Biography
During his years of greatest commercial success, spanning 1957 to 1961, Jimmie Driftwood seemed like a figure out of another era. Trained as a schoolteacher, he first began composing songs to help his pupils grasp historical events, and over time he created or adapted more than five thousand pieces, many rooted in episodes from America’s past, traditional narratives, or everyday experiences of the communities that sang them. In folk music, only Lee Hays of the Weavers came close to matching Driftwood’s impact on the nation’s songbook and its grasp of musical origins, yet Driftwood never matched Hays’s activism; instead he focused on education rather than political campaigns, which spared him both the blacklist and the later veneration from progressive circles that Hays enjoyed. Hays’s leftist leanings also never earned him an invitation to perform for Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during the leader’s first visit to the United Nations, an honor extended to Driftwood.
In September 1959, amid the rock-and-roll era and the rising folk revival, half a dozen Driftwood compositions appeared on American pop or country charts. The most prominent was “The Battle of New Orleans,” which reached the top of both the country and pop lists in Johnny Horton’s recording, while other entries that month included Eddy Arnold’s “Tennessee Stud,” Hawkshaw Hawkins’s “Soldier’s Joy,” Johnny and Jack’s “Sailor Man,” Horton’s “Sal’s Got a Sugar Lip,” and Homer & Jethro’s parody “The Battle of Kookamonga.” More effectively than Hays, Pete Seeger, or Woody Guthrie, Driftwood wove folk, pop, and country threads together and conveyed to a broad audience the shared history behind them.
James Corbett Morris grew up hearing his locally renowned father, whose voice had been captured by folk-song collectors early in the twentieth century. From his mother and grandmother he absorbed traditional ballads, while his father and grandfather passed on old-time fiddle tunes; he also absorbed countless Ozark tales told by both white residents and Native Americans, among them his future wife, who was one-quarter Cherokee. His paternal grandfather, a fiddle maker, constructed the distinctive guitar Driftwood played throughout his life, its neck fashioned from a fence rail, its sides from an ox yoke, and its top and back from a bed’s headboard.
Encouraged by a teacher, he began writing poetry while still young. After high school he attended John Brown College, earned teaching qualifications, and later received a formal education degree from Arkansas Teachers College. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, while accumulating college credits, he traveled west toward Arizona in a Model A Ford that reached only as far as Texas; he hitchhiked the remaining distance. Work proved scarce during the Great Depression until a local radio station’s singing contest offered an opening; he arrived with his guitar and a newly written song titled “Arizona.”
Victory in the contest secured him an early-morning slot on the station, provided he could secure a sponsor. A grocery-store chain eventually employed him and underwrote the broadcast. An older couple who had heard him at the contest later offered lodging and arranged for his mother—who was suffering from secondhand smoke caused by his father’s cigarettes—to join him in Arizona. She died there, and his father later succumbed to cancer as well, by which time Driftwood had returned to Arkansas to teach.
While instructing elementary-school history classes, he recognized how music could illuminate the sweep of American history. He wrote “The Battle of New Orleans,” setting it to the traditional fiddle melody “The Eighth of January,” so students could differentiate the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the War of 1812. The songs and stories of his childhood supplied a rich storehouse; he drew on traditional melodies, recounted old tales, and fashioned new ones that sounded traditional to meet the needs of his classes or any listeners.
In 1936 he married Cleda Azalea Johnson, a former pupil, and the couple settled in a house they built together, where they raised their family. For the next two decades his life centered on teaching and domestic responsibilities, during which he composed thousands of songs, nearly all concerning facets of American history.
By the 1940s, armed with his degree and credentials, he had become a recognized local personality. That might have remained the limit of recognition for the man still known as James Morris, had broader cultural shifts not intervened.
The late 1940s brought renewed interest in folk music through the Almanac Singers and their successors, the Weavers, who turned activist songwriting into commercial success. Although political opposition later disrupted those careers, the 1950s carried folk music and its historical underpinnings onto college campuses crowded with middle-class students.
By the mid-1950s scholars and collectors were seeking Driftwood out, and he began receiving invitations to lecture at colleges and universities across the South and farther afield. In 1957 a friend, Hugh Ashley, mentioned to Don Warden—a steel guitarist in Porter Wagoner’s band who had launched a publishing company—a schoolteacher whose abundant songs had caught the attention of local children.
