Biography
In the 1930s the trio billed as the Anglin Twins and Red—comprising Red, Jim, and Jack Anglin—asserted, with some basis, that they were “the South’s favorite trio.” Their work served as a seedbed for later country styles, directly giving rise to the 1940s partnership Johnnie & Jack and, through that connection, to Kitty Wells’s eventual path. The brothers entered the world in Franklin, Tennessee, as part of a sizable family, yet spent their formative years in Athens, Alabama. While still youths they received guidance and stimulus from the Delmore Brothers of northern Alabama; after relocating to Nashville in 1930, a Delmore Brothers appearance on the Grand Ole Opry prompted the Anglins to envision careers on stage themselves. By 1933 the three had coalesced into a working unit, with Jack handling guitar, Jim on string bass, and Red supplying vocal harmonies. Mid-decade they secured an unpaid berth on Nashville’s WSIX, after which the Delmores facilitated a paid engagement for the brothers on Birmingham’s WAPI. That regional profile drew ARC’s attention as the label readied recording facilities in San Antonio in 1937, yielding the hit “They Are All Going Home but One.” The following year the Anglins shifted operations to Memphis’s WMC and cut further material in Columbia, South Carolina. Of the thirty-four sides they committed to tape, fourteen appeared on ARC’s freshly obtained Vocalion imprint. Subsequent broadcasts from New Orleans and Atlanta ended when Red entered military service; he sustained wounds during the Allied landing in France. Jim later emerged as a leading songwriter of the 1940s and 1950s, supplying signature material for Roy Acuff and, later, Kitty Wells. Among the three, Jack achieved the widest recognition after teaming in the early 1940s with his brother-in-law Johnnie Wright; performing as Johnnie & Jack, the pair delivered multiple RCA Victor successes until Jack’s death in a 1963 automobile collision. Michigan’s Old Homestead label assembled a 1979 anthology that gathered every commercially issued Anglin Brothers recording, exposing a repertory steeped in comic and sentimental numbers of established forms—several of which later performers evidently absorbed from the brothers’ discs and airplay. “Uncle Eph’s Got the Coon,” for instance, became a signature piece for Grandpa Jones, while “Where the Soul of Man Never Dies” entered Hank Williams’s favored gospel selections.