Uncle Dave Macon entered the professional music world after his fiftieth birthday, carrying the performance customs and repertoire of the nineteenth-century South into the radio broadcasts and commercial recordings that shaped the earliest country music business. One of two founding artists on the program then known as the WSM Barn Dance, he joined its roster in 1925, the year the show later became the Grand Ole Opry. A master showman on the banjo and a living archive of antique songs and comic routines, he remained a beloved emblem of the genre until and after his death in 1952.
Born David Harrison Macon in Smartt Station in middle Tennessee’s Warren County, he was the child of a Confederate officer who held a sizable farm. Although Macon absorbed the local folk music in his youth, he was equally formed by city life: after the family relocated to Nashville and ran a hotel, he mingled with the vaudeville performers who appeared there. Following the stabbing of his father near the hotel, the family departed Nashville. Macon then worked on a farm and later ran a wagon freight business, playing music only at neighborhood gatherings and dances.
The shift to a second musical career stemmed partly from the arrival of motorized trucks, which undercut his wagon line in the early 1920s when a rival adopted the new vehicles. In 1923, while trading tunes with fiddler Sid Harkreader in a Nashville barbershop, Macon drew the attention of a Loew’s theater-chain agent who happened to enter. The pair soon toured as far as New England, and when George D. Hay assembled performers two years later for what became the Opry, Macon was an obvious selection. The same circuit yielded his first recording session, held in New York for the Vocalion label in 1924. He continued to record extensively through the 1930s and sporadically until 1950 for multiple companies, backed at various times by Harkreader, the brother duo Sam & Kirk McGee, the Delmore Brothers, the young Roy Acuff, and other string musicians that included a still-unknown Bill Monroe. For secular numbers, his accompanists performed under the name the Fruit Jar Drinkers.
The resulting discs remain both richly pleasurable and invaluable historical records, preserving a wide array of banjo techniques while documenting late-nineteenth-century American song. Macon delivered comic-musical sketches such as the “Uncle Dave’s Travels” series, topical pieces often of his own making (“Governor Al Smith”), lighthearted folk songs (“I’ll Tickle Nancy”), gospel material with his Dixie Sacred Singers, blackface minstrel numbers, distinctive proto-blues he learned from African-American freight workers (“Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy”), and songs of still other kinds. Yet listeners cherished “the Dixie Dewdrop” above all for his live performances, preserved on weekly Opry broadcasts that reached a national audience for a period in the 1930s and in the 1940 film Grand Ole Opry. Macon supplied the showmanship, humor, political commentary (sometimes at odds with later standards), and relentless vitality that an 1880s southern vaudeville crowd would have expected for its dollar, handling the banjo with the trick dexterity of the Harlem Globetrotters.
He kept appearing on the Opry almost until his death, increasingly regarded as a warm-hearted bridge to the music’s beginnings. Inducted in 1966 as the tenth member of the Country Music Hall of Fame, he also drew fresh notice from younger listeners during the old-time revival tied to the folk movement. Even so, he occupies a less central place in country listeners’ awareness than Jimmie Rodgers or the Carter Family, despite comparable fame in his own era. The difference may lie in his representing an older stratum of American music-making than nearly any other figure familiar to country audiences; today’s listeners readily grasp Rodgers’s blues or the Carters’ domestic sentiment, whereas Macon can demand more attention. That attention, however, is amply rewarded by engagement with his musical legacy.