Still legally James Morris at the time, he adopted the professional and legal name Jimmie Driftwood after a family anecdote: at his birth his grandfather had presented his wife with a bundle she expected to be the infant, only to find a piece of wood, prompting her exclamation, “It’s just a piece of driftwood.”
Warden signed Driftwood after hearing him perform one hundred songs, the last of which was “The Battle of New Orleans.” With the folk revival at its height, RCA Victor soon offered a contract in its search for folksingers. His first session took place on October 27, 1957, the month he signed; accompanied only by his own guitar plus Chet Atkins on guitar and Bob L. Moore on bass, he recorded “The Battle of New Orleans” first. Eleven tracks from that day filled his debut album, Newly Discovered Early American Folk Songs, released in summer 1958. It sold modestly yet respectably and earned favorable notices, though no single became a hit, largely because “The Battle of New Orleans” received limited airplay owing to the words “hell” and “damn.”
A second round of sessions was planned for November 1958, but Warden’s publishing efforts yielded an unforeseen breakthrough beforehand. After touring with Horton late in 1958, Warden played “The Battle of New Orleans” for Horton via manager Tillman Franks. Horton wanted to record it immediately; after edits that shortened the song and an appearance by Driftwood on the Louisiana Hayride, Horton cut the track in Nashville on January 27, 1959.
Issued the following spring, Horton’s single reached number one on the country charts for ten of its twenty-one weeks and crossed over to the pop charts for another twenty-one-week run, holding the top position for six weeks. Horton further boosted exposure by performing the song on The Ed Sullivan Show in June.
Demand for Driftwood’s material surged even as his second album, The Wilderness Road, appeared; buoyed by Horton’s success, it outsold the debut. By mid-1959 dozens of his songs were recorded or slated for recording, culminating in September when six of those releases occupied Billboard charts simultaneously. “The Battle of New Orleans” brought him a Grammy Award; The Wilderness Road earned another, followed three years later by an award for Billy Yank and Johnny Reb.
At first the scale of his success puzzled Driftwood, who had viewed the publishing deal mainly as a means to gain hearings for his songs so he could succeed as a recording artist. His own releases sold steadily but never approached the volume of Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans,” which achieved gold status and sold widely worldwide; the record served as a template for later topical-historical songs such as Horton’s “Sink the Bismarck,” Columbia’s willingness to record Pete Le Farge’s “Ballad of Ira Hayes” (both in its original version and Johnny Cash’s), and even Johnny Duncan’s English recording of “The Legend of Gunga Din.”
Driftwood anticipated substantial royalties from RCA and received some, yet the checks from Warden’s publishing company proved far larger—five-figure sums that, by Timbo, Arkansas, standards in 1959, represented unprecedented wealth. The income secured financial comfort for Driftwood, his wife, and their family for years and enabled them to acquire extensive land.
Driftwood recut “The Battle of New Orleans” in a more commercial stereo arrangement; it charted briefly on the country lists in mid-1959, though its sales lagged far behind Horton’s still-rising version. Driftwood nonetheless remained prominent: in April 1959 he performed at Carnegie Hall, appeared at the Berkeley and Newport folk festivals, received an honorary doctorate in American folklore from Peabody College in Nashville, sang for Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations, guested on network game shows including To Tell the Truth, and secured regular spots on the Grand Ole Opry, the Louisiana Hayride, and the Ozark Jubilee.
The whirlwind forced him to abandon classroom teaching, a change he regretted. He continued educating other teachers about music’s instructional power, lecturing at national educators’ gatherings throughout the early 1960s.
In the early 1960s he embraced a local cause, the Arkansas Folk Festival, which eventually drew 100,000 visitors annually. The event led to the Rackansack Folklore Society and, in the early 1970s, the Ozark Folk Center. He later established the Jimmie Driftwood Barn as a performance venue for society members. Additional interests included environmental preservation, notably the Blanchard Caverns and the Buffalo River; he chaired the Arkansas Parks and Tourism Commission, joined the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts advisory committee in Washington, D.C., and served as a musicologist for the National Geographic Society. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he appeared at hundreds of colleges and universities in these capacities.
