Merle Travis

• Born: November 29, 1917
• Birthplace: Rosewood, Kentucky
• Died: October 20, 1983
• Place of death: Tahlequah, Kentucky

American country singer-songwriter and guitarist

While Travis did not invent the fingerstyle guitar technique called “Travis picking,” he made it widely accessible to such disciples as Chet Atkins and Doc Watson through his recordings, radio broadcasts, and television appearances. His deeply folk-flavored country songs have had an enduring impact beyond Travis’s original recordings of them.

The Life

Merle Robert Travis (TRAH-vihs) was the youngest of four children born to a farmer-turned-miner in Kentucky’s coal country. His father played banjo, and at age twelve Merle got a guitar from an older brother whose wife played guitar in the fingerpicking style popular in Kentucky’s Muhlenberg County. Guitarists Ike Everly (father of Don and Phil Everly) and Mose Rager were role models for Travis, an eager pupil. Travis made his first radio appearance in Evansville, Indiana, in 1936, and a year later was hired by veteran fiddler and bandleader Clayton McMichen for his Georgia Wildcats. In 1938, Travis began a six-year association with the Drifting Pioneers, a string band that broadcast over Cincinnati’s 50,000-watt station WLW.

In 1943, Travis and Louis Marshall “Grandpa” Jones became the first artists to record for the King label. After a brief stint in the Marines, Travis moved to Los Angeles in 1944 and made his first Capitol label recordings as a sideman late that year. His first recordings as leader appeared in 1945, and the next year saw his biggest chart success, “Divorce Me C.O.D.” The year 1947 saw the Folk Songs of the Hills album, which included Travis’s most enduring songs.

The late 1940’s found Travis designing a solid-body guitar and continuing to enjoy chart success with his singles. That waned in the 1950’s, but his fortunes brightened in 1955, when Tennessee Ernie Ford had a multimillion-selling hit with Travis’s “Sixteen Tons.” In the 1960’s and 1970’s, folk audiences rediscovered Travis, and he continued to perform and record into the 1980’s. His 1973 album with his star disciple, The Atkins-Travis Traveling Show, won a Grammy for Best Country Instrumental Performance.

Travis settled in eastern Oklahoma with fourth wife (and former wife of Hank Thompson) Dorothy, writing his memoirs and recording as late as 1981. In October of 1983 he suffered a heart attack and died in the hospital the next day. A monument dedicated to him in Ebenezer, Kentucky, is the site where his ashes were dispersed.

The Music

Travis was forged in the crucible of “live” radio, where both versatility and virtuosity were highly valued. He absorbed everything from folk songs to 1920’s pop tunes, and his work as both guitarist and songwriter freely reflects the range of his influences. The guitar style that came to be called Travis picking was not original with him, though his impressive talent and access to both radio and recording meant he effectively branded it. Characterized by a right-hand thumb-and-finger interaction that somewhat approximated stride-style piano, Travis picking was a sophisticated folk fingerstyle that, with variations, was common to both black and white rural southerners. Travis, equally at home on either acoustic or electric guitar, “took it to town” while keeping the sound grounded enough to be embraced by folk-guitar enthusiasts after it had ceased being novel in country music.

Similarly, his songwriting could be artfully guileless. Commissioned by his record label to write an album’s worth of folk songs, he delivered originals that had the stamp of hoary authenticity, even though they were freshly penned. The songs he wrote for the commercial country market tended to be of a novelty bent, though the best of them had a sophistication that would not have been out of place in a late-1940’s pop song. Uniquely, Travis the songwriter inhabited a territory somewhere between Woody Guthrie and Johnny Mercer.

“Divorce Me C.O.D.” In the 1960’s, divorce would become a topic of cliché in country music. In the 1940’s, however, it was untried and somewhat taboo. In 1946, Travis changed that with a clever lyric and a bouncy delivery that took this song to number one on Billboard’s folk chart for a remarkable fourteen weeks. Unfortunately, this success encouraged Travis to lean toward novelty songs for his future commercial singles.

