The Jordanaires

For more than four decades the Jordanaires ranked among country music’s leading backup vocal ensembles, lending their voices to Jim Reeves, Patsy Cline, George Jones, and Elvis Presley. Formed as a quartet in Springfield, Missouri, in the closing years of the 1940s, the group’s charter members—Bob Hubbard, Bill Matthews, Monty Matthews, and Culley Holt—specialized in barbershop harmonies and spirituals and made their Grand Ole Opry debut in 1949. Membership shifted in the early 1950s when Gordon Stoker and Hoyt Hawkins stepped in for Hubbard, who had been drafted, and for Bill Matthews, whose health had declined sharply. Monty Matthews departed in 1953 for personal reasons and was succeeded by Neal Matthews.

By 1954 the Jordanaires were providing vocal support for Elton Britt, Red Foley, and Jimmy Wakely; that same year they performed on Eddy Arnold’s television program. Their decisive opportunity arrived when longtime admirer Elvis Presley, newly signed to RCA Victor, asked them to accompany him on record. Presley kept his word once stardom arrived, retaining the quartet as his regular backup singers through 1970 and featuring them in numerous films as well as on his gospel sessions. Culley Holt’s illness prompted his replacement by Hugh Jarrett in 1954; Jarrett exited in 1958 and was succeeded by Ray Walker.

Away from Presley’s projects, the Jordanaires left their own imprint on country music. Neal Matthews, an inventive arranger, shaped Jim Reeves’s chart-topping “Four Walls” in 1957. Beginning in 1959 they also recorded behind Patsy Cline, and they originated the Nashville number system of chord notation that remains standard in studios and on stage. The group issued its own gospel and country albums, supplied the principal momentum behind the Nashville chapter of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists/Screen Actors Guild, and opened the city’s commercial jingle industry, thereby launching the careers of vocalists such as Janie Fricke and Judy Rodman.