His recording career concluded in 1961, yet his six RCA albums endure as a distinctive country-folk testament. Artists from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen have drawn on elements of his songwriting approach, and even 1980s roots-rock bands such as the Del Lords have performed his material with the intensity usually reserved for songs by Dylan and Guthrie. Driftwood died on July 12, 1998, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at age 91.
In September 1959, amid the rock-and-roll era and the rising folk revival, half a dozen Driftwood compositions appeared on American pop or country charts. The most prominent was “The Battle of New Orleans,” which reached the top of both the country and pop lists in Johnny Horton’s recording, while other entries that month included Eddy Arnold’s “Tennessee Stud,” Hawkshaw Hawkins’s “Soldier’s Joy,” Johnny and Jack’s “Sailor Man,” Horton’s “Sal’s Got a Sugar Lip,” and Homer & Jethro’s parody “The Battle of Kookamonga.” More effectively than Hays, Pete Seeger, or Woody Guthrie, Driftwood wove folk, pop, and country threads together and conveyed to a broad audience the shared history behind them.
James Corbett Morris grew up hearing his locally renowned father, whose voice had been captured by folk-song collectors early in the twentieth century. From his mother and grandmother he absorbed traditional ballads, while his father and grandfather passed on old-time fiddle tunes; he also absorbed countless Ozark tales told by both white residents and Native Americans, among them his future wife, who was one-quarter Cherokee. His paternal grandfather, a fiddle maker, constructed the distinctive guitar Driftwood played throughout his life, its neck fashioned from a fence rail, its sides from an ox yoke, and its top and back from a bed’s headboard.
Encouraged by a teacher, he began writing poetry while still young. After high school he attended John Brown College, earned teaching qualifications, and later received a formal education degree from Arkansas Teachers College. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, while accumulating college credits, he traveled west toward Arizona in a Model A Ford that reached only as far as Texas; he hitchhiked the remaining distance. Work proved scarce during the Great Depression until a local radio station’s singing contest offered an opening; he arrived with his guitar and a newly written song titled “Arizona.”
Victory in the contest secured him an early-morning slot on the station, provided he could secure a sponsor. A grocery-store chain eventually employed him and underwrote the broadcast. An older couple who had heard him at the contest later offered lodging and arranged for his mother—who was suffering from secondhand smoke caused by his father’s cigarettes—to join him in Arizona. She died there, and his father later succumbed to cancer as well, by which time Driftwood had returned to Arkansas to teach.
While instructing elementary-school history classes, he recognized how music could illuminate the sweep of American history. He wrote “The Battle of New Orleans,” setting it to the traditional fiddle melody “The Eighth of January,” so students could differentiate the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, and the War of 1812. The songs and stories of his childhood supplied a rich storehouse; he drew on traditional melodies, recounted old tales, and fashioned new ones that sounded traditional to meet the needs of his classes or any listeners.
In 1936 he married Cleda Azalea Johnson, a former pupil, and the couple settled in a house they built together, where they raised their family. For the next two decades his life centered on teaching and domestic responsibilities, during which he composed thousands of songs, nearly all concerning facets of American history.
By the 1940s, armed with his degree and credentials, he had become a recognized local personality. That might have remained the limit of recognition for the man still known as James Morris, had broader cultural shifts not intervened.
The late 1940s brought renewed interest in folk music through the Almanac Singers and their successors, the Weavers, who turned activist songwriting into commercial success. Although political opposition later disrupted those careers, the 1950s carried folk music and its historical underpinnings onto college campuses crowded with middle-class students.
By the mid-1950s scholars and collectors were seeking Driftwood out, and he began receiving invitations to lecture at colleges and universities across the South and farther afield. In 1957 a friend, Hugh Ashley, mentioned to Don Warden—a steel guitarist in Porter Wagoner’s band who had launched a publishing company—a schoolteacher whose abundant songs had caught the attention of local children.
Still legally James Morris at the time, he adopted the professional and legal name Jimmie Driftwood after a family anecdote: at his birth his grandfather had presented his wife with a bundle she expected to be the infant, only to find a piece of wood, prompting her exclamation, “It’s just a piece of driftwood.”
