Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys (1936-1969)
(1948) - "Tennessee Waltz" was written by Redd Stewart & Pee King.
The story behind this song has been told many times in many ways. How they came to write the song is probably the single most asked question for both Pee Wee and Redd.
The following story of how the "Tennessee Waltz" came to be is based on an interview with John Rice Irwin, Founder and Board Chairman of The Museum of Appalachia in October 1996.
On March 6, 1948, Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King were traveling by truck from a performance in Henderson, Texas. The radio was turned to WSM's Grand Ole Opry. As they listened to Bill Monroe sing "The Kentucky Waltz," Pee Wee jokingly said to Redd, "Why haven't you written a song about your home state of Tennessee?"
At that moment, with pencil in hand and nothing but the cover from one of those large boxes of wooden matches on which to write, Redd began scribbling the words to the "Tennessee Waltz." Upon returning to his home in Nashville, he transcribed what he had written onto paper and penciled in the notes.
During this time in his life, Redd wrote and sold songs to various performers on the Grand Ole Opry. He offered to sell the "Tennessee Waltz" to a rising young singer, Cowboy Copas, for $25.00. Copas refused the offer, saying there were "too many waltzes already." So Redd put the song back in his guitar case where it remained for the next six months. He later sang it on a Louisville radio station in 1948, and it was recorded by others. It gained a good bit of popularity as a country song, and then it sort of faded away.
Several years later, the very popular Patti Page needed an additional song to complete a recording session she had planned. She agreed to add the "Tennessee Waltz" as the "B" side of the record. When it was released in May, 1950, Patti Page's recording of the song soon sold some 5,000,000 copies, and "it became the most popular song in the nation within six months." According to Dr. Bill Malone, a respected scholar on the subject, it became the biggest hit in modern popular music, and the top song ever licensed by Broadcast Music, Inc. (BMI). What started out as a country song, written by a country writer, became "an international pop standard."
The popularity of the "Tennessee Waltz" has continued through the years, and it reputedly has been played on radio and television more times than any country music song ever written. Several years ago the record sales were over 65,000,000, and has now surpassed the 1,000,000 mark. It has been recorded by over 100 major artists, and it is a "Tennessee State Song." (Its popularity, of course, reached far beyond the boundary of country music, and it may be misleading to refer to it as a country song.)
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