Country Como

Of a summer's day in the back-hill country of Henderson, Tenn., it was just plumb natural for all the farmboys to sing as they plowed their fields. Over at the Arnold farm, young Eddy would hear the voices echoing along the creek bottom and he would chime in with That Silver Haired Daddy of Mine, or maybe just practice up on his yodeling. Come sundown, he would toss his hand-me-down Sears, Roebuck geetar into a gunny sack and ride the family mule six miles into town to pick up 75-c- playing square-dance music.

Last week Eddy Arnold was on the road again. Only this time he rode up in a big Cadillac car to pick up $5,000 for an evening of pickin' and singin' at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall. What was a li'l ole country boy doing in a big fancy place like that? "This is the fulfillment of a lifetime dream," drawled Eddy, all fancied up in a tuxedo and string tie. Backed by a 17-piece orchestra, he sang about humpback mules, lonesome hearts and them old cottonfields back home in a mellifluous baritone that poured out just as warm and creamy as milk fresh out of the barn cow. Mostly, the songs were samplings of his biggest hits--Anytime, Bouquet of Roses--flavored with a touch of falsetto and yodel-like loops that carried that special stamp of the hill country. Trading on a broad, half-moon smile and an ultra-relaxed manner that could charm the warts off a hog's back, he drew a standing ovation and a stampede of well-wishers.

By-Cracky Nonsense. Though Arnold has been peddling down-home songs for more than 20 years, this was his first appearance in Manhattan--and it marked a new era for country music. A few years ago, any country crooner billing himself as "The Tennessee Plowboy" would have been run out of most Northern cities. But now, in an age of shifting population, country music has penetrated the metropolis in a big way, and no one has helped the cause or stands to profit more than Arnold. His recent appearances in Boston, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles and Chicago have drawn big crowds, and his records are selling better than ever. For Arnold, that's saying something: with sales of 46 million records, he is one of the top ten bestselling recording performers of all time. And, as they still say down in Nashville ("Music City, U.S.A."), that ain't hay.

It ain't hayseed either. Arnold has never gone in for the spangled Western getups, nasal mewings and twangy guitars that have made country music so tiresome. He is more the Country Como, a slightly citified slicker in sports shirt and slacks, singing to arrangements laced with violins and a gently humming chorus. As such, he has attracted a broader popular following than any other singer in the old Nashville clan. Says he: "Once we cut out all the by-cracky nonsense and give respect to our music, then people will respect us."

Biggest Killings. Arnold is not denying his roots; indeed, with the slightest prompting he can discourse endlessly on the subtleties of mule breeding or coon hunting. Most of his early memories are of hard, hard times. His father died when he was eleven, and he eventually had to quit high school to work the family's sharecropper farm. At 18, he hitched a ride on a cottonseed truck and landed a job singing on a radio station in Jackson, Tenn. After three years of internship with Pee Wee King and his Golden West Cowboys ("I sold song books and swept out the auditoriums"), he got married and struck out on his own. At first the going was tough: "I used to kid my wife that she married me for my money. Actually, she made more than I did, working in a 5 and 100 store." But then I Eddy began recording for RCA Victor in 1945 and was soon turning out hit records like flapjacks.

Now 48, Arnold lives the life of a gentleman farmer on his 107-acre spread outside Nashville. He performs one week out of the month, spends most of the rest of his time answering the 200 pieces of fan mail he gets every week. With an annual income of more than $200,000, he tried his hand at investing, succeeded so well that he now sits on the boards of three companies, owns or has interests in an auto agency, a music-publishing house, a ranch, a record-pressing firm, a water utility, a realty company, and a 400-unit apartment house. His biggest killings have been in real estate; he once snapped up 21 acres for $6,250, recently sold them for $150,000.

Still, he finds "all the talk about the profit side" a little boring. All he really wants to do, he says, is sing. When his friend Frank Clement, the Governor of Tennessee, recently tried to persuade him to run as his successor in the statehouse, Arnold turned him down. "They tell me I would win," he explains, "but then I wouldn't be able to sing. And if that happened, then I just wouldn't be me any more."

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