Warden signed Driftwood after hearing him perform one hundred songs, the last of which was “The Battle of New Orleans.” With the folk revival at its height, RCA Victor soon offered a contract in its search for folksingers. His first session took place on October 27, 1957, the month he signed; accompanied only by his own guitar plus Chet Atkins on guitar and Bob L. Moore on bass, he recorded “The Battle of New Orleans” first. Eleven tracks from that day filled his debut album, Newly Discovered Early American Folk Songs, released in summer 1958. It sold modestly yet respectably and earned favorable notices, though no single became a hit, largely because “The Battle of New Orleans” received limited airplay owing to the words “hell” and “damn.”
A second round of sessions was planned for November 1958, but Warden’s publishing efforts yielded an unforeseen breakthrough beforehand. After touring with Horton late in 1958, Warden played “The Battle of New Orleans” for Horton via manager Tillman Franks. Horton wanted to record it immediately; after edits that shortened the song and an appearance by Driftwood on the Louisiana Hayride, Horton cut the track in Nashville on January 27, 1959.
Issued the following spring, Horton’s single reached number one on the country charts for ten of its twenty-one weeks and crossed over to the pop charts for another twenty-one-week run, holding the top position for six weeks. Horton further boosted exposure by performing the song on The Ed Sullivan Show in June.
Demand for Driftwood’s material surged even as his second album, The Wilderness Road, appeared; buoyed by Horton’s success, it outsold the debut. By mid-1959 dozens of his songs were recorded or slated for recording, culminating in September when six of those releases occupied Billboard charts simultaneously. “The Battle of New Orleans” brought him a Grammy Award; The Wilderness Road earned another, followed three years later by an award for Billy Yank and Johnny Reb.
At first the scale of his success puzzled Driftwood, who had viewed the publishing deal mainly as a means to gain hearings for his songs so he could succeed as a recording artist. His own releases sold steadily but never approached the volume of Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans,” which achieved gold status and sold widely worldwide; the record served as a template for later topical-historical songs such as Horton’s “Sink the Bismarck,” Columbia’s willingness to record Pete Le Farge’s “Ballad of Ira Hayes” (both in its original version and Johnny Cash’s), and even Johnny Duncan’s English recording of “The Legend of Gunga Din.”
Driftwood anticipated substantial royalties from RCA and received some, yet the checks from Warden’s publishing company proved far larger—five-figure sums that, by Timbo, Arkansas, standards in 1959, represented unprecedented wealth. The income secured financial comfort for Driftwood, his wife, and their family for years and enabled them to acquire extensive land.
Driftwood recut “The Battle of New Orleans” in a more commercial stereo arrangement; it charted briefly on the country lists in mid-1959, though its sales lagged far behind Horton’s still-rising version. Driftwood nonetheless remained prominent: in April 1959 he performed at Carnegie Hall, appeared at the Berkeley and Newport folk festivals, received an honorary doctorate in American folklore from Peabody College in Nashville, sang for Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations, guested on network game shows including To Tell the Truth, and secured regular spots on the Grand Ole Opry, the Louisiana Hayride, and the Ozark Jubilee.
The whirlwind forced him to abandon classroom teaching, a change he regretted. He continued educating other teachers about music’s instructional power, lecturing at national educators’ gatherings throughout the early 1960s.
In the early 1960s he embraced a local cause, the Arkansas Folk Festival, which eventually drew 100,000 visitors annually. The event led to the Rackansack Folklore Society and, in the early 1970s, the Ozark Folk Center. He later established the Jimmie Driftwood Barn as a performance venue for society members. Additional interests included environmental preservation, notably the Blanchard Caverns and the Buffalo River; he chaired the Arkansas Parks and Tourism Commission, joined the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts advisory committee in Washington, D.C., and served as a musicologist for the National Geographic Society. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s he appeared at hundreds of colleges and universities in these capacities.
His recording career concluded in 1961, yet his six RCA albums endure as a distinctive country-folk testament. Artists from Bob Dylan to Bruce Springsteen have drawn on elements of his songwriting approach, and even 1980s roots-rock bands such as the Del Lords have performed his material with the intensity usually reserved for songs by Dylan and Guthrie. Driftwood died on July 12, 1998, in Fayetteville, Arkansas, at age 91.
Albums