“Sixteen Tons.” Travis never worked in a coal mine, but he saw enough of the miner’s life to write detailed songs about it. “Sixteen Tons” was lyrically inspired by family remarks about the miner’s life, as well as by an old Josh White song. What Travis made of his raw materials was entirely original, as was, in a very different way, Tennessee Ernie Ford’s later reworking of the song into an international hit.

“Dark as a Dungeon.” The bluesy “Sixteen Tons” contrasts with the hymnlike quality of Travis’s other great critique of the miner’s life, “Dark as a Dungeon.” “Sixteen Tons” would become an unlikely pop hit, while “Dark as a Dungeon” would be sung by Pete Seeger and Joan Baez and became a folk revival standard. A lesser songwriter, delivering a topical song in a folk idiom, might have made something mawkish, but Travis’s work is genuinely moving.

“Cannonball Rag.” Originally recorded in 1949 as “Cannonball Stomp,” Travis may have brought this solo guitar showpiece with him from Kentucky. It was not the hottest of his guitar instrumentals, but it was one with a musical smile beaming over its virtuosity and became the most widely performed of all Travis’s guitar pieces.

Musical Legacy

Travis will be remembered as a man who gave his name to a style of guitar playing adopted and modified by Chet Atkins and such disciples of his as Jerry Reed. That style continues to be a part of both country and folk music performances in the United States and abroad. Travis also designed a solid-body guitar that may have influenced some of Leo Fender’s early creations. Travis was also a catalyst for, and early popularizer of, the Bigsby vibrato bar for electric guitars.

A pleasant if unremarkable singer, Travis enjoyed considerable chart success in his time with now-forgotten novelty songs. Ironically, his enduring compositions are the songs he wrote reluctantly when Capitol wanted a collection of folk songs. These drew on the specifics of his native region and the life of its people and, for all their specificity, struck a universal chord. They remain paragons of the best folk-inspired topical songs, inspiring such later works in the idiom as John Prine’s “Paradise.” Travis was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1977.

Bibliography

Anderson, Bobby. That Muhlenberg Sound. Beechmont, Ky.: MuhlBut Press, 1993. While it is tempting to dismiss this book as an amateurishly written regional musical genealogy, it does provide useful background on the region that gave rise to Travis, the people who influenced his guitar style, and later local musicians and singers influenced by Travis.

Green, Archie. Only a Miner: Studies in Recorded Coal-Mining Songs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972. Green’s superb scholarly work offers a detailed analysis of Travis’s Folk Songs of the Hills, particularly “Sixteen Tons” and “Dark as a Dungeon.”

Jones, Louis M., with Charles K. Wolfe. Everybody’s Grandpa: Fifty Years Behind the Mike. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984. Jones was a nearly lifelong friend of Travis, whose personal flaws as well as musical brilliance are vividly recalled—along with much else in Jones’s colorful life—in this delightful musician’s memoir.

Wolfe, Charles K. Kentucky Country: Folk and Country Music of Kentucky. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1982. Country music’s finest scholar presents Travis in the context of a rich and varied tapestry of musicians from the Bluegrass State.

Principal Recordings

albums:Folk Songs of the Hills, 1947; Merle TravisGuitar, 1956; Back Home, 1957; Travis, 1962; Songs of the Coal Mines, 1963; I’m a Natural Born Gambling Man, 1964; Merle Travis and Joe Maphis, 1964 (with Joe Maphis); Great Songs of the Delmore Brothers, 1969; Strictly Guitar, 1969; The Atkins-Travis Traveling Show, 1974; Country Guitar Giants, 1979 (with Maphis); Light Singin’ and Pickin’, 1980; Travis Pickin’, 1981; Merle and Grandpa’s Farm and Home Hour, 1985 (with Grandpa Jones); Rough, Rowdy, and Blue, 1986.