Old to Cut the Mustard,” reached the Top Ten in 1952 and was later covered by Rosemary Clooney and other pop artists. Although the decade discouraged the erotic themes of his early work, “Too Old to Cut the Mustard” and similar Carlisles tracks like “The Old Knot Hole” evoked that earlier license. “No Help Wanted” climbed to number one the next year and remained there for five weeks; three additional Top Ten hits followed in 1953, among them the Ira Louvin composition “Taint Nice (To Talk Like That).” Despite their old-fashioned humor, the records bristled with an energy that anticipated rock & roll, featuring sharp electric guitar solos and such novelties as bass saxophone. The string of hits brought the Carlisles an invitation to join the Opry in 1953. Carlisle’s children entered the band in the 1960s, and he returned to the charts in 1965 with “What Kind of Deal Is This.” He remained a regular Opry presence until ten days before his death on March 17, 2003.